Monday, July 3, 2023
Get ready for a very awkward sports analogy from somebody that doesn’t watch sports, or participate in them (with the exception of cycling and occasionally tennis).
Picture it, Friday evening I was sitting in my chair and looking at the weather for Saturday morning. It was looking like a good day for some landscape photography, but I had no idea where I wanted to go. I went through all of my old haunts and started to look through surrounding areas that might have some good locations to try out. After about an hour or two, I started to dial my search into the area of Bass Lake which is part of the Moses Cone Property which I had just visited at the end of June. By the time I had decided on this, I was closing in on it being too late to even consider getting up that early. I got a few things figured out and finished my episode of Mayans MC before rushing to bed. I had my clock set for 4am which would give me about five hours of sleep.
Well, shortly after midnight, I was woken up by Toni who was not feeling well and was in a bit of a worrisome condition. I was up with her for about an hour or so before she was able to get back into bed and try to go to sleep. After that, I knew that I wasn’t going to have enough sleep to make a trek happen in the morning, so I just turned off the alarm.
That was strike one.
Now that I had a location in mind, I was better able to plan the morning and make sure that I had enough sleep. The weather was actually looking a bit better for Sunday morning, and I had been able to scout Bass Lake a little more by way of Google Maps and satellite imagery. I was thinking that I would get up just a tad earlier in case I needed to search out a composition since I didn’t know exactly how the terrain was going to look. I just knew that if at all possible, I wanted to include a little island that was in the lake. The idea was to turn in early and get up at 3:45am. Well, things happened, and I was up until nearly midnight before I was able to get a shower. Doing the math, I wasn’t going to be able to get enough sleep to manage a trek that early in the morning.
That was strike two.
By the time Sunday evening rolled around, I was again considering going out to Bass Lake for a sunrise shoot to see how the location looked. Things were on track to have me in bed at a reasonable hour and I had the alarm set for 3:45am as planned the night before. The weather was again looking promising, but with a bit more cloud cover. That was a bit concerning to me since I had been planning on between 50 and 75% coverage in the mid and upper elevations. I was no looking at just about 100% coverage in the upper layers of the atmosphere. My hope was that the forecast was wrong in the way that it normally is with high clouds, and I would have much less coverage which would allow some sunlight through to provide some color.
I did manage to get to sleep at a reasonable time, and even slept the entire night through. When the clock rang at 3:45, I was not exactly excited about the possibility of going out though. Looking back over the previous two mornings, I didn’t want to forfeit this chance though. I went ahead and looked at the weather which was showing less cloud cover in the hourly forecast, and it was actually showing to be clear at the moment. This was actually a good turn of events because the 100% cloud cover was probably going to snuff out the color in the sky which I was going to need with water being a major foreground element in the photos I was planning on. Even if the color didn’t hit, I was needing to get out there and scout it out to see if there were other possibilities for different times of the year. With that in mind, I got up and started to get ready. There was also an element of, if I didn’t get up, this would be my third strike in three days for the same location. I didn’t like the idea of that kind of failure looming over me, so I took the swing.
By getting up out of bed and starting on my way, I at least made contact with the ball. Now, whether it fouled, or landed in the stands was yet to be seen. If I was lucky, some kid in the nosebleed section would catch the ball as I rounded the bases. Hey, that almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about. AI text is really good, isn’t it? I’m kidding, this was all me. I know my way around a football bat and can slam dunk a pitch with the best of them.
The ride out there was just under an hour from the house. The entire way up the mountain, I was looking at really good skies with a hazy moon behind the thin clouds. These were the types of clouds that would reflect a lot of color from the low sun. I was starting to think that I had waited until the perfect day for a lake sunrise shoot. When I got up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, the clouds all faded away and I was left looking at nothing but stars in the sky. This was going to be problematic to say the least. I had to have some kind of clouds above if I had any hopes of color at daybreak. I was committed now, and just continued on to my destination. Since this was the first time I had been to this lake, I had the GPS pumping in directions and I went through Aho Gap which brought back memories of living off of the Parkway during my junior year at ASU. I went through Blowing Rock, and eventually ended up on the road that brought me to the parking area.
When I got to the parking lot, it was small, but I had expected it after looking at the satellite views. There was only one other vehicle there, and it looked as if it had been parked there all night long. I heard nobody out there and saw no signs of anyone around. I grabbed my gear and started towards the water. I knew that the distance around the lake was just shy of a mile, so I had time to find a good composition in any direction should I need to look.
When I cleared the trees, I was able to see up into the sky for the first time and found it to be pretty much void of any clouds. The only ones that were there were on the Southeast edge of the lake. That fact kind of forced my hand because I wasn’t going to get any color in the other directions. I pulled out the phone to check the sun locator app to see where it was going to enter the sky at. With that bit of information in mind, I knew the direction that I was going to have to shoot in. As it turned out, the side of the lake that I had come in on was where I was going to need to shoot. Without having to do a lot of walking, I had time to scout out some good foreground interest. Ther were a lot of lily pads which was something that I am not accustomed to working with at all. It was going to provide a bit of texture and visual interest to the scene which I was kind of digging since the sky wasn’t going to be as strong as I had been hoping for.
Along the shoreline, I found a couple of deadfalls into the water which I started to think about using as foreground and leading lines. There were two areas that seemed to be the most ideal for a composition. I chose the one with a slightly larger fallen tree because of a bit more structure to it. It was also the angle that got me closest to the island as part of the composition. That was one of the elements that I wanted to try to get in the composition. This would allow that, and if the conditions would work, I could get a little fog behind it to give some separation from the distant shore. It was too dark at this point to really tell if that was going to happen.
Looking at the sky, it was looking like this might not work out as well as I was hoping, but I didn’t want to give up just yet. I might have hit a pop fly and be sent back to the dugout after all. Baseball metaphor nailed once again!
I got a composition worked out and started to make test exposures at 30 seconds to see how things were looking. The composition was looking pretty good, but the sky was failing the scene quite epically. It was still blue hour at this point and everything was blue. The whisps of clouds above didn’t seem likely to pick up any color as the sun got closer. Under normal circumstances, I would have been able to make this work, but since I had a foreground that was so intricate with textures and details thanks to the lily pads, I needed a lot more interest in the sky to make this work and be balanced. It just wasn’t seeming like it was going to happen.
It was now about 6am, fourteen minutes before sunrise and when I would normally be getting the best of the colorful soft light. I was getting a hint of yellows off to the left as the sun approached, but there was nothing like what I am used to seeing at this point. The minutes ticked on, and I kept making exposures as the light improved. Eventually, there were some oranges and pinks in the sky thanks to some clouds that were just now coming into view. There wasn’t a lot of color, but I was looking at the sky thinking that there was enough that I could use some of the tricks that I had learned at Doughton Park a while back to make this scene work the way that I wanted it to. By 6:10, I was starting to think that that kind of heavy post processing might not be needed after all. The clouds were looking good, and the colors were coming into their own quickly. It wasn’t an epic sunrise by any stretch, but I was seeing just enough there to balance out the composition and give me a good image right before the sun came up.
There are typically two blushes during a sunrise or sunset. I had captured the first blush which had arrived kind of late as it was just before the sun cracked the horizon. That is the image that you see shared here in the blog. I waited around for about 10 minutes after the sunrise and saw that there was no chance for that second blush. I had shot 36 frames during the sunrise which if I was lucky would yield a single keeper. The sky wasn’t good enough to hope for more than that. With the color gone, I packed up the camera and started to walk the trail to see what else was there to photograph.
My first stop was the double pool which was just to the North of my location. It was a very interesting design, and something that I would have liked to photograph. The reality of it was the light wasn’t good on it, and there was no great composition to be had. I just filed that away for another time. This freed me up to keep on walking the trail which was a very simple task as it was well groomed and surfaced. I noticed that there were a lot of people here now both walking and running. I was just calmly walking because there was no sense in trying to run the bases. I knew that I hadn’t hit a home run. I might have gotten a good double out of the first location, and I was happy with that.
The trail around the lake was really pretty and I loved the trees that lined the trail. There just wasn’t much, if anything in the way of a composition that I wanted to shoot. I kept pausing to look at the different angles around the lake as well as the trees along the sides. It was all very pretty, but nothing at all was jumping out at me. I was starting to be content with the nice walk in the calm morning air. I didn’t want to put any more stress on myself to create images at this point because I knew that if I did, the images would be less than ideal. I had my one photo for the day, and I still had time to go up to the Parkway to get some more photos.
I had made it around 3/4 of the lake without finding anything else to shoot when I came upon another large area of lily pads near the shore of the lake. There was one obvious difference here from what I had seen with the other sections. These had little white buds on them which caught my eyes. As I got closer to them, I could see that many of them were opened into flowers that I had to assume were Lotus Flowers based on the look. These were certainly not my typical subject, but I recognized the beauty of them as well as the fact that I had not really come across them like this before. I quickly surveyed the scene and determined that the light was looking pretty good on them, and I could see enough visual interest with them that I wanted to get a few frames of the flowers.
I picked an area where I could get the closest to them with the camera and started to set the tripod up on the edge of the bank. This area had an elevated bank of maybe two feet above the water level. With the tripod extended to get the right angle to show the yellow centers of the flowers, I was starting to get a little further away from the flowers than I had hoped for. I knew that I was going to need my telephoto lens for this, so I pulled that one out and added a polarizer to it to help with the saturation of the greens in the water as well as darken the water itself. I peeked through the camera and found that even at 200mm, I didn’t have a tight enough framing on the flowers. I went to the bag and pulled out my teleconverter which made that 200mm zoom to 400mm which was still just barely enough to get the framing that I wanted to have.
With the camera finally set up, I started to make different exposures with slightly different compositions. The compositions were not difficult to figure out and I leaned heavily on the use of negative space within the frame. I found compositions where the negative space created shapes around the flower, or in some cases two of the flowers. The pads gave the texture while the flower provided that impactful punch from the most luminous thing in the scene. The hardest part here was watching my exposure. Since I knew that I was going to keep the flower brightest in the scene, I exposed for the highlights and made sure that nothing at all clipped in the highlights. The shadows were allowed to fall wherever they needed to. This gave me a pretty close to final look to the images without a lot of need for post processing. Occasionally the sun would come out and light things up to add a bit more contrast to the scene, but even that was minimal thanks to the thin clouds that were pretty much all through the sky at this point.
I stayed at this location for a lot longer than I had anticipated as I worked different compositions with different flowers. It was a lot of fun, and I had no idea how any of these were going to turn out since I don’t normally shoot flowers like this. I hated that I was stretching the lens to a full 400mm because I knew that this was the softest focal length of the lens, and it was going to be softer still with the extender added into the mix. I just kept waiting for any camera shake to dissipate after making adjustments before triggering the shutter with the remote release. I would then zoom in on the image review to confirm that the focus and sharpness were looking good.
I was pretty happy with what I was seeing in the LCD but knew that the final test would be when I got it home on the computer. That is always when little softness errors show up. All I could do was try everything that I could to ensure that the image would be sharp where I wanted it to be. Ironically, most of these turned out excellent and I was able to pick several of the best of them for edits and inclusion into this blog.
I ended up with four of them that I really liked which surprised me. As I was showing Toni the photos since she loves Lotus Flowers, she really wanted to see them done in black and white because that was how she normally saw them photographed. Personally, I really liked the color images because of the red stems beneath the water which played with the green quite nicely. The white flower stood out more with the green backgrounds as well, but I wasn’t opposed to giving it a try in black and white.
I went back to my remaining two-star picks from the culling process and found one that didn’t have quite the color impact as the others. I pulled that one into the develop module and started the black and white conversion. It went well, but I still don’t think that it has the impact of the color ones. The end result is seen earlier in the blog and I’m glad that I worked the image for Toni because I like how it turned out as much as she did. It made the fifth image from this area which made it into the keepers. That really surprised me, and really increased my hit rate for the day.
I had one more composition to work on before I called it a day. That was an interesting tree that was situated across the trail from where I had been working on the Lotus Flowers. I worked out two variations on the tree and didn’t much care for either one of them. Those two compositions only accounted for one exposure a piece that brought my morning total up to 56 frames. Of those, I have six posted here to share which is about my average 10% hit rate. Most of the successful images happened in the second half of those 56 frames though as I burned a lot of exposures trying to get the best light from sunrise. In the end though, I am very happy with the morning’s results. I was able to shoot a new location without ever having scouted it before. I came away with a good many photos which was icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned. I also captured images that were unlike pretty much anything that I had shot before.
Toni even made the comment about the sunrise shot that she loved it, but it was a much busier image than she was used to from me. She is absolutely right about that. The additional textures and details from the lily pads do make a huge difference to the overall impact of the photo. It felt weird to capture as well as edit, but I agree with Toni on this one. I like the end result and I think that the image talks and says all the right things to the viewer.
When I finished the stroll around the lake, I noticed that the parking lot was full, and there were just way too many people out here at this point. That was my cue to leave. The clouds had pretty much turned the sky boring at this point anyway. I had hopes of getting a better sky up on the Parkway as I went home. That didn’t happen and I found that the light was actually rather flat over the landscape. I saw nothing else that I wanted to shoot up on the Parkway so when I got back to 421, I set my course to home.
One last place that I went before going home was a repair shop not far from the house. The flat light was going to be nearly perfect to photograph this old Dodge that was parked beside the building. It had been there a few weeks, but this was the first time that the conditions had been right to capture it. The only problem was when I got there, it was gone.
That…was strike three for the day.
Even though technically I had three strikes, I managed to get on a base or two and I got some decent photographs. Most importantly thought, I got out and went to a new place where I captured images that were just really unlike anything that I normally shoot. I don’t expect for a cooler of Gatorade to be poured over me, or to be carried on the shoulders of another player, but I’m quite satisfied with the outcome of the day.
I hope that you enjoyed this trek as well. Let me know if any of these photos speak to you and I will start working on making a print for your wall. If you are looking to up your photography game, be sure to check out my different mentorship programs. I currently have a vacancy in my Advanced Mentorship Program and would love to get to know you and your photography better. The consult is totally free and will give us an opportunity to custom build a program for you. Just give me a call at 336-681-0220, or email me at [email protected].
Until next time…
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