343 - Klondike Park

I'm back at it again. And it's been a ROUGH couple of weeks.

Transitioning from moving from the Prius into Haley's van has been a nightmare. It needed about a million and one unexpected repairs before moving in, so I basically just lived at Haley's parents house while it was being fixed. I loved hanging out with them, but after two weeks and 15+ bug bites later, it got old. Especially after I found a tick buried up my ass.

So to get out of the house for a bit, we decided to have a quickie shoot at this local lake that Haley knew about. And I'm going to be 100% honest with this location... I wasn't expecting to get any type of good photo.

I should also mention I finally got a legit wide angle lens, the Tamron 17-28mm 2.8. And by legit I mean it is actually decently sharp and has auto-focus, unlike the Laowa 10-18mm lens I had before, which was my only wide setup and featured a 100% manual focus system. Cool, but not very practical for focus stacking or any type of printed high quality image. So the point of this shoot was to test out the new Tamron a bit, and get some must needed fresh air.

We show up to this place and it was basically a typical Missouri lake. Low trees, fuck tons of bugs, and water that looked questionable to swim in. Except for one crazy feature... The entire grounds surrounding it were covered in white sand/clay. AKA why it's called Klondike Park.

It was actually really fucking cool once I got a feel for it.

We walked around the lake for a bit and I played with the lens. Shot here, shot there. Nothing too crazy. What I REALLY wanted to get was a foreground/background type of shot. So I was on the lookout for some type of strange foreground plant.

Eventually I stumbled upon this one twisted tree root... And it was alright. The foreground was cool, and the sky lighting was dope, but the backdrop tree just didn't feel very "magnificent." Hard to find "magnificent" in the mid-west though. There's a strong possibility I could just be spoiled by Colorado's mountain landscape. So I took the shot anyway.

And we went home, did our thing, and I ignored the photos for the next week or so.

I even SKIPPED these photos to edit the next shoot, Wind Cave, because I was so convinced these photos were utter trash. But then, on one boring ass afternoon, I decided to open em' up and mess around a bit.

Well... I spent some time editing the tree photo and it came out dope once I got it into the Photoshop engine. Like I said- I didn't expect that at all. It's crazy how some photos NEED Photoshop to look good... Else they just look like a pile of shit.

Here's the shot, in all it's Photoshop luminosity mask glory...

“What Would You Do?”

[1/200s ~ f/6.3 ~ 17mm ~ ISO 4000]

Sony a7rIII + Tamron 17-28mm 2.8

(Want a Print? Get one here.)

In retrospect, I probably didn't need my ISO at 4k if I reduced my shutter and actually brought a tripod. But I didn't, so I'm dealing with it. Honestly, grain doesn't even really matter unless you're a photography nerd. Normal people don't even know what that shit is.

Overall, awesome shoot and I had a great time getting out for a bit. Moving into Haley's van soon. LET'S GO!!!

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I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.

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