The first inspiration for this piece was a passage I read in "Best Served Cold", by Joe Abercrombie. Except the paragraph described looking up through a valley. I created the valley geometry using Geocontrol and then placed my Vue d'Esprit camera at the bottom of the scene. After a few mediocre renders I decided to move the camera to the top of the valley, turn it around, and look down.

I was as blown away as some of the comments below when I saw the render. I added the water and colored it to match some photos a good friend of mine had taken at Glacier National Park. I had always been taken by the almost turquoise water in those pics and had wanted to include it in one of my scenes.

The foreground tree was a tough call for me. I wanted something in the foreground to give the scene a sense of distance and scale, but I didn't want it to distract from the scene. I think it worked out well however. This is the only one of my images to rate over 9 after 2 weeks.

I hope to create fall and winter versions at a later date.