This lone pine high in the Blue Ridge mountains with the red berry covered bush in the foreground and the hazy Blue Ridge foothills receding east to the Virginia Piedmont caught my eye. The hardest part of making the shot was keeping myself upright on the 45 degree slope that I chose for my tripod - the tripod did fine but my ankles were a problem.
I tried three different techniques with this scene as the lighting and tonal range were a bit too much for the camera. I did one where I exposed for the sky & let the remainder do whatever - resulting in dark areas that were too dark for my taste. The 2nd version was a 5 shot HDR - see that long branch going from the berry bush up to the top of the pine? It doesn't look good when repeated 5 times (it was windy and each exposure caught it in a different place. The 3rd version - this one - was a variation on the first where I used a 3-stop grad neutral density filter to hold back some of the bright light in the sky - which is how I've always shot this type of scene since the day that I figured out what was what several years ago.