Picture Lake

There are some things that you just have to do, things that you know everyone does but that you end up doing anyway. For me, this involved a trip to Picture Lake at sunset last night. I was one of three photographers present, which is rather rare - much more often, I don't see anyone else with a camera on my travels.

I realized that I'm not really quite good enough to do the whole Mt-Shuksan-reflected-in-the-lake thing, at least in a way that doesn't look flat and conventional. So instead of straight shots of the lake, I tried other perspectives. The first one was actually the last I took; as you can see from the angle of sunlight on the mountain, it was just before sunset. I thought about using a narrow aperture to get everything in focus, but I decided that something wider (f/5.6) was in order. I made this decision because I wanted to isolate the two flowers and draw attention to them. I think it reinforces a feeling of scale, in this case, with the sharper flowers feeling close and the out-of-focus mountain feeling large and distant.

This one's a bit abstract, but I think it actually works. I zoomed in to the face of Mount Shuksan as late evening light was hitting it. I liked the color of the light and the shadows; I think that putting trees in the foreground creates a sense of scale (Galen Rowell called this sort of thing "visual sea level"). The diagonal lines of the rock faces help unify the composition, and contrast with the vertical lines of the forest.

The final one is probably the least impressive of the bunch, but I still think it's a nice composition; the forked tree in the foreground stands out well. This particular image needs some color work; the actual light falling on the mountains was much warmer, more akin to the color in the images above.