Sunset Lake Ice

It's been cold, cold enough to freeze some of the smaller lakes.

Sometimes you get the good shot; sometimes it’s there but you never see it. I got lucky on this one.

We’ve had a few windy days, but it was calm today so I decided to take my big camera up to Sunset Lake; I like to photograph the reflections off of the lake on calm days. Except it’s been really cold, and the lake was solidly frozen over. You can see a lot of broken ice on the surface in the shot above—that’s the local kids throwing ice chunks onto the frozen surface to hear the crazy ringing sound you get off a huge sheet of ice.

That tall, bent tree, plus those clouds, though: that was the shot, and when the clouds moved away from my original target, I quickly reset the camera at a new location to get the shot you see above.

My original choice of shot was to catch the last rays of the sun on the lake, and ti clearly shows the patterns etched into the ice by the recent heavy winds.

I love going up to the lake; it’s so quiet and full of amazing views. The 35mm lens I used today gives a very wide view on the medium format camera. I have had a lot of trouble with the lens; it’s so wide and any bright light, even just a bright sky as here, would cause veiling flare (which washes out the image). I put together a series of adapters to create a modest lens shield, and it worked pretty well.

I did get some reflections off the ice, which turned out to be sweet in its own way. Might have to wait a while to get reflections off the water again…