people places n things
Perfect
Perhaps there are more pictures in my various galleries captured at Clove Lakes Park than any other single venue. The park is close to my house and I've become familiar with her offerings and moods from January to December. Of the many things I've tried capturing here over the span of the last 25 years, despite all logic, it has been either of the pair of foot bridges that lay in between two of the three lakes that has proved to be the most vexing challenge for me.
Cloves Lakes is a fairly large park (length wise at least). Clove lake, the first of the three lakes, lies off of Clove road. It sends water flowing over a fall at the southern tip of that lake. The falls feeds a stream that flows into the second lake, Martling lake, that ends in front of Martling ave. In between these two lakes are a pair of foot bridges that allow you to cross the brook at different locations. Numerous times I've tried capturing either one of them, mostly in the fall, but for various reasons, always without the success I was hoping for. Occasionally the results we're actually brutal.
My first attempt can be seen near the beginning of my scenic gallery, taken over 25 years ago. Lack of detail and excessive grain thwarted me that time, as back in those days film was not as light sensitive as digital sensors are now, and I had to use a high speed film in order to get a shutter speed high enough to freeze the leaves moving in the breeze, at an f-stop small enough to give me adequate depth of field. The shortcomings of ectachrome 200 to handle such a demanding task created my first disappointment. But the scene itself was very nice, save for a dull sky I later punched up a little while converting it to digital. The overall pleasantness of the shot made me determined to try and get a better capture of one of them now that digital equipment would allow me to get better results. And thus started my near decade of aggravation.
Some years it was due to graffiti on the bridges. Sometimes lighting conditions, and more often than not, my own failures to properly compose the scene. All the attempts were so bad that I never added a single one to my galleries.
However there is something to be said for persistence. So if anything nearly a decade of coming here each fall had provided me with, it was a very thorough dossier of what to do if you want this charming autumn scene to turn out like crap. Little did I realize that knowledge was going to have a positive flip side in the end. As I came upon the bridge on this lovely fall day in 2015, instead my head being filled with thoughts of "What new ways will this scene find to disappoint me?", my head had a clear check off list of things I did and didn't want in the scene. While such a list was more or less present many times before this, the utter surety of everything on the list was a new twist.
Instead of my customary search for the right spot, I went right to the one location for my camera that was superior to any other. I was confident choosing this spot was never one of the reasons I failed in the past and that this spot and angle was indeed perfect. I immediately chose the correct height for my tripod, having eliminated all the prior heights over the years that were too high or too low. When my camera was high enough to see the reflections off the water to the right of the bridge I knew my height was perfect.
Way too often in the past this scene was too flat and dull. But the sunlight shining on the trees in the background helped provide pop. And when a break in the clouds sent a shaft of warm light onto the bridge, I knew it was the long missing element that would lift this scene to perfection. So I made sure to have all the equipment set up and proper exposure set for the next break of sunlight just in case it was the last one falling on the bridge that I was going to get with this lighting. When the shaft of light came back I took my shots of the bridge and moved on.
After returning home I edited this shot in Nik software and sent it out to a bunch of my friends. One of them was my friend and former high school roommate Michael. He's my photographic mentor, and it was his knowledge of photography that inspired me to try my hand at it so very long ago. Often when I include him on the list of people I send my shots out to he writes back with useful suggestions I could have tried that would have improved the image. This time he sent back a one word reply - "perfect".
