Before Dawn

I think I need to go back to central Nevada to do more shooting. Since my original trip in 2012 I find myself contemplating the things I would do differently or lamenting the opportunities I missed — like not shooting the ghost town of Berlin because I got lost!
But until I pull the trigger on that trip I have the images I shot in 2012 — I am still finding images that need processing from that batch. This is one of them.
I woke early one morning, well before dawn, and decided to head up through the pass to try to catch a shot of the town at dawn. Well dawn was a bust, but the images I grabbed in the pre-dawn blue hour held promise. And time. Evidently I needed some time to mull around how exactly to process this one.
I took some liberties in processing this (my photo, my rules). I underexposed the image overall in Lightroom then brought up the town a little more. I wanted to draw the eye to Austin a bit more, so I used a tilt-shift blur, then masked the blur out along the ridge of the surrounding hills to separate it even more from the expanse of Reese River Valley.
Hope you like it.
Nice one Bob, like the results, nice work