Lake of the Clouds + repost

Todd, I love the composition; the sun is placed in exactly the correct "rule of thirds" spot; the foreground lines on the mountain lead to the water, which in turn leads to the rear of the picture. Lovely! The only thing is, I'm not at all familiar with your part of the country (alas), so I have no way of telling whether the scene is naturally lit this way or whether it's a trifle oversaturated toward the red side. But I do think you've captured it at the right moment for the light.

I think there was a ton of potential here, a great scene and nice comp, but there are major technical problems. It looks like when you blended the exposures, you blended two for the sky when the clouds had already moved, so you have some significant halos in the sky. You also lost a lot of clarity up top. The good news is that there is a ton of resources from this site to help you get there with your blends. As an aside, I can vouch for how commenting on other folks photos will help you improve your own stuff.
Oh, I just read Nancy's comment--i think the red will look fine once you perfect the blend--its the blend that is making it look oversaturated and muddy.

Whoa, that's a lot of RED! I think most of us have seen the sunrize color a scene like this, but backlighting those red leaves with the red sunlight is really amazing. Can't tell from this small image, but I wonder if you lost any detail by shooting at f/25 with a 13mm focal length? I don't think you really need f/25 for DOF at 13 mm. -- did you stop down to get a Sun star?

Some gorgeous light on a nice composition. The softness in the image let's it down however, I'm not sure if it's a result of the blend or web sharpening process.

I agree with the others, great potential here it just needs some work in post processing :)

Better?

No, the original was much better. One of the difficulties in offering advice on these jpegs is that you don't know what the starting point was, so there's no reference. In reading the other comments i think what this needs first and foremost is just better sharpening for the web. Assuming it wasnt blurry to begin with, make sure you oversharpen it before resizing--there are lots of ways to sharpen for web and if you do a search of this site youll find a few pretty quickly.

I agree with the others here...this image has some real potential. Look at a post on here by Kane Englebert from a week or so back. He has many of the same elements here with the reds and such. If you can duplicate some of the blends, you have a real winner here!!