[/caption] A snow storm that had brought 6 inches along the Mt. Hood Wilderness the night before gave way to sunny skies the morning I took this photo. This makes for an epic day since the sun creates a fantastic contrast, flocked trees create a great personality and the blue skies allow the mountain to really stand out. I normally stop hear whenever I am heading out on a snow-shoe trip during winter or a hike in the summer. This photo shows just how well your photos can turn out if you have all of these ingredients. The sun was still fairly low so parts of the trees are shrouded in the shadows. This also creates more personality in your field of view. I also made sure to crop out some of the sky high above as well as parts of the trees in the foreground. I wanted to showcase more of the snowy mountain in a panoramic view. I took this photo on 2/9/11 at about 10:23am and I had stopped along Hwy 26 to take this shot. I wasn’t using my tripod or my remote switch since the lighting was pretty good and I wasn’t worried about any blur or camera shake. However, I did make sure that the IS was on. I was using my Canon T1i along with my Canon 55-250mm telephoto lens. I also attached my warming filter and my CIR-PL in order to take advantage of the blue sky and bring out the colors of the flocked trees. I had the camera in Program/Normal mode so the aperture was set at F-8 and the shutter at 1/250 second. Due to the brightness of the sky, snow and sunlight I did set the ISO to 100 and the white balance to -0.7. I also set the focal length to 60mm since I wanted to avoid photographing the Hwy below as well as eliminating some of the sky. Therefore, I was able to include the entire mountain without having too many distractions in the frame. I’ve taken hundreds of photos from this same spot which includes many different types of panoramic to close up shots of the mountain but this allowed me to showcase the entire volcano.