5.3. How Can I Get the Best Shot?

By taking your time on the hike and then exploring the shoreline, you can get some interesting views of Dog Lake. Bringing along the right equipment as well as adjusting your settings for the location will enable you to get the images you want.

5.3.1. Equipment

You have to make the hike to Dog Lake carrying your equipment uphill, so to keep your load light, just carry your wide-angle lens, some filters, and your tripod.

5.3.1.1. Lenses

From the southwest shore, a wide-angle lens in the 16-28mm range will work the best to give you a strong foreground element using the grasses or logs in the left foreground and showing the curve of the lake in the background. If you want to use the peninsula as the foreground element, use a midrange zoom of 35-105mm.

5.3.1.2. Filters

A polarizing filter reduces the glare off the surface of the lake, allowing you to see below the surface of the water and to use the grasses as a stronger foreground element. If you go early in the morning or later in the afternoon, the polarizing filter will also darken the sky and emphasize any clouds that may appear. Using the filter also helps add some contrast and gives more depth to your image.

5.3.1.3. Extras

As always, besides a lens, a tripod is the accessory that helps to improve your images more than any other. In this case, if you want to have everything sharp from the foreground grasses to the distant mountains, you need to use a small aperture to ensure the greatest amount of depth of field. Because you are using a small aperture in this image, you will have slower shutter speeds, so the tripod will ensure a nice sharp image (see figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1. Getting low in the grasses along the shore of Dog Lake on a summer morning. Taken at ISO 100, f/13, 1/125 second with a 17mm lens.

5.3.2. Camera settings

For this image, getting an extreme amount of depth of field to ensure sharpness from your foreground to your background is the most important factor to consider when deciding on exposure settings.

• ISO. Using the native ISO of your camera always gives you the best image. If you are using a tripod, it will not be difficult to use this native ISO. If you are handholding the camera, you may want to boost the ISO to 400 or higher so that you use a smaller aperture to ensure enough depth of field and still have a fast enough shutter speed to be steady.

• Exposure mode. Since depth of field is the foremost concern, using Aperture Priority mode, where you set the aperture and the camera sets the shutter speed, would be the best choice. Choosing apertures in the f/11 to f/22 range will give you good depth of field and allow you to have sharp images throughout. To maximize depth of field, focus about one-third of the way into the scene and allow the small aperture to extend the focus from front to back.

• Exposure compensation. If your camera light meter reads the whole scene, you should not need any exposure compensation.

• White balance. Daylight white balance should work well for most images taken of this subject. But you are at a high elevation, and there can be an excess of blue light. If your images look too blue on the LCD, use a white balance of Cloudy or Shade to warm up your image.

5.3.3. Exposure

Dog Lake is a forgiving subject. You can photograph here under lots of conditions.

5.3.3.1. Ideal time to shoot

Dog Lake is one location that you can photograph at any time of day. I recommend either photographing from approximately 9:30 a.m. to 11: 30 a.m. or 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. At these times, the sun is off center, which allows you to have better contrast throughout the image. Also, shadows appear in the forested areas adding some depth to the image.

5.3.3.2. Working around the weather

The great photographer, Ansel Adams, called skies that were completely clear of clouds "bald-headed skies." Summers in the Sierras can often produce such skies, which can make for a dull and uninteresting shot, because you can't take advantage of capturing the clouds' reflections off the lake. However, if you are photographing on a particularly clear and cloudless day, you may want to try using a polarizing filter that will help darken the sky and add some contrast and interest to your photos.

5.3.3.3. Low-light and night options

With today's digital cameras, taking photographs in a very low-light situation is easy. If you want to photograph the night stars reflected in Dog Lake, you need a tripod, a cable release, and a camera with ISO settings of 1000 or higher. Open your wide-angle lens as wide as it goes (f/2.8, f/3.5, and so on) and set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, if you want to shoot the stars as points of light, and adjust the ISO to give you the correct exposure. If you want to shoot star trails reflected in the lake, then you want to set the camera to a Bulb setting (on the shutter speed) and use exposures of 5 to 30 minutes (or longer if you want very long streaks). Because you will be exposing so much, longer ISOs of 100 to 400 will work. And because you are facing mostly north at this location, you can locate the North Star — the star trails will all create circles around this star!

5.3.3.4. Getting creative

Using a wide-angle lens and getting low and close to either some grasses or logs as a foreground element and really emphasizing this element is one way to get creative in this location. Another idea would be to use a focal length, such as 65-80mm, and take a series of vertical images that you can stitch together into a panoramic view of the lake. Most cameras come with software for creating panoramic images and some cameras even have a Panoramic mode built in. If you do this technique, make sure you overlap your images by one-third so that the software has an easier time stitching them together. The reason that you want to use the longer lens in a vertical mode for panoramic images is to keep the subject from getting too small in the picture and to look more like the way your eye sees the scene.