Devine (not to be confused with Divine) Lake Park is a nice little city park in Leander with a lot of trees and a pond and it is very close by to me. In the summer you can see the sun set over the water from one shore and I try to remember to go out there when there might be a nice sunset.

Tuesday afternoon, I took the dog for a walk and saw the clouds forming up like there would be a good sunset. So, when I got back home I grabbed the camera and went over to the park and hiked out among the bugs to see if I could get a nice photo. As the sun set, the clouds thinned out and I was left with a mediocre sunset. So, I worked on trying to get some reflections across the water.

These images are HDR merges of multiple images. The above was shot at 25mm to try to leave out the large levee to the right of frame. The image below was shot at 16mm as I got down close to some purple flowers. I knew the flowers would not be exposed at all when I captured the sky so I took about 7 photos and made an HDR merge to get it all in. You can probably find a little bit of ghosting if you really dig in.

I guess the purple flowers turned out OK. though it was kind of hard to compete with a bright sunset in the background. So the next morning I went back out a little after sunrise and before work to see things in the morning light. It was actually nice out that early.

Below are the flowers with the light at my back. These were taken with the Nikon Z50 whereas the above HDR photos were taken with the D750. You may also notice some white ducks in the distance across the pond. I tried a few ideas to try to make the flowers more interesting in this setting, but then I noticed the dragonflies.

The dragonflies were abundant and I had the luxury of working several of them on their perches against the emerald and azure background. There was only a slight breeze and there were many of these guys hanging on to twigs and reeds in the bright morning light. And all that bright sunlight at my back made them easy to photograph as high shutter speeds and low ISO.

I did have a lot of trouble getting focus as I was as close to them as I could get and the camera kept trying to focus on the background. I finally found that I could manually get the camera close to the focus point and then the autofocus could do a much more reliable job on the little bugs.

The above dragonfly was happily perched on a spent Mexican Hat and quite patiently let me take multiple photos of him or her. I love the sun sparkle it its eye.

Then there were some ducks. To me, the ducks with their built-in grin always look so self-assured. These ducks are quite comfortable with people, who probably often feed them, and sat there calmly in the morning sun letting me take their photograph.

Thanks for reading about my photos at Devine Lake. Please leave a comment.