Wednesday, April 5, 2023
So, there I was finishing up on the edits of three photos from my evening at Price Lake when Toni came down to check on me. I showed her the three that I was happy with and for the sake of comparison, I showed her one that I had edited and just not cared for the outcome. She said that she loved it and wanted it printed for her meditation room. With that, I commenced to tweaking the colors, starting over from scratch, and then going back to the original and working the gradations of colors until I finally had something that I thought was pretty decent.
That was kind of the theme behind this trek from the very beginning. It started with an idea which changed, and then changed again. Let’s rewind the day a bit to see how this one happened. It all started with an appointment I had in town. I had seen that the weather was calling for cloudy skies through most of the day with some potential texture between the layers. I wanted to go out and do some more photography but wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. My appointment was at 11:30 and was supposed to last only a short time. The plan was to go out and look for some good subjects after I was finished with the appointment.
Well, the appointment took some interesting turns that prompted me to go to two other places to make some changes there. One of them required me to have to come back home to get a signature from Toni before returning. By the time all of this was finished, it was about time for Toni to go to work. I looked at the weather and wasn’t really seeing great clouds for doing rural and decay photography, but there was the potential for some interesting landscape conditions. I made the quick decision to head up to The Lump and start working around that area on the Blue Ridge Parkway. As I was heading that way, I was thinking that the best light for landscapes was going to be happening closer to sunset which was still about five hours away. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and didn’t want to wait till 9, or later to eat again. I decided to head home real quick to see Toni before she went to work. I then grabbed a quick meal and took care of some of the administrative tasks that my morning had created.
At this point, I started to really consider where I wanted to shoot. I went through a quick list of locations that sounded like good ideas which included The Lump, a vista near the Mt Jefferson Overlook, Price Lake, and Beacon Heights. These are all areas that look good at sunset, but I started to be a little concerned with the time of year. While the trees were filling in great around Wilkes County, it was going to be a different thing up on the mountain. I know that Doughton Park was not really seeing much change at all yet. With that in mind, I decided against The Lump and Beacon Heights because I really thought that they would benefit from the Spring colors. I was left with the little vista and Price Lake. Paying more attention to the hourly cloud forecast, I saw that there was a pretty good chance for color in the sky which I wanted to take advantage of with the reflective water of the lake. Price Lake is a location that I have been wanting to visit for a while now on a foggy morning because I have a composition in mind that I think will work very well in those conditions. Ideally, it needs to have some Spring color in the trees, and I thought that this might be a good chance to visit and see if that color is even starting to get preset. If I miss the fog, the color will make for a strong photo as well.
The decision was made to head to Price Lake just after 5pm. This would get me up there as the sun was getting lower in the sky with plenty of time to look at different compositions. I would even have time to bypass the lake and look for another location if needed. It felt weird driving to a location for photography wearing sunglasses since that is a pretty good indication that the light is too harsh for me to make photographs. The clouds were seeming to be a little more scattered than expected, but that meant that there would be a better chance for some great color in the sky. I knew that this was going to be a gamble, and even beyond the weather conditions, I was pretty sure that the mountains were all still looking very much like Winter at the stage of the year. I did have hope though because it had been in the low 80’s around Wilkesboro and I was driving with the air conditioning on. Once it gets warm, the colors start to pop out it seems.
When I got to Price Lake, there were really no signs of Spring that jumped out at me. It all looked pretty dormant from the main parking area. I didn’t care for the way the light was hitting from that angle, so I went around to the boat launch side of the lake where most of my favorite compositions are located. This is usually a sunrise location for me, but I have been here one other time for a sunset and had really good conditions. I was hoping for a repeat of that experience which would give my photographs lots of colors despite the dormant trees. I got parked and grabbed my bag. The first place I wanted to check out was the little dock on the far side of the lake. This was what I was looking forward to photographing during a foggy morning. Of course, there was no fog at all, and the trees above the platform were bare as could be. There was also a couple on the platform enjoying the lake. I almost passed up on the scene because of the people and the lack of atmosphere. However, I did want to see how the scene framed up the best since it had been several years since I’ve photographed this composition.
I slowly started to set the camera up with hopes that the couple would move on down the trail in the near future. Since I was looking at a very long distance to the opposite shore, I started out with my telephoto lens mounted to an extender which made it equivalent to a 140-400mm zoom. There was a bit of a breeze which prompted me to consider a long exposure to smooth the water, so I got the composition framed up and the focus locked. I then figured out the base exposure and plugged that value into my exposure calculator for a 10-stop ND filter. That gave me 3:20 worth of exposure, so I changed a few things around until I got 2:40 which was more to my liking. I slid that filter in as well as adding the Polarizer (figured into the exposure time). During all of this, there was a guy that was coming down the stairs with his kayak and he paused for a minute to ask where I was shooting so that he wouldn’t be in the way. That really took me off guard because it is so rare for somebody to ask that. I shared where I was planning to be aiming the camera but didn’t expect him to work around my needs. As it turned out, he was already planning on being in an area of the lake far away from what I was wanting to shoot. It turned out that he was a photographer as well, which explained why he was concerned about being in the shot. At any rate, it was a very nice and welcomed experience being out on a trek and was so far and away different from when I am doing my decay photography.
In the few minutes that had passed since I started setting up, the couple was making moves like they were about to leave which was what I was hoping for. I double checked everything with the camera and got ready for the long exposure. When they had cleared the scene, I released the shutter and waited for the exposure to finish. It was a little underexposed for my liking, and I didn’t really see enough benefit from the long exposure since the water was relatively calm at this point in the day. For simplicity, I pulled the ND filter out of the holder and just left the polarizer. This would allow much faster shooting which would also freeze all of the leaves and vegetation.
I cranked off a shot and realized that I had caught another hiker entering the view. I looked closely at the woods and found several hikers moving around which I had to be careful about capturing. I waited until they were all out of the frame and fired another shot. This one was very dull because the sun had gone back behind the clouds leaving no highlights on the scene. I again waited for the sun to come back out and confirmed that the hikers were all out of the frame before getting this next frame. It seemed to work out quite well as I looked at the image on the LCD. There wasn’t much color to it, and I was figuring that I would be better off doing this as a black and white presentation. It had all the right ingredients with the textures being the primary focus and the light directing the eyes.
I was still wanting to do a color image here since that is what I had been considering for a good while now. I just needed to change up the framing to bring the greens into play a bit more and maybe simplify the overall scene. I flipped the camera on its side to shoot a vertical composition. Seeing that I was on the wider end of my lens’ focal length, I decided it was time to pull the extender off so that the sharpness wasn’t compromised for no reason. This allowed me to capture the tree above the platform with a little more specificity and brought the strong greens into a larger portion of the frame. For this composition, I did the same waiting game for the hikers and the sun but added another element to the mix. There was a class of kayakers which were coming through the area. There must have been 15 or 20 of them. Had I been prepared for them; it would have made for a pretty good photo, but even with a wide end of 70mm, I didn’t have enough room to place them into the scene, so I just waited for them to pass me by. One of them asked if I could send him a “pic” as he went by. I let him know that I had gotten a photo before they had entered the frame but was waiting for them to move through before I resumed.
They cleared out of the frame after a minute or two and I was back to making images again. The intensity of the sun was changing quickly giving a lot of different looks on the scene. What I was most interested in was getting some separation between the platform and the background as well as having the tree structure stand out from the woods behind. There were a lot of button pushes here trying to get the right combination of light. I also tried this as a square crop to give a bit more width on the sides while including no more to the frame above or below. When looking at the camera’s LCD, I was convinced that the square crop was going to be my friend here and was pretty sure that was what I had used years ago when I shot it in the Fall.
It wasn’t until I got home that I saw that the square crop wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped. I preferred the vertical and the horizontal versions better. The horizontal one worked out great as a black and white as I had anticipated. It was the vertical one, which was cropped down to a 4:5 aspect ratio that seemed to have the best color aspects. This was the one that I worked on for about 45 minutes and just never found the right balance of color tones to make me happy. This one stayed at a four-star rating as I finished up the other three images that I had decided to edit. When Toni came down to see how the photos were going, I went through the tree of them which I had finished. When I was talking about how I needed different colors for the platform photos to really work, I showed her the partially edited vertical, color photo to give her an idea of how the colors just didn’t work in the scene. She actually loved the color one as much as the black and white which surprised me. Toni loves black and white imagery, and particularly loves my landscapes. For her to lean this hard towards a color one, and even want a print of it to hang in her meditation room, meant that there was something there which I had not seen fully. It was at that moment that I was determined to make this photo work.
I started to tweak the colors some more and added a few more masks to try and bend the color palette to my will. After about 10 more minutes, I was starting to make a mess of the whole thing. I just hit reset on the photo and started over from the beginning. I got into another edit which took about 15 more minutes and I decided that it was looking too flat and the colors were still not right. This was where I did something that I rarely do, and went to the history tab. I went back to the point where I had stopped originally and began work from there. I did a lot of work with the contrasts within the scene and tweaked color temperatures while playing around with the tone curve. It was slowly coming together, and I had pulled the greens away from the other colors in the scene which had been my ultimate goal the first time. I now had well over an hour and a half on this edit and was reasonably happy with the outcome. Just don’t get this confused with “fixing it in post,” as there was no fixing to be done. I just had to figure out how to get the colors to represent as I saw them creatively. Fundamentally, nothing has been manipulated or altered in this photograph and it is actually very true to how it appeared at the time of capture.
When I was finally finished with it, I sent a small file to Toni’s phone and go the official seal of approval from her. I also got an order to make a print of this one so that will be happening in the near future. Funny how my least favorite photo of the day was the one that she liked the best, which made me spend more time on it than any of the others. Speaking of the others, I was actually just getting started with the day at this point. I knew that I was done with the platform since there really isn’t much else that I can do compositionally here. I packed up the camera and went back up to the parking lot to go over to the side where the canoes are located.
I had a couple of ideas for this area and wanted to start with the canoes which provided some really good color contrasts to the scene. Sadly, there were no workable compositions here which was largely due to the fact that the boats were all stored on the metal dock which was not all that picturesque. There were some kayaks on the shore which would have been interesting except they were all the same color which happened to be a powder blue. I just didn’t see anything interesting with the boats and decided to move onto my main reason for coming out here. I needed to get set up for the sunset which was going to be happening in about an hour’s time.
This is a location that I have shot many times over the years, and it still seems like my special little hidden area because I have never seen anyone else here before. It allows me a chance to get an interesting foreground with the distant shore a good distance from that foreground. My hope was that the lake would pick up the colors in the sky as the sun started to illuminate the clouds overhead which were looking pretty good. It was a gamble at best because I was shooting pretty much exactly opposite of where the sun was dropping in the sky. The color was pretty much going to have to stretch across the entirety of the sky which I saw a great potential in. I just had to nail down a composition before the light show started.
I must have tried a half dozen positions for the camera moving from left to right. My initial compositions only included the larger of the two outstretched rocks, but the test shots that I made with that position left me feeling that the right side of the frame was much too dark, and it felt overly heavy. Since the sunlight was hitting the trees to the left, and the ones on the right side were in shadow, I needed to do something with the foreground to gain that balance which was not present. I backed up and started to include the smaller of the two jutting rocks. This brought with it some other challenges like the tree branches coming in from the left, and a lack of balance in the rocks themselves due to the size difference. Previously, I had shot a similar composition here, but had wanted to get more of the trees on the right side of the frame which allowed for a better balance between rocks. This time, the warm sunlight on the trees to the left of the frame was an important aspect and I had to keep that element in place which forced the balancing act with the rocks.
After about 15 minutes, I finally had a workable composition that I felt was worthwhile. As I went through the exposure issues, I decided that I wanted to use a polarizer to deepen the colors in the water as well as provide some more contrast in the sky. The sky was also pretty bright in comparison to the lower portions of the frame, so I added a 3-stop, soft edge ND Grad which helped to bring the sky down a bit. As I started to make exposures, the light levels in the foreground began to drop since that was predominantly in the shade. I slid in an additional 2-stop grad as well which allowed a more even exposure through the scene. I was now running three filters for this photo, and while I had wanted to make this a long exposure, I didn’t have the slot available for an ND filter. I could have added another slot to the holder, but I was already at the edge of what I could shoot without vignetting as it was. Had I added the other slot, I would have gone from 20mm, to probably 30mm which would not have worked at all.
I had the composition and the exposure. By stopping the lens down, I was able to get a one second shutter speed which was enough to smooth the water during the lulls in the breeze. It wasn’t ideal, but it seemed to be working in the image review. Normally, I would have aimed for a three second exposure here.
By this point, golden hour was starting and the warm sunlight on the trees to the left side was making them glow against the sky. It wasn’t Fall, and certainly didn’t look like Spring, but the sunlight made those bare branches just as colorful as if the leaves were showing out. I had to capitalize on this lighting, so I started to make exposures as the intensity of the sun changed on the trees. I was also looking at the clouds which were also moving around enough to create different aspects of interest in the sky. It was the breeze that played the biggest part though because more than half of my images from this set showed ripples and different patterns in the water. There was no way to get a glasslike surface, but I was trying to get as close as possible to it. This was one of the few that had the water the way I wanted it, with the light on the trees like I needed, and the clouds providing a bit of interest and framing for the scene.
This happened to be the first image that I edited from the day because it was the one that was closest to what I was expecting. The edit went much faster than I had expected, and things just fell into place with it. It quickly turned into my favorite from the day if for no other reason than the way the colors all went together. It was one of those landscapes that looked more like a painting than a photograph and that was what I was going for. This is the kind of fine art landscape image that I strive to create where so many things have to come together to make it all work out.
The evening had reached a crescendo during this 10-minute period when the light was really working for the scene. I was hoping that it was just a prelude to the main event though. As expected, the sun dipped down beneath the trees to my back and the trees that had been so well lit were now in the dark. The clouds were still looking great and what I was needing here was some brilliant hues to start hitting the clouds which would then reflect in the water. I decided to stay with the original composition even though the light had changed. I liked the fact that the left-hand rock seemed to be pointing at the large tree that kind of stood out from the rest on the distant shore. I provided a pathway through the image, and I didn’t want to mess that up.
As the light levels dropped, the scene took on a much-reduced overall contrast, so I was able to pull out the 2-stop ND Grad. This was my opportunity to slide in that 5-stop ND filter to really get the water smoothed out, but there was now another problem that I had to deal with. The wind was starting to really pick up at this point which surprised me. The weather forecast called for diminishing winds through the early evening, but the gusts were now probably 15mph or so. It wasn’t terrible, but when dealing with water, the wind becomes very apparent. The wind was also starting to cause issues with the trees on the other side of the lake, specifically, the tall evergreen which had become a focal point to the composition. Had I added the ND Filter and stretched out the exposure to 30 seconds or so, the tree would have become much too muddy for that key position in the frame. I was actually having a hard time at two seconds to keep it still. Instead of adding the ND filter and going for a longer exposure, I had to boost the ISO and pull the shutter speed back to a single second which kept the tree relatively sharp if I timed the exposure right.
I wasn’t seeing any color in the sky which was starting to worry me. The first blush of sunset had come and gone with very little color in the sky. The second blush would likely be more intense, but it would not be powerful enough to stretch across the sky to the East. All I was seeing was a flat scene in front of me with very little light. I stuck it out for the last 20 minutes to see what would happen. As the wind would die down, I would snap a shot hoping to catch the clouds in an interesting position. It was quite anticlimactic after the way the light had hit the trees at the start of golden hour.
As I was about to give up on this part of the evening and try to find something else, the clouds started to form a frame around that tree which I had deemed the visual anchor across the lake. Even without the color this was an interesting development in the sky. I took advantage of the conditions until the clouds changed and the sun dipped well below the horizon. I was figuring that this was not going to be nearly as good as the earlier circumstance, but there was always the chance of making this a very dramatic black and white photograph to show off the sky.
When I got the images home and went through them, I was really not all that happy with these last frames of the day because the light was so lifeless and flat. I knew that they weren’t going to work as color images, so I found the best of the series and did a black and white conversion. It was still rather bland, but I saw potential in it. I played with the profiles and then started to really dial in the contrast until I had an image that I was pretty happy with. It certainly didn’t rise to the level of the earlier color image, but it said something completely different which made it a unique image from the day and thus a closely related pair of photographs.
With all of the frames captured to try and get the wind, light, and water to all look right, I ended up shooting 78 images over the two locations. I knew that the hit rate wasn’t going to be that high for this session since I was playing with the light trying to get specific things to happen. I was expecting two to three keepers and actually had three up until Toni cast her vote. With four of them now listed as keepers I was thrilled with the day. Considering I didn’t get the sunset that I was after, and I didn’t see the Spring colors that I was interested in, I managed to get some pretty good photographs. I’m ready to see the mountains in their Spring colors now and hope to come back here for a repeat chance at the little wooden platform.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the photographs that I brought back. As always, if there are any that you would like to see up on your wall, please let me know so I can start getting a print made up for you. Not only is a print the final part of the creative process for me, it is also the best way to experience and appreciate photography in general. Sure, you can look at it on your monitor or phone, but are you sure that your screen is calibrated the same way mine is? How about the brightness? Well, I work in a completely calibrated environment so I’m able to edit the images the same way they will appear in print. When you select a print of one of my photos, you can be guaranteed that the photo you are enjoying is the exact way that I intended for it to look.
If you are looking to improve on your own photography, I am offering a series of beginner workshops through Spring which might be of interest. I have a composition building workshop at the end of May, followed by a workshop where I teach several different techniques of getting your focus and depth of field correct. These are both half day workshops with a lot of practical exercise, one on one teaching, and plenty of handouts with information. Get signed up today to ensure your spot!
Until next time….
Remember to use the code KISER10 to get 10% off your purchase
