Photo: Crater Lake Sunrise

Crater Lake Sunrise

Copyright Laura A Knauth, All rights reserved.  
Please contact me for any usage or licensing options.

Location
Discovery Point in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. 

I can only imagine what it must have been like for someone to climb over the rim of the crater and see this view without knowing what was here. :)  The plaque marking the discovery of Crater Lake is on the far right of the image. Wizard Island is a volcanic cinder cone poking out of the lake on the left.

Even thought the morning was freezing cold, there is something so warming and revitalizing about watching the sun rise from the frozen darkness. This was my first snowshoeing experience in recent memory, and it definitely is an unusual experience to clamp on snowshoes in the wind and darkness and then walk through the forest for an hour or so to reach this point. Well worth the effort though! What a beautiful location.

Technical Information
I took this image in three panels. The six stop neutral density filter added to the rich warm colors this morning. In order to help balance the sky with the ground, I also used a 3-stop reverse neutral density filter. Even though I have a filter holder, I find it too cumbersome to use when I'm playing with different filters while the lighting is changing so quickly. I invested in the largest size of the Singh Ray filters so I could hand hold it and have some margin of error. (These filters are also usually available through Adorama, B&H Photo, or Amazon as well.)

I line up the darkest band of the filter over the horizon and then shake the filter over the duration of the exposure to even out the effect. I find it helps tremendously for sunrise shots to capture the sky detail along with the foreground in the same image (otherwise, my camera is not able to preserve the sky information at the horizon due to the extreme lighting conditions).

I combine this hand-held filter technique with the 'Live View' mode of my camera to ensure the filter position is aligned properly. Before using this technique, my use of hand held filters was very hit or miss (you could see the edges of the filter or bad reflections). A downside is that Live View uses up a lot of battery juice, but I find the time savings in the field well worthwhile. One other caveat of hand holding is that your fingers can get pretty cold on days like this. ;p

Canon 50d 
Tokina Lens 11-16mm, 11mm 
f/13, 4s, ISO 100

Filters: 
6-stop ND filter + 
3stop Rev ND Grad

Thanks for stopping by my blog!

by Laura A Knauth