I spent a few hours recently shooting sunset reflections in water at the Mystic Lakes. This is a wider shot of the sunset scene on the Upper Mystic Lake a bit over a week ago. I basically put on a telephoto lens and shot close-ups of those pools of water in the foreground of this picture.

 

 

I had a few technical problems. That's why you have to go out and do this stuff. Practice, you know.

 

The last time I really concentrated on taking reflected color photos like this it was in the fall and I was going for tree reflections on streams. Ice is a totally different dynamic.

 

For one, although I use a tripod on both situations, I found that the ice really moved around a lot and rendered the tripod much less effective than I had expected. I wasn't really trying to pull in my exposure times - I was shooting for composition and depth of field. I should have been trying to keep the exposure times under 1/4 s or so. Even that is not fast enough, depending on what's going on. There was a constant oscillation on the ice, presumably due to it being moved around by the wind. And so the ice was rising and falling and you should time the peak or trough to get the steadiest exposure. But the actual picture changes dramatically depending on whether the ice is up (and standing water is not) or down (with standing water pooled up on top).