Sea of Fog at Acherlipass by David Kaplan

5 questions about this photo:

Q1. What equipment did you use?
I used a Nikon D700 with attached Nikkor AF-S 24mm f/1.4G lens and a Feisol carbon tripod.

Q2. What settings did you have on your camera?
Because it's an HDR there were taken multiple exposures. So overall exposure time was around 800s. Aperture was wide open (1.4) and ISO speed was set to 1000.

Q3. What software did you use during the post-production?
First step: Nikon Capture NX2 to convert the RAWs to 16bit TIFFs after white balance and CA correction. After that all the images were processed with my self-developed neoHDR software which combines all images including the moving stars and creates a non-tonemapped HDR. This HDR image was tonemapped in Photomatix. After that I used Lightroom to fine tune the result and finally I added a little glow in Photoshop to pop out the sea of fog a little bit more.

Q4. What is the location?
The image was taken at Ächerlipass near Lucerne in Switzerland. It was the highest open passroad at this time of year.

Q5. How did you come up with the idea of this shot?
Taking landscape pictures at night is one of my favourite subjects. I always wanted to shoot a sea of fog, lit by a city underneath. I waited for months until the weather finally became like this.

Extra Q: Please share an interesting or funny fact that happened while working on this photograph.
The clouds down the other valley, which is not visible on this picture, growed very fast. At the time I drove up the passroad with my motorcycle there was only a slight haze down the valley. Only on hour later there was a huge sea of fog only a few meters below me. A few minutes later I was completely lost in fog and could barely see my hand. The weather in the mountains can change very quickly.