Herbert Lake & Alpen Glow

Classic Banff mountains with gorgeous light. Excellent - the fog on the lake makes it for me.
-matt

Very pretty. I wish I could see more detail in the trees though.

- Dan.

I like this, I like the way the mist seperates the lake from the land, wonderful light

Outstanding.

I love shots like this in which the subject appears to glow. Alberta tops my list of places I long to visit and this certainly helps to secure that desire.

Very nice. I wasn't the one that asked for more detail here, but I'm very glad you posted it. Gotta ask why the 1D to shoot this rather than the 1Ds (or even 10D)? I'm thinking simply about the number of pixels and the detail possible.

Rich

Rich S wrote:Very nice. I wasn't the one that asked for more detail here, but I'm very glad you posted it. Gotta ask why the 1D to shoot this rather than the 1Ds (or even 10D)?

Because the shot was taken in October 2002 before the 1Ds or the 10D was shipping

EJ,

Very nice, as usual!


Anders

E.J.,
This is excellent.

Great scene. Great picture.

I can see enough detail in the trees to make out texture even at this size. Nice image!

Spectacular!

Hey E.J.,

Obviously a great scene. You've got some killer shots of the Canadian Rockies man.

I have both a comment and a question.

Q -- Can you explain how you used a GND filter here? I can see why you wanted some detail in the trees which required some compensation against the brightly llit mountain peak/sky. However, doesn't that lighten the reflection to the point that it is brighter than the peaks? You haven't blown out the reflection at all. I'm always somewhat uncertain in these situations how to expose/filter the shot.

Critique: I'd like the compostion to be skewed slightly to your right .. I think there is excess negative space on the left as is here. I think this would bring the higher peak closer to a power point (not a big issue) but also leave some more room to follow that wonderful ridge line across the frame. On this composition, my eye tends to exit the frame as it reaches the right hand side.

Cheers

Carl

I used a 2 stop soft graduation filter. I place the filter with the DOF preview button pushed down so I can see exactly what the filter will do at my selected aperture. I select a filter that does not leave the reflection brighter than the primary image. In most cases, the reflection is somewhat attenuated due to the non-perfect reflecting characteristics of the water which gives you a chance to get a filter in there.

If this were a slide film image, I am 100% certain that I would have lost much of the tree detail due to poor exposure range. in that case, I would have used two ND filters, one for the reflection and one for the primary and left the trees in the clear. But with digital and one to two stops more shadow detail, extracting the tree detail is relatively easy.

As for the composition, just to the right, the shoreline comes rapidly toward me from this shooting location so i really couldn't go much farther to the right. Cropping from the left is a possibility though.

Hey E.J.,

Thanks for your prompt reply. I guess you're saying you just kinda filtered for the reflectoin/Peaks, and hope for the best with the tree detail? And when you said 2 filters with slide film, would you place one upside down for the reflection, like a 1-stop soft edge, and a darker filter, upright, for the trees and shoreline?

Thanks again.

Cheers

Carl

Actually you can spot meter the sky through the filter and then the trees through the clear part and as long as you can get it down to about 5 stops different with digital, you will know that you will record enough detail - with film its more like 3 1/2 stops to make sure you still get enough detail. Why so little? well you still need to keep the sky from being white and keep detail in the trees.

Yes, in the situation of needing to get more tree detail while holding both the sky and the reflection in check, I would use a 1 stop on the water and a 3 stop on the sky or whatever combination looks like it will all record. Again digital helps here with the histogram but developing an eye for this sort of thing will make you get it right the first time almost every time.

Thanks E.J.,

I appreciate your time and explanation man.

Cheers

Carl