Continuing through dawn at one of the Vermilion Lakes

When I arrived at the second Vermilion Lake and scrambled down to the shoreline I was alone and in darkness.  Once I turned off my headlamp my eyes adjusted and a thin line brightening to the east.  Mount Rundle stood resolutely across the water and I started to make out clouds as they slid toward the horizon.

The image above was a 25 second exposure on f/10 and ISO 800 taken at 7:25 AM.  I used that to get a feel for how the scene looked as it was still too dark to make out much of the details and color in the sky with my eyes alone.

I didn’t mind the grass but I chose to focus on the sky and its reflection so a few steps to the right and setting up closer to the waterline was the next step.  The clouds in the image above made a great frame around Rundle and the pre-sunrise colors intensified considerably by the time that I made this photograph at 7:35 AM.

The pre-dawn light’s color faded out before 8 AM.  The lull before the fire came into the sky did not last long and I soon caught the first hints of pink catching in the clouds.  The photograph of Tunnel Mountain, Mount Rundle and Sulphur Mountain above was taken at 8:10 using a 2 second exposure on f/16 at ISO 50.  The light soon caught the clouds hanging low above the mountains in the image below (8:13 AM; 0.8 seconds; f/16; ISO 50).  From there the reds and oranges started to splash across the sky above the Bow Valley.

By 8:16, the pinks had been driven off completely.  Now the trick was to hold the really bright circle of sky left of Mount Rundle (in the centre of the image below – 0.6 seconds; f/16; ISO 50)).  I was exposing off of that circle so that the highlights weren’t completely blown knowing that the RAW file captured by my camera would hold detail in the shadows elsewhere which I could recover in post.

I played with the focal length of several images during the exposure.  This created streaks in the photograph which served as interesting leading lines into the sunrise and Mount Rundle.  I shared my favourite one of these on the weekend (here) and below is another that I really liked as well.  This one has more brightness in the foreground so it has a different feel for me (8:20; 0.5 seconds; f/16; ISO 50).

By 8:20, the fire was waning and only golds and oranges outlined the silhouette of the mountains.  The photograph below being one of the last from my shoot (8:22; 0.3 seconds; f/16; ISO 50).

I jumped into a last frame just before the sun came over Rundle’s flank.   I had wanted to catch a sunstar as it crested the mountain but the clouds got in the middle as can happen.  That exposure was taken at 8:50 AM with a 4 second exposure (f/16 and ISO 100) using a heavy neutral density filter to get the extended shutter speed.  A beautiful morning in one of those places I love returning to again and again.  It’s rare that it doesn’t share a new look, or a few of them, with me each time.