Often I come across a location that I think could be photographed well under the right conditions. I keep coming back to these locations in my mind and in person trying sort out what to do with it. One such location was the overlook along the hiking trail in my previous post that I eventually decided needed to be photographed at dawn. There is another such location at Inks Lake State Park that I have been trying to figure out how to photograph for quite some time. It is basically a granite hill overlooking part of the lake from the southeast end of the park. This hill is accessed on the Pecan Flats trail, which is not one of the most heavily trafficked trails in the park. The hill is littered with granite boulders, prickly pear cactus, and a few gnarly old trees and it seems to me that there must be a photo up here around sunrise or sunset. Sunrise is a bit difficult as you aren’t really supposed to enter the park until the office opens well after sunrise, but I can arrange to be there at sunset with a day pass.

I headed out there last Sunday on a warm cloudless summer afternoon in mid-November here in climate science denial land. I walked along the lake for a while trying to shoot a few photos of water birds and then planned to be up on the granite hill about 20 minutes before sunset to see what I could see. I probably should have arrived a bit earlier to give myself more time to scout out some compositions but I got distracted by an egret. The photo above is one of my first shots from the hill top with all the boulder glowing with evening light.

I eventually focused on a prickly pear next to a large boulder. I was thinking it would be nice to get the brightly lit boulder across from the setting sun with the prickly pear in the foreground. I put a wide lens on and got down close and took 5 exposure bracketed-images to combine in Lightroom so that I could get the full range of light and shadows. I ended up getting a lot more of that boulder on the right than the photo really needed so I cropped bit off of the image. This is my Flickr image for this blog post, but I think I could have probably done a better job composing it.

I had a tripod, but I didn’t have the tripod base-plate on my camera. I searched my backpack and didn’t find the base-plate, so I took the bracketed shots hand-held using high-speed continuous shooting. The risk of this is that you slightly move between shots making the alignment imperfect, and I did have to go into Photoshop and fix tiny areas that didn’t align perfectly. Turns out I had a small tripod base-plate attached to the foot of my long lens that I could have used and just didn’t notice at the time. Live and learn I guess.

The boulder is so large and weighty in the above image that I am not sure it works all that well. Also, shooting so wide makes the lake appear small in the distance. I did get some of that cactus needle back-light glow I was trying to get, so that worked well. I think next time I will order some high clouds and try to find a more balanced composition.

The lens in the second photo (14-24mm f/2.8) is well-behaved when shooting into the sun and I shot at a relatively wide aperture to avoid an exaggerated sun burst. The first photo at the top was shot with my lower cost super zoom and it doesn’t handle the sun nearly as well as you can see from the lens flare and color separation under the sun in the image. You really do get what you pay for with lenses.

Lastly, I got down low and close to the prickly pear. I had to dial the aperture down to f/9 to get better focus depth, which results in more a pronounced sun burst. I had a lot of trouble deciding how to edit the color around the sun as the yellows were a bit over-powering; I ended up desaturating quite a bit. The granite really picks up that golden hour light quite well.

I don’t think I solved this location yet, which is good because I have to go back and try again some time. There are a few other locations that I know of that bother me as I haven’t quite figured out how to photograph them yet. One is a small stand of trees I know of that desperately needs some fog, which is rare around here but gives me something to think about. I guess this sort of thing is what makes this a fun hobby.

And now a colorful reflection photo I took that I didn’t know what to do with so I’ll tack it on to the end. I promise that I didn’t mess with the white balance on this photo, the light was really this warm in the clear late afternoon. Thanks for the read.