Lately I have been going out and shooting photos, looking at them on my computer, and then just sort of sitting on them for a week or so before I figure out what I think about them. This is true of some photos I took last weekend on a cloudy, dreary Sunday afternoon. I had a vision of what I wanted to shoot and have been thinking about this vision for a while. I don’t think I accomplished it for reasons I’ll go in to and I’ll probably return and try again if the conditions look good. I also only came home with one photo that I thought much of, so I am going to make this blog post about that photo.

My vision is to shoot a portion of the lake that has dead trees sticking out of it while there are calm, cloudy, gray conditions. I envision an image with muted colors, high contrast and almost but not entirely black-and-white. I want smoothed over water with glass like reflections, and very little else in the shot but the subject. Something that evokes the mood of a cool and calm winter morning when almost no-one wants to be at the lake.

Sunday afternoon, I almost had my conditions but the lake wasn’t very still like it is at dawn sometimes. But, circumstances prevented me from going out both Saturday and Sunday mornings so I had to take what I could. Regardless of that, by Sunday evening I needed to get out and away from things and wander around the lake. And I eventually settled on a little shallow cove that I could access by ducking under some trees. In this cove there was a dead tree in the lake, mostly alone and free of clutter. So, I set up my tripod in the water and began working on a shot.

The image above was shot at 21mm with an ND filter giving me an exposure of 20 seconds to still the water. I used a 2 second delay to avoid introducing camera shake when pressing the button. I moved around, up and down, zoomed in and out trying to get the composition that I wanted. In processing, I desaturated the colors quite a bit, and increased the contrast. I also cleaned up some junk in the corner that I didn’t like (and then put a watermark there ironically).

When I shoot long exposures, I am currently limited by the fact that I only have an ND filter for my 14-24mm lens. I somehow got a big horrible scratch on my other filter, so I need to replace that. This constraint really held me back from some of the shots I wanted to take on this day. The 14-24mm is very wide, which is great when you need it but in most situations it takes it far too much of the scene. So, this is the only long exposure image that I liked at all.

I don’t really like the trees and their reflections on either side, but I couldn’t see removing that much content from the image in Photoshop. Ideally I could have stepped back and decreased the angle of view but, I was up against the trees and brush. Also, the opposite lake shore really gets in the way and is too distracting. Fog would have been awesome for this shot to give it the simplified look that I wanted. I am not good enough to add fog in Photoshop and even if I was, I wouldn’t. So the above image is the gloomy image I get.

I wandered around and found some other scenes that I wanted to photograph, but I was limited by my lack of ND filter for my longer lens and didn’t really get what I wanted. I could have tried taking 30 or 40 images and averaging them out in Photoshop to get a similar effect, but that is a lot of work and didn’t seem worth it. So, I will think about these scenes and how to shoot them and will probably head out there at some point in the future to try again.

As I wandered around the opposite side of the lake, I did find a scene that I might want to shoot with better light and color so I have that to plan for as well. I think there is a photo to be made on this trail on a late afternoon with some warm light on the landscape and I’ll keep this in mind as a place to come back to.

Thanks for reading my one photo blog post that actually had two photos.