Sunrise at Mount Tom, Sierra Nevada, California, USA

Again, browsing through old pictures, and again, ending up with the Sierra Nevada/Owens Valley photo session. I am so looking forward to being there in May this year again.
The picture here is not from May, but February 2010. Like the previous ones (and here), it shows varying stages of the sunrise.What made this particular morning special was a band of clouds, forming illumination patterns on the snow covered

mountains. This is a shot that does not use a wide-angle, but a (short) telephoto approach, singling out Mount Tom (4,163 m aka 13,658 ft), one of the highest peaks at the northern part of Owens Valley (a bit further south, there is of course Mt. Whitney, with 4,421 m the highest peak in the "mainland" US (i.e. excluding Alaska, where you have the Denali)).

Due to its height, it's quite interesting how the light colour changes on the flank, i.e. at the lower part it's barely getting sunrise, whereas at the peak, the sun is obviously quite "higher". The shadow from the clouds emphasizes this, of course.

What is a bit missing is a foreground. I blame that on the one single morning I had, where I had to multitask running around in a barely scouted area, avoiding cow droppings, looking at the scenery, and force me not have my mouth hanging open by the sheer beauty of everything, while at the same time, light was always changing. For the next time, I memorized a few spots I noticed where I will have trees to work with in the foreground.