Just about every spring, I make the little 4x4 drive out to Sagehen Meadows. It is my favorite meadow in the Tahoe area, a little bit north of Truckee, California where I live. I decided to scout it out yesterday and see how things are looking, and to my surprise, the Camas wildflowers are already blooming! It's still a bit early in their short season, hopefully the meadow will fill in bit more as there have been some years where it is a solid blanket of purple and it almost looks like a purple lake from a distance.
I found this one area in the meadow that had quite a few early bloomers and I thought it made for a nice subject matter. My daytime shots were alright, but I decided to stick around until sunset because the clouds were starting to look like they had potential to fire off with color. I was right!!! Sunset was an incredibly beautiful one, even though the SkyFire app was calling for a dud sunset. The photo I got was totally worth sitting around collecting mosquito bites...
"Sagehen Meadows at Sunset 10"
Shot with a Canon 5DS R and a 24-105mm lens. Two graduated neutral density filters were used on the front of the lens in order to darken the sky a bit and balance the foreground exposure with the sky exposure. The camera's ISO was 400, the lens aperture was f/18, and it was s 2.5 second long exposure. The aperture was small because I wanted the background to be somewhat sharp as well as the foreground. There was a little breeze out there so the long exposure was challenging. I kept having to wait for breaks in the breeze in order to shoot the flowers when they weren't moving back and forth. There were a lot of failed attempts but I eventually did get a shot that wasn't affected by the wind.
And here's one more. Most of the daytime photos I shot were not "keepers", but I did really like this one with the lady bug.
"Camas at Sagehen Meadows 6"
Thanks for looking and I hope you are all having a great day!
Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com
