Ever since I first saw David Shields photos of Bonsai Rock I had wanted to shoot this location. For the past couple years I've leased a ski cabin with several of my friends for the entire winter. Being so close to Lake Tahoe and Bonsai Rock you'd think it would be easy to get here to shoot. Last year I had made it up to the eastern shore to photograph Bonsai but I waited too long into the year (it was almost May when I made my way over there) and the sun was setting more northerly than I wanted. Willie and I decided to do a Tahoe photo weekend at the end of March, hoping the sunset would still be south-westerly enough for a nice sunset. It was storming all week and we rented a 4 wheel drive SUV for the trip. Hoping to get a great sunset we departed plenty early from my cabin and arrived at Bonsai Rock pretty hopeful. Random side-story: I've driven all over California (and many parts of the United States) over the past 6 years and although I've seen "Caution: falling rocks" signs, I've never actually really paid attention to them or had any issues. On the drive to Bonsai Rock the car in front of me rolled down his window and started waving his arm, pointing to the left, signaling something that I couldn't figure out. He quickly changed lanes and that's when I realized what he meant …. GIANT F'ING BOULDER!!!!!!! There were 3 cars to my left and I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the giant rock. This thing would have seriously messed up the SUV. So Mr. Car in front of me … thank you! We arrived at Bonsai Rock with plenty of time before sunset. Last year there was so much snow that the lake level rose fairly significantly. Even with a dry winter the lake level is much higher than we really want for good Bonsai Rock photos. The beautiful foreground rocks are mostly under water. Willie and I spent a couple minutes looking at compositions but with so few rocks exposed we were pretty limited and found our shots pretty quickly. We had plenty of time to kill before sunset and it was partially cloudy so I decided to pull out the Lee Big Stopper and see what kind of effect I could get. I set up a 3.5 minute exposure, clicked the button and sure enough, I got a super neat pattern in the sky. The water was pretty choppy and the long exposure turned the water into glass. Perfect! Now we just need a beautiful sunset and I'll repeat this. Unfortunately we didn't get a sunset (thick clouds blocked the sunset) but I did manage to get a nice long exposure photo! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 36mm, f/16, 3 min 20 sec, ISO 200 Lee Filter Holder + 0.6 HiTech Soft ND Grad + Lee Big Stopper

A couple weeks ago Willie asked me to reserve the weekend of March 30, 2012 for a photo-trip. About the same time, my roommate and a bunch of my friends decided to make that same weekend a Tahoe get-away/ski-trip weekend. I wanted to do both so I convinced Willie to join and we'd shoot Lake Tahoe. We had been monitoring the weather all week and it seemed like every 5 hours the report changed. A large storm was rolling in but nobody could decide when exactly it would hit. We knew we wanted to shoot Bonsai Rock (which I have previously photographed) and Emerald Bay. Planning this photo trip turned into a nightmare because we weren't sure what sunrises or sunsets would be good and we couldn't figure out if the roads would even be open. The road to Emerald Bay had been closed all week due to snow / avalanche control but finally opened as we drove up to Tahoe. Friday night we drove to Bonsai Rock and had a skunked sunset (but I did manage to get a photo that I was happy with thanks to the Lee Big Stopper, coming soon). Saturday morning we woke up at 5:15am (ouch), wiped the sand out of eyes and hit the road. I had done some research and found that Emerald Bay was not only really close to our cabin but also pretty easy to photograph. Just pull off on one of the turn-outs, find a spot that doesn't have trees, and shoot. We were the only ones on the road when we got to Emerald Bay and only a few cars passed us as we watched the sunrise. There were a LOT of clouds (as you can see) but we were lucky and an opening in the east allowed the sunrise to sneak through and light up the clouds. We were treated for a beautiful sunrise (finally Mama Nature played nice for us!). Thanks to a super massive wind that had blown in, Emerald Bay also had some neat wave action going on (which you can see in this photo). Willie used his new Singh-Ray Reverse ND Grad and was able to get a large dynamic range with very little clipping. My HiTech Reverse ND isn't as soft and was doing some ugly things to the hill on the left so I had to settle for 2 filters and some bracketing. This shot is a 2-exposure blend, although the underexposed photo was only used in the bright section on the right of the photo, above the mountains and below the clouds. Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 24mm, f/18, 10 sec, ISO 100 Lee Filter Holder + (0.9 + 0.3) HiTech Soft ND Grad's

After Willie and I watched a beautiful sunrise over Emerald Bay we decided to see how easy it would be to find Eagle Falls. We knew the general location but we weren't sure if the falls was right off the trail, if we had to hike down to the lake, or what. Turns out it's a LOT easier to find than we thought. And by a lot easier I mean it's literally right off the road (you can see it from the road). It took a little bit of log walking, tree branch hangin' on, and some skippin' over rocks to get over here to get the composition we wanted. By this time the clouds were rollin' in pretty heavily and although we knew the color was gone we thought we'd have some fun taking some test shots anyways. I wanted to use the branches to add some interest to the foreground as well as frame the shot. I figured the tree could help frame this as well. The sunrise managed to squeak through the clouds and made a couple light-rays which I thought were neat. Without any color I thought I'd turn this into a black and white and see how it turned out. I used Nik's Silver Efex Pro to convert this and pull out some contrast and structure in the photo. Did I over process this? After the conversion I tried to pull the contrast back even more but I think a lot of that motion was in the RAW file from the long exposure. Thoughts? Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 17mm, f/9, 0.5 sec, ISO 100 B+W Circular Polarizer + HiTech 0.6 Soft Grad ND