For years, I resisted ever taking a vacation unless it focused on
nothing but SCUBA diving. How things have changed.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Kendra and I decided on a long
weekend up around Lake Tahoe. The cheap lodging and easy access
to several different shooting locations helped play a part in
our decision. Being close to casinos and a multitude of Safeways,
Subways, and Starbucks was an unexpected surprise.
For our first day, we got up at 6am to finish packing and get
to Tahoe by lunch time, thus allowing ourselves plenty of time
to scout out and find Bonsai Rock. It seemed like a good place
to start as the weather forecast called for worsening wind and
potential show showers as the weekend progressed. Stephen Oachs
mentioned something about reflections, and yeah, wind and reflections
don't work so well.
Kendra is the GPS queen, and she loaded up a bunch of spots
for us to check out. As we drove around the lake, she would randomly
tell me how fast I was driving by looking at her GPS. As we passed
Sand Harbor, I knew Bonsai Rock was close and told Kendra to
look out the window for it as it is down a relatively steep incline
from the highway.
"But the GPS says we have four more miles",
she said. "No", I replied, "it's
only about half a mile or so from Sand Harbor". At that
instant, I hear "there it is!" and the GPS
chimes in that we had reached our destination. Funny how four
miles can
be covered in 30 seconds. Good job GPS.
So this is my reflections shot, you won't see many more reflections
from me out of this trip. The weather forecasters were pretty
accurate.
I did pick up a couple new toys before the trip. One being a
Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer. This polarizer is like giving
a drug addict an unlimited supply of funds and making them immune
to the legal system. I rarely took this filter off as it was
a great opportunity to see what it could do. I felt I needed
this little preface in order to help explain
some of the far out and whacky colors that I will be posting
over the next week or two. And if you don't know about the Gold-N-Blue
polarizer by Singh-Ray, read more here.
Nikon D300
Nikkor 12-24mm @ 12mm
15sec @ f14, ISO 100
Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizer
Lee .9 and .6 Soft GND Filters
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