Never really happy

So the other night as the sun was going down, I found myself at Lake McDonald again, hoping that the light would get good. You know the kind of light I'm talking about. It's pink and gold and blue and purple all at once for about five minutes.

You point a camera at it and bracket exposures just in case and make a picture. It never looks as good as you remember it.

I am not alone in this assertion. Because on this night, I also ran into Ed Gilliland, a photographer whose work I admire, and he had similar thought.

"You know," he said. "I've taken hundreds, no thousands, of photos of this lake, and I can only think of a couple that I liked."

And Ed uses all sorts of cameras, from a great big 8-by-10 to a 35 mm and all formats in between. He is a connoisseur of photography - the sort that waits for hours for the light to get right. He works from dawn to dusk. He takes fabulous photos.

Ed and I are not alone, either. I remember asking Mel Ruder if he would give us some pictures for the office.

"Well," he said, "you might as well have my favorites."

You know how many he had made? Five. Two were of Lake McDonald. One was just the lake, the other was several deer walking on the ice. Great photos.

Mel, too, judging from the archives, took thousands of photos of the lake. He also came up with just two that he really liked.

So what is it? Is the lake so horribly difficult to photograph? No. Anybody with a 35 mm camera and 50 mm lens can take a nice photo of Lake McDonald. The angle of view with a 50mm, possibly the cheapest lens ever built, is just about perfect to capture the major mountains and most of the lake.

Is it the light? Mostly, yes. It is the rare day when everything comes together. Lake McDonald is best photographed in the winter, when the snow is on the peaks and the trees.

And, contrary to what you might think, you also want clouds. Not overcast, mind you, but enough to catch and hold the light. Clouds also give the mountains a sense of scale. It's always good if a couple of them are actually just slightly lower than the summit of the peaks.

On the other hand, you don't want clouds covering the sun, which is behind you at dusk. The clouds over the sun take away the glow.

This entire setup, of course, happens only once, maybe twice a winter. And then you have to be there when it actually happens.

So you keep going back and back and back, never really happy with the photos you've taken. But always happy you made the trip there. The lake is never the same place twice, and there isn't a finer place on the planet to simply waste time.

See, there is hope for a great picture in those skies. And believe me, it is worth the wait.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.