Inner Peace

Here’s a final reflection photo from my camping weekend last month.
 
That old saying that “luck comes to the prepared” is surely true in photography, but sometimes it’s more luck than prepared. I took this photograph the day prior to the one I posted earlier with a similar composition. I had scouted the location the day before. Setting up this morning though, it was dark enough that I couldn’t fine tune my composition looking through the viewfinder. (Live View was even worse.) To compose, I opened the aperture and took long exposures with a high ISO. This gave me bright enough images that I could see my composition, and fine-tune as needed. Happy, I started to move my settings back to “normal.” I had set the ISO to 100, when I decided to tweak the composition one more time. I took this image to confirm I was happy, and then sat back to wait for the light show to begin.
 
It never did. If you look close, you can see a touch of warmth over Broken Top, and that was all I got. In addition, as the dawn developed the clouds obscured Broken Top completely. Killing time waiting to be sure my opportunity was lost, I was looking at my earlier images and noted that I really liked this image. The camera read the early light very blue, and I liked the mood of the clouds. Noting my aperture and long exposure though, I was worried I would have blurring issues when I viewed the image at full size. (The camera couldn’t focus in the dark, so I had kicked focusing to manual so the camera would quit searching, without noting if I was focused near or far.) Fortunately, when I got home I found everything was sharp.
 
This photo looks better if you click on it to view the large version on a dark background (and if you play John Rutter’s “A Gaelic Blessing” while you view it  ).

A couple notes of clarification (from questions on the similar composition I posted earlier). That's a pine cone on the branch, not a bird. (I wish it was a bird!) Igor, I took this from the north side of the spit that runs northwest of the boat ramp.
 
Nikon D7100
Nikon 12.0-24.0 mm f/4.0 at 15 mm (mm equiv.); mildly cropped
3.0 sec. at f/4.0 and ISO 100