Playing with Light

I was driving along the lakeshore in town (the lake being a widening of the St-Lawrence River) a couple of days ago about 7:30 in the morning when I was struck by the light on the water. Normally I would have had a camera with me but I was on the way to “do stuff” and only had a phone but I pulled over and took a couple of record shots. Later in the day I downloaded them, tweaked the white balance slightly to compensate for what the iPhone had decided it ought to be and shared the image on the town Facebook group. People here love pictures of the town and within a couple of hours I realised that it had received the most ‘likes’ of any picture I had previously posted there and I was getting requests for copies from all over the place. Very gratifying of course but curious because my thinking about the image was that it was nice but a bit “chocolate boxy” to be good.

Anyway, the next day I was up a half hour earlier and went out with a proper camera to try to improve on the original.

I think I did manage to improve  but what was especially interesting was the different light. I took the pictures from exactly the same location, looking in the same direction. One set were take at 7:00am and one closer to 7:30. The main difference was that the first day (with the phone) there was a thin cloud high in the sky while the second day all was clear. The results were remarkably different – that cloud filter over the sun and the higher elevation of it had created a rosy glow over everything whereas the clear sky and slightly lower sun was heavily laden with a golden-yellow light.

For the record this looking down river to the east and Montreal city is directly below the sun.

Really quite a striking difference – which version do you prefer?

Baie-D’Urfé – 7:30am – 27 August
iPhone 8 (maximum wide-angle)

Baie-D’Urfé – 7:00am – 28 August
Sony alpha 7ii + Voightlander 12mm lens