This image is a special one for me. I captured the foreground of this image during blue hour on a beautiful evening up at one of my favorite places in the World. This is a hike on Vancouver Island, located on the Westcoast of BC, Canada. In order to get to this spot, you have to drive up a rough 10km+ deactivated dirt service road. Once you've reached the trailhead, you have to scramble for around 3km as you hike along cliffs, waterfalls, and canyons on your way up to this lake.
I absolutely love a good scramble myself. My wife on the other hand, not as much; especially when she has a heavy camping backpack on. So for the second half of this hike, in addition to my even heavier 50lb+ backpack, I also carried her backpack on my shoulder as we made the steep ascent to this paradise in the mountains.
Once we arrived, there were only two other people there swimming in the lake. After we had setup camp, they had already started making their way back down the mountain and we ended up having this lake all to ourselves.
After photographing the sunset that evening, I had to stay out for longer to capture some blue hour photographs of this place. I especially love blue hour for landscape photography because the light has such a soft, ethereal feel to it. And it is perfect for creating clean, colorful astrophotography landscape images later on in post-production.
Once we got home a day later from this overnight hiking trip, I uploaded the files to my computer and eventually started culling through the images that I would choose to process. This one really stood out to me, and after doing my usual post-production work on the photo itself, I then brought it into Photoshop and blended in one of my photos that I captured of the Milky Way at a different location. This was the final result.