This is a shot from the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. This shot is of the red crater at an altitude of 6,188 feet. It took me about 4 hours to hike up to this level and it was the most exhausting thing I have ever done in my life.
The mist on the ground is literally a cloud rolling in and moments after I took this shot, it became too cloudy to even see the two hikers with oversized backpacks shown in the upper right of the photo. The landscape in the far background was used for wide-angle shots of Mordor in the LOTR movies.
I took this with my Nikon D700 with my 16-35mm f/4.0 lens at 1/500sec and f/11.
