With my new Flickr account, I have renewed my motivation to browse Explore and some of the new groups I have found to seek out inspiration.  As I was doing this late last night, I came across a photo that led me to recall this image from earlier in the year still sitting on one my hard drives.

It was taken back in May when my life felt a lot simpler then, but I digress. 😉

It was from back when I had time for after-work walks with my wife through the forest preserve that’s a 1/2 mile from our home. I was still testing out my Canon SX110 IS as my everyday point and shoot and decided to bring it along on one particularly gorgeous afternoon stroll. The plan was more for just sparking a little creativity than a more serious landscape shoot.

The Image

At about the turnaround point in the walk, we come to this little walking bridge over the Skokie River that we’ve crossed dozens of times. With the weather being exceptional, I stopped to frame up a shot or two when I noticed the sky’s reflection down in the water below.

Again, this was more for creative capture than any type of a technically sound shot. I didn’t have the right gear for that, nor would I burden my wife with my company on her walk if I was trekking around with my tripod and my camera bag, and stopping for 15 minutes at a time. In fact, this wasn’t even the shot I wanted, but I still like it. Hence, the rest of the story.

What I saw and originally wanted to capture was both the sky above the horizon line and part of it’s reflection in the water. This was back before I heard the phrase “expose for the highlights” hundreds of times or had any practice with HDR. Therefore, and given the time of day, my sky was pretty much blown out, and trying to compensate for the lighting would have lost much of the reflection and detail down below.

So, instead of spending a good 15 minutes messing around with everything in Manual mode, I zoomed in a little tighter and brought down the subject of my image to just be the water itself. Again, not the most technically sound photo because it was handheld, slightly rushed, and my pulse was up because of the walking (probably leading to more camera shake).

But still, instead of just leaving with a few shots with a blown out sky, I’ve got a decent image and a better story to share and keep in mind for the next time the lighting isn’t exactly the way I want it.