Mt Rainier - New Snow

Woke up seeing stars out the window. And my impulsive side took over. Decided to try for the third time this month to get an early morning shot of Mt Rainier from Chinook Pass area before they close the roadway for the winter. Fortunately, only six inches of new snow. This was from Naches Peak Loop trail.

Ok, this is close to what I have been trying to shoot. Though I was hoping for some more shrub fall colors poking through.

The original is a photomerge of 21 frames with my Nikon D300 and Zeiss 35 mm. No filters. Probably 50% overlap for each frame...3 rows of 7 frames each. 9600 x 6800 pixels. Downsizing is not too successful. I tried noise reduction and blurring first, then downsizing and sharpening. Not much better. You'll just have to imagine finer details.

Folks, thanks for the comments.

Tom H: Each shot was 1/800 sec shutter and F13. I altered only the focus when shooting the snow in foreground. Once past that row, the focal length was at infinity. I did boost a few raw images individually in CS3 to bring out more detail in fir needles where they were too dark.