Lost Lake

• Saul Bellow.

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One of the most interesting things about nature photography is seeing nature’s wonders at its best possible lighting. This is one of those images I made of Mt Hood from Lost Lake, framing wise id did nothing just basically pointed the camera at the mountain at shot the image.

The interestingness in this image is the light and I had nothing to do with it other than capture it with a camera and my wife who shot the same image with an iPhone managed to get an exceptionally great picture too, so it’s not about the camera or post processing. It’s all about finding a good view and sticking with it until nature begins the show.

Hope you all like it have a nice day..

• Henry David Thoreau.

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After our Oneonta gorge adventure we had planned on going to Lost Lake to get a better side of Mt hood. But we seriously under estimated how far the location was and how difficult it is to find some locations in Oregon. Finally after hunting through some winding un paved forest roads we reached the lake but could not find a good location with a nice enough view of the mountain.

Finally my wife had enough of all my maniacal driving around and decided to ask a camp employee. Interestingly it was his first day on the job but unlike me he knew what he was doing and directed us to a nice location where we could watch the perfect sunset lighting the mountain in vivid colors. We were in a bit of a hurry reaching this location but had an awesome time shooting and enjoying this great sunset. Hope you all like it..

• Plutarch.

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One of the coolest events that you can see as a landscape photographer is the morning glow on the peak of a mountain. Not being a morning person, I used to completely ignore sunrises when I started in favor of the more comfortably timed sunsets. I reasoned that both are golden hours with warm side-lighting, so I was not missing out on anything by choosing to forego sunrises. That plan lasted until I saw the first light hitting a mountain peak. The first time it happened was in the White Mountains of NH. While it is true that both sunsets and sunrises have warm golden side lighting, it’s a whole different atmosphere during sunrise. Somehow it's quieter, purer and more intimate.

The challenging part for me was to capture the mood and feeling of a mountain sunrise. I struggled quite a bit with the post-processing as well. First, I tried the HDR route and it did not work at all, the images looked artificial ad forced. Then I happened upon an article about Ansel Adams and his processing techniques. It was interesting to learn that Ansel meticulously processed his images, and one of the key elements from the article was that Ansel stayed away from global edit and preferred treating highlights and shadows differently. Until then, I thought the fault was with my photography technique, but I realized the problem was with my editing process. I started watching tons of processing videos online and adjusted my processing workflow to include the usage of luminosity masks. Luminosity masks helped me in isolating my processing for highlights and shadows. And the images started to look better. The last step of the change was to take the images that will work with the processing technique to get the result that I had in my mind. The approach changed from getting a perfectly balanced exposure to getting shots that collected the correct information that’s needed to create the final image. Now, this might seem too mechanical, but the tricky part is picturing the result while you are frantically trying to capture the stunning that lasts a few seconds.

In the next few days, I will be posting images taken a few days apart at various vantage points near Mount Hood. This shot was taken at the perfect moment when the beauty of the light was at its peak. I knew I had to get the details of the very soft light right to get the scene right, so I sacrificed a few shadow details for the final image to work. I could have bracketed the image and made the trees brighter but that would have looked unnatural and distracted from the main subject of the shot.

Just off U.S. Highway 20 in Central Oregon there is a lake with a curious fate. Every winter the aptly-named Lost Lake fills up, before slowly draining through a hole, drying up and making way for a meadow.

The hole has been there as long as anyone can remember, Jude McHugh, spokeswoman with the Willamette National Forest, told The Bulletin. And while the hole may appear to be one of those oddest of mysteries that nobody can quite figure out, the explanation is rather simple. The volcanic landscape of the area gives way to a number of quirky geologic traits – the one responsible for swallowing the lake is a lava tube. The tunnel-like structure is formed when flowing lava hardens near the surface but continues to flow downwards, and the inner lava escapes before hardening. The result, a tube that opens to the surface and leads to the mysterious depths below.

McHugh says it’s unclear exactly where the water goes, but it possibly seeps into the porous subsurface underground, refilling the expansive aquifer that feeds springs on both sides of the Cascades.

The lake is bounded on the east by 4,468-foot (1,362 m) Lost Lake Butte and on the southwest by 4,556-foot (1,389 m) Preachers Peak. The lake is fed by three unnamed intermittent creeks from Lost Lake Butte, and Inlet Creek from Preachers Peak. The lake maintains a very consistent level via an outlet at the north tip, the source of Lake Branch Hood River, a tributary of West Fork Hood River. It is the second-deepest lake in Mount Hood National Forest after Wahtum Lake at 167 feet (51 m).

• Robert M. Pirsig.

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While continuing with the sunrise theme, today's shot was taken just a few minutes after the shot from yesterday’s post. The ambient light got a whole lot brighter with colors getting a lot less vivid. Ambient light change means the shutter speed is a lot faster making the motion in water more pronounced. At this stage, I used a 2-stop ND grad filter to balance the difference in light.

Another important factor for a good sunrise shot is the post-processing. When I started, I used to heavily process my images, trying my best to make HDR images look realistic. Then I got introduced to luminosity masks and it truly changed my post-production workflow. Another change I adopted was to embrace the shadows, HDR processing lightens the dark parts of the image. The shadows and the dark parts of the mage make the bright vibrant colors stand out more.