September 15, 2014
Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

Moraine Lake is one of my favorite locations in Banff National Park. I had spent five mornings at the lake on this recent visit hoping to create a great image with epic clouds and color. On two mornings there were decent clouds but not very exciting color, and on the other three mornings neither were very interesting. On the sixth morning the conditions were so bad that I made a nice image. That's right, terrible conditions got me out of the rut of trying to make a preconceived image and I was able to work with the conditions. When I arrived, there was a thin layer of clouds in the bowl above the lake, and I was hoping that they would coalesce against the mountains at about the time when the higher clouds developed fantastic color. Instead, the low clouds kept thickening and spreading, and pretty soon I couldn't see the far side of the lake. That's when I saw the possibility of working with the fog and made this image.

The next morning at Moraine Lake, the clouds weren't terribly interesting and there was no color. Plus it was breezy enough that the lake was choppy most of the time and there wasn't much of a reflection. The clouds were moving across the frame, so I used a 10-stop solid neutral density filter and a 3-stop solid neutral density filter to lengthen the exposure to blur the clouds and smooth out the choppy water. I also used a 3-stop soft graduated neutral density filter to balance the dark foreground and bright sky. For such a long exposure, and in general where significant parts of the scene change between the beginning and end of the exposure, exposure bracketing to blend images later isn't very useful.