A Frozen Lake Tahoe Tree For The #frozenphotocontest

Woohoo! @claudiaz is back at it with more photo contests too! This "frozen" photo is an entry for the latest contest. The frozen photo contest info post can be found HERE

This was one cool morning. Seriously, it was COLD out there. My good friend Tony and I decided to wake up super early to shoot the icy Lake Tahoe shoreline from my kayak, near Sand Harbor. We saw this awesome looking icicle covered tree and hopped off the kayak for some better, closer photos. The windy storm the night before had kicked up a lot of waves that splashed water all over the boulders and trees on the shoreline. It appeared that it was cold enough that the water immediately froze on everything it landed on. The ground and boulders we had to walk on were super slippery but it was worth it.

click to view large

This was shot with a Canon 1DS Mark III and a 24-105mm lens set at 50mm. I usually prefer to use a tripod when shooting landscapes but since there were two of us on the tandem kayak and I wasn't originally planning on getting off the kayak, the tripod was left in the car and this was shot handheld. The shutter speed was 1/200 second, a fairly fast shutter speed so I could get everything tack sharp. The aperture was f10, a mid-range aperture that had enough depth of field to keep the background fairly sharp. And this led to an ISO of 125. A flash was used to light up the tree and ice more. The RAW image was edited in Adobe Photoshop's Camera RAW feature where the shadow and highlights were adjusted, the color was balanced, and the saturation was increased a touch.

As we were paddling on the lake, each drop of water that fell off the paddles and landed on our legs froze instantly. It made for an interesting photography experience and Tony and I were laughing about it. Fortunately, we were both dressed appropriately for the occasion with snow pants so it wasn't a big deal. Here are a couple "selfie" photos from the shoot. These are my ice covered pants and more ice on a boulder:

Here's a little photo of me that Tony shot:

I just noticed I wasn't wearing gloves. Brrr! What was I thinking? These days I have a nice pair of neoprene gloves for kayaking in the winter and I'm sure I'd wear those gloves in these conditions now...

Thank you for looking and reading!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography



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