I was lucky to get out yesterday afternoon for a little 4x4ing and a photo adventure. The plan was to drive down to a spot at Stampede Reservoir (north of Truckee, California a bit) to photograph the Kokanee salmon run using my Canon camera's underwater housing. I've been to this spot and shot there before but this year, the fish seem to be a bit behind schedule. When I finally got there, after a pretty rough drive down the unmaintained dirt road, I was incredibly disappointed as I only found two dead Kokanee and no alive ones. Bummer!
One dead Kokanee Salmon above and one disappointed photographer below.
I was actually at this spot about three weeks ago. A fishing buddy and I approached the area by boat, and then walked rather than by 4x4. We saw that it was still too early then but I thought it would be good to go this time. Wrong.
However, I did see that they put the gate back up across the river. I believe it's fish and game rangers that do this, it stops the Kokanee from going further upstream and allows the rangers to collect eggs from the fish to bring to a fish hatchery. I believe this means I'm not too late, I just need to go back and check the area again in a couple of weeks...
Well, after my failed attempt at some over/under shots of the Kokanee, I walked around a bit to see if I could find a decent scene for sunset. I considered driving back to Donner Lake, a more popular lake, but it was getting too late and I didn't have enough time, so I explored where I was.
The best scene I could find was this patch of red/pink ground cover plant. Not the most interesting foreground but I felt it was the best I was going to find out there.
Luckily, we had a decent sunset and I ended up with this "keeper" shot below. Not my best work but I was happy to redeem myself after a failed fish photo attempt. Stampede Reservoir is hard to see but if you look closely, you can see it in the background. I'm pretty happy with the shot. I doubt it will ever sell as a big print but it is still going to make it onto my website.
Shot with a Canon 5DS R and a 16-35mm lens set at 16mm. Two graduated neutral density filters were used on the front of the lens in order to darken the sky a bit and balance the sky exposure with the foreground exposure. A polarizing filter was also used in order to get a bit more color from the clouds. The ISO was 50 and the aperture was f20. This all let to an exposure time of 13 seconds so a tripod was used.
Thanks for looking and I hope you all had a great weekend!
Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography