Sherbrooke Ranges

Being summer, I knew it was less than ideal conditions. Still, I headed down to the Sherbrooke Ranges to check out a boathouse, situated next to a lake in the Alfred Nicholas Gardens. I knew that once the sun was to peak through the clouds that I would face an unbalanced exposure throughout the shot as well as bright reflections. I chose a cloudy/overcast day which gave me the best chances to limit these issues and get a great photo. 

For the shoot, I used a Canon 1dx and Canon 24-70mm 2.8 Mk ii, as well as my Lee Filter kit, which in this instance included the 105mm Circular Polariser, paired with a 0.6 Hard Grad ND filter and 0.9 Soft Grad ND filter. The Polariser helps reduce any reflections and glare off the water, and the graduated ND filters helped balance the exposure between the bright sky and tree tops, and the shaded boathouse below. I could have shot this with a 16-35mm, but that would have left a lot of dead space both below and above the boathouse. Instead, I shot several shots at around 45mm and stitched them together in post production.

Being that there were a slight breeze and no motion to be showed, I wanted to keep the shutter speed to a minimum but had no set speed in mind. Given that I wanted to keep the majority of the shot sharp, I set the aperture to f16 and ISO to 50 to give no noise within the shot. All that said, the light left me shooting with a shutter speed of 4 seconds, which gave some trees movement, which I wasn't fazed about. 

In the end I came up with three images, two panoramic shots from slighty different angles, and a square shot giving a wider sense of the trees above.

This shot comprised of two photos stitched together with the boathouse in the middle of the photo. I had a family of ducks enjoying the day with me which caused the water to ripple. The other shots were taken when the ducks were fluttering around where as this shot was taken after they'd left, giving an almost mirror reflection.

The sun peeked through at one stage and overexposed the banks around the boathouse. This gave me the idea to shoot vertically and eliminate that out of the photo. this also gave a better sense of the large trees surrounding the lake.

This is similar to the first shot. It was a tight area, meaning unfortunately there's not many angles at which to shoot the boathouse. i went a little closer and brought the tree into the left of the picture to help create depth within the photo.