How I Shot ‘Sunrise and Mt. Hood’… at 10,000 ft

From the ‘Best of Mark Toal’

Plane over Mt Hood

The above photograph is another example of why you should always have a camera with you even when you’re barely awake on a 6:30 AM flight from Portland to San Diego.

After getting up at 4 AM to catch the flight, I was trying to decide between getting a cup of coffee or going to sleep. As the plane took of from a dark Portland I could just see the first orange of the sunrise in the east as we headed south. Then the snow capped Mt. Hood came into view.

I reached for my Micro Four-thirds Panasonic Lumix GM5 camera with the compact 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH lens attached that was in my carry-on bag. Because of it’s extremely small size, this was my current “take everywhere” camera at the time. On business trips like this I like to carry it with my iPad in a DomkeF-803 camera bag.

I didn’t have time to think about settings so I left the camera in Program mode and shot this RAW file through the plane’s window with an exposure of 1/80th second at f/3.5 at ISO 200. I later processed the image in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to produce what you see here.