San Luis Lake

• e. e. cummings.

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While on our road trip through Colorado, we decided to stretch ourselves a bit and visit the stunning Great Sand Dunes National Park. We could only spare an afternoon for this beautiful piece of the desert but wanted to scope it out in case of a future visit. En route to the park, we came across the signs to the San Luis State Wildlife Area. Since we had ample time left for sunset, we decided to do a quick stop and see if there are any interesting birds around. We struck out in terms of Birds but got to see the lake in its full capacity, which is unusual for this time of the year.

While we were walking around the park, I noticed an unusual cloud formation on top of the lake. Looked like a lenticular cloud formation, but those usually form on top of mountain peaks, so I am not sure about the name of these types of clouds. We looked around for a suitable element to place as the main subject and finally found this tuft of long grass growing in the lake. I used a Lee Big Stopper to slow down the shutter speed a bit. Unfortunately, the filter rendered this image with a very strong blue color cast. No amount of post-processing could save the image, so I wrote it off as a lesson learned. Recently while I was on baby duty, I thought it would be fun to go through images that I could give the black and white treatment, and the result impressed me enough to post here. This also emphasizes the importance of going through your old shots; not only does it help to learn from the mistakes that you made but the practice also helps unearth forgotten gems.