Ponomar Photography

Last night at 12:00AM, the wind was howling almost as loud as the coyotes in the distance. A friend and I were blindly scything our way through the invisible brush of the river bottom with our tripods. Through the muddy darkness we wandered aimlessly, stopping every so often to snap a few shots that caught our eyes (since we are photographers, this could be translated more accurately as: “we stopped taking photos every so often to continue on our journey”).

Barely able to see in front of us, we made our way to the river, while managing to meander our way around of any rabid dear or truculent trees that may lie in our path. A small portion of the river was dried up, so we walked across it to an island on the old man river. 

I set up my tripod where I wanted it, but the view I wanted was so low that I was left sitting in the wet water of the shore, barely able to crouch my head enough to see through the viewfinder. The wind was so strong that it felt like my tripod was shaking in front of me. The moon was a waxing crescent and reflected radiantly off of the water.

I took a few shots ranging from 30 to 45 seconds.  I wanted a decent depth of field, so this shot (although a little unorthodox) ended up being a 45 second exposure at F8 and 3200 ISO. I was actually quite surprised at how clean the image turned out.