I have been at a lake this week for spring break. I didn’t go far, just down to Canyon Lake which is south of Austin. It is nice to get away a little. The lake is still quite cold but I got in anyway and endured the initial shock. I rented a little pontoon boat and the photo below was taken by my daughter from the boat and shows me floating on the lake.

I did manage to hike around the next somewhat foggy morning and take some photos of the lake. It was a mostly cloudy day that began with fog and I thought that it would make for some interesting long exposures. There is a hiking trail that leads to a park which is closed to vehicles right now, so I had the shore line all to myself on this morning. I found the remains of a tree on the shore and decided that it would be my subject.

This was a 15 second exposure using an ND filter. My basic thoughts were that the diagonal shoreline would be crossed by the opposite diagonal of the tree while the water and the distance would be misty with the fog and long exposure.

I went in closer to the tree to see if making the tree a bigger part of the foreground would help. I had to raise the tripod so that you could make out the branches down by the water. This is a 20 second exposure.

I like the first one better but you can decide and sound off in the comments if you like.

For editing, I had to reduce color saturation a lot as the rocks on the shoreline are a very vibrant orange and I found that they overwhelmed the image, so the colors are knocked down quite a bit in these images. I also worked on deepening the contrast in the sky to give the clouds some character. I increased the clarity on the pebbles to help them stand out and removed some spots from the filter.

This distant shoreline caught my eye as it had some trees shrouded in the fog. It is difficult to see in my images above that were shot at 16mm, so I put on the 70-200mm lens and shot the distant park at 200mm

This is the full width of my image but I cropped down the sky above and lake below to focus on the trees. I don’t think that this image lived up to my vision I guess mainly because there isn’t much interesting in the trees across the lake. I thought it might look a little vague and mysterious. Maybe if there was a boat in the water.

I hiked around and over that hill in the distance on the left to have a look at the marina at which I rented the boat on the previous day. There are trails leading all over and around this hill and I enjoyed hiking around and by the shoreline.

And that was my foggy morning hike by the lake. I returned later for some sunset pictures which I will post later. Thanks for reading.