Yesterday sucked. A day earlier, I had received the 2nd COVID vaccine dose and I was starting to feel the effects (initially chills, then fever, aching, and headache) before going to bed and they persisted until the early afternoon.
This morning, I was back to my old-self and it started snowing before dark, so I grabbed my camera, put on the weather-proof lens, and pocketed 2 extra batteries before getting in the car and driving to Green Lakes. I asked Austin if he wanted to accompany me, but he said it was “too cold”, despite only being 30 degrees. He would still be in his flannel pajamas when I’d return 4 hours later.
I was tempted to go to Oxbow Falls to see if I could photograph the tree I had noted a few weeks ago when hiking with Christine, but I wanted to have a chance to photograph more than one subject. I also considered a forest to the south, but I didn’t want to drive that far. So Green Lakes it was.
From the lot, I captured a couple images that work compositionally, but are otherwise boring and unremarkable.
I walked along the western shore of Green Lake and continued west to Round Lake, then North and East to the campgrounds before taking the trail from the campgrounds to the rolling hills section of the park.
Despite my inclination to capture most images in monochrome, there were a few sights that warranted color. The image of the leaves below is sharp where I focused, but the depth of field is insufficient considering the subject matter. If I had a tripod, perhaps I could have done better, but the light was already poor and at 135mm (270mm), I didn’t want to go below 1/50 second and I was already at ISO 800. To get improve the depth of field further, I’d have needed to increase ISO to near 3200, which is too high for my camera considering the post-processing software available to me.
The water on Green Lake was relatively calm, but not glass-like.
After unsuccessfully trying to capture an image near the pines west of the campground, I tried my hand again at arranging a composition around a tree that has always gotten the better of me. Today, I was happy with the composition as I saw it today. I am not sure why it has evaded me until now, but I have always wanted to center it in the frame … until this morning.
As I approached the rolling hills, on my way to see what my favorite tree looked like, I saw another tree along a hedgerow that caught my eye for the first time. I am pretty sure that I will never have another occasion to shoot it from this perspective: I had to walk through waist-high reeds/grasses and prickers for approximately 200 feet, and I will NOT do that when the bugs are out.
I then continued on my way and circled the tree at the top of the hill, but there wasn’t anything there to photograph that was better than anything else that I have captured there in the past.
For the first time in a long while, I elected to make an effort to get everything as I wanted it in camera and all the images here are JPEGs straight out of camera. I still have the RAW files for archival purposes, but I purposefully composed and captured the images in camera as I would hope to see them out of darktable. As the colors today were a bit desaturated, I captured all color images with the “Vivid” setting while the monochrome images were captured with the “ART5 – Grainy Film” setting with shadows +4/Highlights-4. Frankly, I think I would likely try to max-out both the shadows/highlights at +7/-7 next time I am out because the setting is very contrasty. I could also shoot without the grain, but I like it … even if it doesn’t look “film-like”.