Sunrise Ablaze

4x4-Shot Panorama, 4 Multi-Exposure, f1.8-f4.6, ND filters+focus change on long exposures

This was one of those photos that was absolute dumb luck with a side of serendipity- during a four hour van ride to Helena, I drove through one of the most amazing sunrises of my life, to which the only possible reaction was obvious- yelling "stop the van" and pretending the weird looks from everyone around didn't exist. I packed fairly light, so my trusty tripod was nowhere to be found, but I decided to try for a panorama all the same.
In my hurry to capture the scene, I ran through my usual multi-exposure process without handling white balance on the bloom passes, giving me an incredibly vivid (if wholly surreal) take of the scene; this nearly led to me trashing the entire shot, but I decided to work with what I had all the same.
To plan my attack, I took a single "slice" of the scene above, and experimented with ways of merging bloom into the near/far HDR exposures. It was here I noted that each of the exposures were terribly out-of-alignment, but I eventually settled on using the bloom layer to modulate gamma and saturation of each pixel, giving the vivid-yet-still-plausible colors above. This method took a few tuning parameters which I copy/pasted across exposures, resulting in some differences to lighting across the panorama (the rightmost side was the template)- although the end result used this to accentuate the sunrise, it's still my biggest regret on this composition. Handling exposure stitching and correlation also presented difficulty, to which I responded with artistic liberty to still convey the scene as a whole- this resulted in some of the "grating" artifacts seen in the result, leaving room for improvement in all my early-morning drives.

Magic Behind the Curtains: