On Sunday I drove out to the Ghost Reservoir to photograph a friend of mine and his ice sailing boat as he prepared for an upcoming project of his own. Stefan Dalberg is the real-deal when it comes to adventure and living. Stef is passionate about a lot of things including speed and putting 100% into whatever he does. It's never dull watching him rip it up on the ice at the Ghost and it always gives me something great to shoot.
I'm just coming off of holidays down on the island where I had to force myself to slow down so this may be the reason my brain hadn't come back up to speed yet. I had envisioned some big production lighting set-up for a sunset shoot with Stef and the boat but when I drug all my gear out on to the ice, the conditions had changed quite a lot. After a few test shots I realized that without some good over head clouds, my sunset would be quick and fairly undramatic.
The sun started to dip below a band of storm clouds on the Foothills to the West and Stef was now blasting by me on every run. I try not to limit my vision too much when on location as even with a great plan, there is always something serendipitous that could happen if you keep your mind open and keep looking around. I noticed the smokey band of high cloud in the sky was glowing and dropping my exposure by a stop, I was able to pull a lot of detail out of the sky and the ice while the boat was on my up-wind side.
It's important for me to put a lot of pre-production and planning into a session but part of that is leaving room for "something magic" to happen. Especially now that I am using the 5D Mark III I am able to get closer to my ideas and even when creating on the fly, capture more of what I see before it quickly disappears.
