Reflections

There is something truly magical about reflections.  We encounter them every day and yet when I see one in a landscape it still captures me.  I'm not sure if it is the symmetry or added depth that I like.  Add a sunset plus a reflection and you end up with something striking. 

Getting the perfect reflection in water can be very difficult as the water has to be ridiculously smooth.  The slightest disturbance can distort the image and take away from the effect.  Now this isn't always the case.  Some reflections look perfectly good even with some distortion. 

Our last trip to Gull Lake afforded me with an excellent chance to get a nice reflection with sunset.  After a few days of sitting on the dock only to have the clouds disappear or drop to the horizon I finally got a night where everything lined up just right.  The image below is a three panel stitched panoramic.  In reality since each panel was a nine frame HDR the image is composed of 27 different exposures.  I decided to use HDR for this because I really wanted to get some of the detail in the shore across the bay.  You can get a perfectly good sunset by underexposing the image slightly.  That gives you the rich colors in the sky while the foreground elements are usually in deeper shadow.   For this particular scene I wanted to try to preserve the image as I saw it while sitting on the dock with Mom.

I should add a big thanks to Mom for being a constant source of support and a frequent shooting companion.

As always prints are available here as well as the image in full resolution where  you can see much more detail.