Lake Bailey Sunrise

On Memorial Day, I decided to make an early morning trip to Petit Jean State Park. My intention was to visit the rock formation known as Turtle Rocks and photograph the abstract patterns in the formation.  In fact, getting to the park before sunrise wasn’t even a priority.  If I got there right at or just after sunrise, that was fine with me because the sidelighting provided by the early morning light would be perfect for the type of images I was trying to make.

When I arrived in the park, the sky had brightened considerably, but the sun had not yet broken the horizon. I decided to make a quick stop at Lake Bailey to see what might catch my eye.  Walking along the bank, I was struck by how calm the water was – mirror smooth with not a ripple in sight.  I noticed some geese swimming through the water and immediately thought how nice it would be to photograph the geese as they paddled across the lake with the sunrise in the background.  I quickly began to set up my camera.  However, something spooked the geese, and they immediately took flight.  They were gone in an instant leaving me with nothing but disappointment and a memory.

I looked around and noticed the fishing dock. I moved to a location in which I could not only get a shot of the dock as it jutted out into the lake but also include some of the lakeshore.  By the time I found the spot I wanted to shoot from, the sun was just beginning to peek from behind the trees at the far end of the lake. 

I waited a few more minutes for the sun to finally rise completely above the tree line. While I waited, I considered my biggest challenge:  exposure.  Including the sun in the frame would cause the entire photograph to be underexposed, which was not the outcome I desired.  Trying to expose for the foreground would overexpose the sky, which, again, was not a result I was looking for.

The only option to capture detail in both the bright sky and the darker foreground was to use the HDR technique. Once the sun rose above the far line of trees, I shot a series of frames, in one-stop increments, from 3 stops underexposed to 3 stops overexposed for a total of seven shots.  Using Lightroom’s “Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop” command, I merged all seven frames into a single image, made additional adjustments to the combined image, and ended with a photograph which is properly exposed throughout the frame.

When I look at this photograph, I feel a sense of quietness and serenity, and that was exactly the sort of feeling I had as I stood there. While there didn’t appear to be an open spot in the park’s camping areas, there was no one out and about yet when I took this picture.  It truly was a very peaceful moment.

Settings:  24mm,  f/22, ISO400