7:13 AM, Day #1. I was running 30 minutes late this morning, having slept through my alarm at the local hotel in Lee Vining. My favorite time to shoot Mono Lake is about 30 minutes prior to sunrise, when the flat pastel colors of the pink and blue dawn settle in above the Sierras, lending a surrealistic mood and lighting to the lake and ghostly tufas. Groggy and still half asleep, I rushed to the South Tufa Field (about a 15 minute drive) and arrived at the parking lot trailhead just as the pink alpenglow was hitting the Sierras to the west. I had anticipated having 20 minutes to compose the shot for this moment, but now I had to run to catch what was left of it. Literally jogging to the south shore of the lake with my gear in hand, this was the first image I composed that cold morning. Twenty-six degrees, but very little wind. I love the contrast here between the white sierras and the pink and blue atmosphere...very delicate light indeed. 0.3 Sec, F/8.0. Only a little post-processing was done to the image; a bit of brightening, and cropped out of some uninteresting foreground at the bottom of the image.