I love early mornings. Temperatures are cooler. The air is cleaner and fresher. And, I get a real sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t usually find during any other part of the day.
But, as great as an early morning is, the one thing that makes it even better, at least for me, is an overcast sky. There is just something about an overcast morning that seems to amplify everything I like about early mornings in general.
Making a recent trip to Petit Jean State Park with my wife and dog, everything came together for a great morning. It was early, no people were around (which was good since my dog is not always a people dog), and the sky was cloudy. What more could I have asked for?
Our first stop was Lake Bailey. My wife and dog took off in one direction on some glorious adventure. I headed toward the lake where a light fog had settled over the water. The pre-dawn lighting combined with the cloud cover created a blue tone to the landscape that seemed to add to the quietness and peacefulness of the scene. It was that sense of tranquility I wanted to capture.
I set up my camera and tripod along the edge of the lake. Turning on the camera’s Live View feature (something I very rarely use), I composed the shot. I used the dock as a leading line to draw the eye from the right edge of the frame to the left edge. Adjusting the focal length, I included the tree on the far right being careful to leave a little space between the truck and the edge of the picture.
There were ripples on the surface of the lake, but I wanted to smooth them out by using a long shutter speed, which, with an aperture of f/22 and ISO of 100, was 20 seconds. Normally, I would have been hesitant to use such a long shutter speed because of the potential for any wind to cause something, such as tree leaves, to blur. Fortunately, though, there was no wind, so I took the chance and tripped the shutter.
Even though the sky was overcast, it was still significantly brighter than the tree and lakeshore on the right. I knew that would influence the exposure and cause the tree and lakeshore to be underexposed, but the underexposure was preferable to overexposing the sky. Just to be sure I didn’t overexpose the sky, I reduced the exposure by two-thirds of an f-stop from the meter reading.
In Lightroom, I reduced the highlights and opened up the shadows, added a little bit of clarity, and finished by adding just a touch of vibrance and saturation. I then opened the file in Photoshop where I used Neat Image to reduce digital noise and Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI to sharpen the final image.