I took a trip to Tennessee with my family last week. We stayed in this cabin in the hills about an hour east of Nashville. It was a really fun and relaxing time in a beautiful landscape, so I didn’t feel like I had to go far to take some nice shots. The first one is right outside my bedroom window at sunrise on the first day we were there. When I saw the large windows overlooking the valley the night before I knew it would make for a cool perspective in the morning. The next one I took during sunset the next day, there wasn’t much going on in the sky but I thought the colors really made up for that. The last one I took the last night we were there, I planned out when the moon would be in the right spot above the cabin and framed the shot earlier in the day. It was just a matter of getting enough light to really bring out the scene without turning it into a star trail shot (which are awesome shots, but not what I was going for) while being able to use the right aperture to get that sun-star effect on the moon. I ended up with a 90 second exposure (which only gives a slight distortion to the stars because I used a 10mm focal length - a longer length would have given them more of a trail) and f/8 on my Sigma 10-20. Overall I was really happy with how these images came out.