before the sun rises...

I've always wanted to take some pictures from here as the sun rises, and on this past Wednesday (2 March) I woke up before 6 am and headed to the hill in front of the Netherlands Carillon.
This particular picture was the first high dynamic range (HDR) picture I took in the series, taken around 6:08 (sun rise happened around 6:40) and under some chilly temperatures. As I usually do now, I shot two brackets of three shots each, one centered at -1 exposure (-1, -2, 0) and one centered at +1 exposure (+1, 0, +2).  I returned home and selected 5 shots (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) that I processed using Nik HDR Efex Pro, my software of choice now for HDR pictures.
With the shot processed, I used curves in Photoshop to enhance contrast slightly and Nik's Tonal Contrast to tweak the picture a little more.  I finished with Nik's Dfine 2.0 to reduce the noise.
Behold the finished product...