Sometimes you just know...

All afternoon and early evening I had a feeling that I needed to get out on the water tonight. It had been cloudy all day so I was watching for some break in the clouds. I finally went down to the marina about 20 minutes before the sun set. A nice bank of clouds was hiding the sun. I was hoping to get some nice reflections in the water, but it ended up not working out so well for reflections, but the silhouette of land mass against the sky with cloud bank made a great composition so I concentrated on that. I am excited about what I came back with. The nice thing about shooting digital is that I can get a feel for whether my motion technique is working in a particular situation, and then fine-tune what I am doing to get a better result. If I was still shooting film, it would be more hit or miss. Tonight, I shot over 350 photos and narrowed the results down to these 5 as the most promising ones.

Another beautiful evening on the water

Well, this seems to be an extension of the previous post. Different evening, different results. Another very quiet evening because there was no wind, and the only waves and ripples were the ones we created as we drove slowly around. Mary drove this time so I could photograph. I love the more abstract images. Of course I took a few minutes off from shooting to get in the water. Lovely!

Beautiful night on the lake

What can I say, I love being on the water. Tonight, it was just me on the pontoon boat. There was only one other boat out on the lake. Very peaceful. I found a quiet cove where the water was fairly smooth and set the steering wheel so the boat went around in circles, while I sat on the back and took pictures. Then I stopped the boat, sat down on the bow and kicked my feet in the water to make ripples. Is it cheating to make my own waves so I can get more interesting reflections of the sky in the water? I don't think so.

Carnival

Every year, Parkville has a carnival during the week leading up to July 4th. A few years ago I went to the carnival one night and tried some motion photos. Then I missed it for a couple of years. This year I really wanted to try it again. One ride had the best combination of lights and motion and I kept coming back to it. I think the young man operating the ride got kind of spooked because I kept standing there taking lots of pictures. I'm sure he thought I was taking pictures of him, but he's not in any of them.

Rain had to go somewhere

In late April we had a lot of rain. Rain has to go somewhere. Here it goes into Riss Lake, and the overflow feeds a creek that then goes down a series of waterfalls in the Parkville Nature Sanctuary. Normally the flow is moderate, and late in the summer it slows to a trickle. But after several days of heavy rain, WOW the lake level was high, the creek was out of its banks and the waterfalls were amazing. Felt like being in the mountains during spring snow-melt.

I took many photographs, some of which are normal "hold the camera as steady as you can" but still using a long shutter speed to get the nice blur on the water. On some, I also added some of my normal vertical movement, and on these you can see the vertical camera movement interacting with the horizontal movement of the rushing water. Kind of cool!