Shoot While You Can!!

This image looks so calm and serene, doesn’t it? Well I shot it at Donner Lake, California, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains – and it WAS serene – at that moment. And that’s my very short and pithy point today… if you go out seeking sunset on a sketchy weather day, shoot while you can! Especially if you’re ever in the mountains or anywhere that weather conditions are in “quick change mode”.

Because within 30-40 minutes of the photo you see above… this is what I saw looking at the exact same scene:

That’s taken from a video I’m making for The Arcanum about this very topic. In it, I also walk through my processing on one of the photos I took that day before the whiteout. heh. But you see… I DID have several photos to process because I didn’t wait till everything was “perfect”. Thank goodness!

I’m a big believer in grabbing the shot when you can. When it comes to sunsets, we sunset lovers like to set up ahead of time so we’re ready when the big action happens. But if it DOESN’T happen for some reason (like the big snow-raser from the sky comes down and obliterates your scene), then at least you’ll walk home with SOMEthing to work with.

For the record, this is one of the Raw images from the finished photo (since I was shooting into the sun, I used HDR to capture the details I wanted):

As you may know by now, I loves processing… and don’t mind making the scene that looks exactly the way I want it to.

So there you have it.
Shoot while you can…
Have fun with processing.

Short.
Simple.
Pithy.

Grin.