Not really a lake as such, those thinking it is Buttermere in the middle of West Yorkshire may be disappointed, but it’s still quite nice to stroll around. Anyway Pugney’s sailing club in Wakefield is usually where I go if I need a reflected sky shot and as it’s only a few miles from where I live I can get there quickly if the sky looks interesting. There are actually quite a few swans there as well so it has a lot of potential, photographically. When I was setting this shot up a lone swan came close to the rock in the shot (about 3 feet away) but my shutter speed at the time was too slow to freeze the movement but if I’d have been a bit quicker it would have been award winning, it’s I’d have been even quicker I’d have used my new gold reflector, that was quite close by, to light the swan up. In fact I’m going to go back and try for that exact shot very soon.

Anyway back to the (swan-less) image. Shots like this always work well low to the water so you generally get a bit wet, your tripod and camera strap usually get dunked too but as long as you can keep the camera safe no harm is done. This one needed a little foreground inerest, the previously mentioned swan would have been great but a rock would suffice. This was taken at 20mm, f/8, ISO500 for 30 Seconds. Yes it was a long exposure, I have ordered a more accurately colour balanced 10 stop filter from Lee which I will hopefully soon have but the HiTech version worked fine, once the magenta was removed in lightroom. There is a little lens flare coming from the centre of the image but I quite liked it in this version so I kept it in. The sky in the end didn’t go as red and impressive as I’d planned and the swan didn’t stick around but next time maybe…

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