Sadly, One of the best times of day for landscape photography is dawn.  When dawn breaks, it’s calm, quiet, peaceful, and well lit.  It’s also the singular time of day when you can capture still reflections in the watery surfaces of lakes.  We recently had just such a day.  Check out what we captured.

It’s not easy to find the right place for a morning water reflection of the surrounding landscape.  Some lakes are better than others for the job.  Fortunately, there’s one not too far from here called Henry’s Lake.  It’s a couple hours drive away.

Getting to Henry’s Lake isn’t the issue.  Getting to the lake in time for sunrise is.  Sadly, we can’t just leave a couple hours ahead of scheduled sunrise.  We need to arrive earlier than when dawn breaks so that we’re in place for the perfect morning light just before dawn.  We also have to account for road construction.  There’s usually some going on this time of year which will make our trip take longer.

Our next big problem is that we’re driving into an area which deer live.  They will wander into the roads during the window of time we need to be driving.  This means that we have to be extra vigilant or we’ll have a car accident with a deer.  We almost had one on the trip which yielded this photo.  We only saw the deer in time thanks to having the brights on.  Without them, we would have run into the deer.

Once we arrived at our predetermined location, I had to climb down a bit on snow and ice.  Island Park snow lingers much longer than in Pocatello.  It was a bit precarious being on hard-pack snow right next to an icy lake in the wee hours before dawn.  One wrong move and our photography trip would be cancelled to get me warmed up.

I got my tripod set up almost standing in the lake itself for this angle.  Then I waited while the Earth turned and the sun started rising.  When the moment was right, I snapped this shot with the almost perfect mirror reflection of the clouds and light of dawn on the mountains in the water.

The drag of waking up extra early and driving for a couple hours ended up being worth it.  The scare of the deer didn’t hinder me once I got down to my landscape photography.

If you would like to buy fine art prints of this beautiful photo, please follow this link to our online store.  You can order a copy today.