Sunset Lake

The lake remains a fertile ground for landscape photography

Sunset Lake has a trail with seven prayer benches, each with a unique view of the forest. (The lake is located in the foothills around Mt. Rainier, and is operated as a religious campground with some limited permanent housing for guests, a cafeteria, and many acres of beautiful natural environment.)

The scenery along the trail is ideal for personal reflection. You won’t find the big and dramatic; you’ll find small things that are beautiful, with rhythmic relationships among the natural elements. Perfect for contemplation.

This view, between benches along an early part of the trail, had perfect lighting when I went by with my camera. Everything seems to come together here: lighting, texture, stately and oddball shapes, and so on. Lots to ponder.

Shot with the 47mm Schneider Super-Angulon (medium format) lens. It’s a tricky lens, technically: capable of really amazing results, but it has to be babied in almost every respect. It is a good, sharp lens, however, and worth the time it takes get to get a shot set up properly.

The lens has a technical weak spot; it allows “veiling flare” to occur if the source of light (e.g., sun) is forward of the lens—even when it is well off to the side as here. The bad news is that it can wash out color. But the good news is that it can create fantastic 3D feel in an image: the bright parts are little brighter, the shadowed areas are emphasized, as here. The trick is to avoid too much light, or light in the wrong places. I do that by shading the front of the lens in just the right way. Sometimes with my hand, as here; sometimes with a lens hood, or a “compendium,” a word (and a thing) from the days of 4x5 film photography. The haze gives the space recorded by the camera a distinct shape and feel.

This ability to tune a shot (some would say, bring the shot back from the brink of ruin!) is one of the things I love about medium- and large-format photography. It’s not so much a point-and-shoot operation; it’s more like painting in that one gets a chance to not only compose the image, but to manage how the light gets recorded on the “canvass”.