Trillium Lake

The photo above was taken on my first trip to Trillium Lake.  I left my house at around 4:45 because I wanted to get there well before sunrise.  I was probably a bit over-eager, since I got there a good hour prior to sunrise.  This is partially why I love going on photography trips like this alone.  I had an hour to soak in the view in front of me.  The stillness of the water, and lack of wind made it feel like a three dimensional painting hung in front of me.  I found this grouping of rocks and carefully framed the mountain reflection in between them.  In order to even out the exposure, I used a two stop Neutral Density Filter on the sky.  This allowed the reflection to be of similar brightness as the actual mountain.  As I finished taking a few photos, I notice some clouds were forming on the left side of the mountain.  I was hoping for a perfectly clear sky, but overall was happy with the photo.

The above photograph was taken about fifteen minutes after the first photo on this post.  As you can see some bright white clouds began collecting on the right side of the picture.  Additionally, I moved my position to exclude the rocks in the foreground.  When I took this photo, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but when I got it home and converted it to black and white I thought it worked very well.  This is actually my favorite photo of Trillium Lake that I’ve take thus far.

This photo was taken about 8 months after the previous two photographs.  Unlike my previous trip to the lake, this time I was met with a parking lot full of photography enthusiasts.  Also, my brother came with me.  Taking pictures has always been something I like to do alone, so it was new for me to have company.  Additionally, their was a lot of wind, causing the reflection to disappear.  I did notice quite a bit of cloud movement.  As a result, I set this shot up with a 10-stop Neutral Density filter, a Graduated 2-stop Neutral Density filter for the sky, and a circular polarizer.  The shutter was held open for about 2 minutes and 10 seconds.  The resulting picture showed some great cloud movement over the mountain.  One drawback was that the wind also caused the tree to move, so the greenery has a soft focus to it.  The water turned out very nice–and almost looks frozen.

As we were packing up to leave for the trip back to Portland, the sky began to light up.  I tried to compose this shot so that there was a bit of green in the foreground, and a softness to the water.  I found a good spot, and set the camera up with an 2-stop Neutral Density filter over sky.  This allowed me to hold the shutter open for 8 seconds.  This was necessary to create the soft look on the water.  I also find that Neutral Density filters tend to bring out a bit of saturation in the final picture, which seemed to work well on the cloud in the sky.    I will be putting up some information in the next few weeks on using Neutral Density filters.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Mountain Landscapes and tagged with B&W, Black & White, Cascades, Classic, Cloud Movement, Color, Mountains, Mt Hood, Neutral Density, Reflection, Scott Matulich, Sunrise, Sunset. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.