Marie Louise Lake Nightscape

[Andrew McLachlan]

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This image was created back in September during my trip along the north shore of Lake Superior. This trip took me as far as Sleeping Giant Provincial Park near Thunder Bay, Ontario. I spent two nights at the Marie Louise Lake campground and was really hoping for some northern light imagery but each night was relatively clear full too much moonlight. I did experiment with some nightscape imagery nonetheless and created this scene using a long exposure to blur the moving cloud formation yet retain the pin points of light from the stars above. I was playing around with Nik's Silver Effects yesterday for some B&W conversions and came up with this conversion for this scene.

Nikon D800
Nikon 18-35mm lens @ 18mm
ISO 2500
f3.5 @ 25 seconds

Looking forward to comments and suggestions.

[Jonathan Ashton]

I like it, I too have been messing about with Nik Silver - I need to be a bit better before I post!
The radiating/movement appearance of the clouds draws my eyes into further inspection, the myriad stars captures my imagination, I reckon this must have been pretty special to have been there. I think the hint of detail in the far shore is important, a silhouette would have been far less interesting.
Is that a shooting star or meteor top left?
Just for curiosity I would be interested to see the colour version if possible.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Andrew- It's always good to experiment and I like the moving clouds. I just feel there's not enough tonal contrast. I would love to see the sky a more inky black with the clouds and bright stars against it.

TFS,
Rachel

[Morkel Erasmus]

Andrew this looks nice - I do agree that it needs more tonal range and Rachel made a good suggestion to make the sky darker.
I'd also like to see the colour? Moving clouds add a nice element to these kinds of shots. Will post one of my own from Namibia now...

[Adhika Lie]

Very interesting shot, Andrew. It reminds me a lot with your sunrise (or was it sunset) picture with symmetrical clouds from the reflection. Was it from the same place? I am fine with the tone in the sky as it is, but I want to tone down the highlights at the mountain ridge a little bit.

[Andrew McLachlan]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions folks...I will share the colour version in a separate post soon.