The view from our rental house for the week of Grand Lake, Colorado was awesome! Nestled within the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, the small town sits on the banks of two lakes and giant 10,000+ peaks tower above. We explored several hiking trails in the area, ventured up to the 10,000 feet summit of Shadow Mountain and experienced the drastic weather changes throughout the day. From low 50s in the mornings to mid 80s in the afternoon with a random thunderstorm mixed in, and ending with beautiful sunsets over the lake and mountains.
A note about my settings and setup (shot in manual mode).
Since I was standing on the deck and I didn't want too many houses or the road in the photo I used my 70-200mm lens. This image was shot at 70mm but I didn't take a few others at a longer focal length to really focus in on the mountain top.
It was super sunny so the ISO was set to 125.
Because I was so far away from the subject (the mountain) it really didn't matter too much what the aperture was set to because most of everything would be in focus no matter what. And same thing with the shutter speed. So to get the exposure correct I set the aperture to f/2.8 and the shutter speed at 1/3200.