This is one of my favorite photos from the Manasquan Reservoir. When I showed this to one of my friends, they mentioned that the largest piece of driftwood looks like the Loch Ness monster. I had not noticed it before then, but I see it every time I look at the photo. It took quite a while after sunrise for the sun to finally burn off the thick fog. I have been hoping for fog this thick again ever since.
Yesterday, I found time to remove the airplane trails from the image. It was interesting to see how many airplanes flew by during one of the thirteen three-minute exposures.
As mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I was able to take two trips to the reservoir: Last night and Wednesday night. Last night, I was more successful in lighting the foreground. I used a Maglite flashlight to “paint” the foreground with light. I used the stacking technique in both attempts, which gave me a bit of flexibility with the foreground. I used the flashlight on the first and last exposures I took; that way if one was too bright or two dark, I had the other one as a backup. It turned out I exposed too much light on the first frame, so I used the last frame for the foreground.
For this photo, I was facing a few degrees west of south, so my trails were longer. I got to the spot earlier as well, so my total, stacked exposure was twice as long as Wednesday night’s (approx. 42 minutes). I was amazed at the number of airplanes that flew over during that 42 minutes. Most of them did not expose on the image, but you can see a few there now. For any prints I may make of this shot, I will probably clone them out.
