DAMN! 
Eerily majestic yet smooth like cream! Care to share your technique with the class?
Ah thanks. First thing - get up early!! and be prepared (in the dark)- sunrise happens so fast. I did several different versions of this shot, and this one came out best. Still working on some others.
This is actually a pano stitch (of 7 shots), which is a fairly new process that I have been trying. I used to shoot 4x5 until my favorite color transparency film went extinct. I still have some left, but it's truly depressing for me that I cannot get any more. This image is from a digital camera.
I of course use a tripod, but I also have a special panoramic bracket. The camera is mounted vertically on the bracket and aligned to correct for parallax errors, and I have click detents on my ball head that helps to get consistent images for stitching.
I shot manual exposure, manual focus. Exposure for all images was 1/10th of a sec at f8. Lightroom cannot read my camera's RAW files, so I had to do the conversions in proprietary software, then export as tiffs to further adjust in Lightroom. For this series of images I did some minor adjustments, but one thing I did here, that I normally do not like to do is lift the shadows a bit (usually it's the opposite for my tastes). The trees were actually a bit more silhouetted than what appears here, but lifting the shadows brings out a little more detail. There was not much contrast to the scene, so lifting the shadows really did not effect adversely much else of the scene.
I sent the series from Lightroom to build the pano in Photoshop, which does a beautiful job of stitching, if you give it good input.
One thing you will not know unless I say, is the very tip of the tree on the left extended beyond the frame in the stitch (but not my original single image) so I used the spot healing brush tool to cut some off.
Another thing I normally NEVER do, but this time I did, was remove parts of another tree in the left side of the frame. It was distracting. My first time experimenting with removing using the content aware feature. Worked pretty well, but I needed to do some further cleaning up with the healing brush.
Once that was done, I sent the whole stitch back to Lightroom for some further enhancing - which again was very minimal. I used the brush tool to brush along the sand on the right and center to increase the clarity, which enhances micro contrast. I thought it brought out the texture to the sand.
And that's pretty much it.
