This is a favorite shot from 2023. I was out very early for a sunrise shot at Rocky Mountain National Park, and arrived well over an hour before sunrise. After getting my camera ready for my planned shot, I had time to admire my surroundings .... and was blown away by this view of Long's Peak. It was still an hour before sunrise, and the earliest gentle glow in the East was lighting the peaks and trees, while still keeping the sky above dark enough for a myriad of stars to shine through.
Working as fast as I could (in the dark!), I changed to my telephoto zoom lens, and composed and focused the image (it's too dark to use autofocus an hour before sunrise, and I couldn't simply focus on a star at the focal length and f/ratio I was using). Happily the alpenglow was still in full force by the time I was was ready to shoot, although lots of the stars were washed away by the brightening sky.
I combined 20 individual images to get a quality low-noise image of the foreground, and was amazed at how I could watch even more stars be overcome by the brightening sky over those minutes. To recreate the original scene that struck me with such awe, for the final image I used a starry sky image from another time. That's something I rarely do, but in the end felt it was important to convey the majesty of that special moment.
Which image do you prefer?