Winters Trails

Sometimes I get these great ideas, or what I think they are great ideas anyway. The plan was to come up to this part of the Shasta wilderness and connect with a specific lake, hopefully to get some cool reflections and views of Shasta in the snow! Well as some of you might know that spend time in the snow... what happens to lakes when it's cold and snowy outside is that they freeze over, and get covered with snow. Sometimes this is interesting, but in this case, the lakes just looked like vast flat expanses of snow. However, climbing up high, we were able to get above a fog layer hanging over the city that night, and the milky way stretched over the city of Shasta horizontally illuminated well because the light pollution from the city was masked by the fog layer. I took two exposures, one long to smooth out the fog, and capture the foreground details, and another short to capture the sharp stars. During the process I realized that letting the star trails bleed through a little bit made for a more interesting photograph.

Done