Weekly Photo Theme – Dams and Locks

What a beautiful week! I don’t know if everyone had nice weather this week but I think Mother Nature was throwing us a little present for putting up with all her crap over the winter. Whatever her reasons, I liked the result. So much sun and warm temps had me jumping in the car to go exploring with the camera almost every evening. It also allowed me to get in some good field trips for this week’s them of dams and locks. I ended up with plenty of images of a few of the local dams that I didn’t even need to resort to following the Barge Canal or the old Erie Canal for locks. Although, that is still a great theme I will have to pursue this summer. 😉

The first dam I visited is at Hinckley Reservoir. The reservoir was initially created to supply water to the Erie Canal and since 2003 is the source of water for most of Utica, NY. The ‘Ethereal‘ image I posted a few days ago was also taken at Hinckley. The sun was almost below the horizon when I setup for this image so I needed to get a good bracket of images in order to capture the whole dynamic range in the scene. I brought all six images into Photomatix to create the HDR image and finished it of with a few tweaks in Lightroom.

Just a Little Over the Left
Nikon D5100, Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4, {1/5, 1/8, 1/10, 1/15, 1/20 & 1/30s bracket}, 21mm, f/16, ISO 100

The next two images are from one of my favorite playgrounds, Delta Lake State Park. It was another great sunset evening and the light on the dam was irresistible. Of course I forgot that the other residents of the area, mosquitoes, would also be out and I was driven away after a short visit. The grand view of the dam is another HDR image processed through Photomatix. I only needed three exposures to capture the light. I didn’t want lose the great clouds above the dam while trying to get all the shadow detail.

No Trespassing
Nikon D5100, Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4, {1/30, 1/60 & 1/125s bracket}, 17mm, f/16, ISO 100

As you can see in the first Delta Lake dam image the lake level was sufficient to allow water over the spillway but not in the great torrents I usually see in the Spring. The patterns of the falling water were mesmerizing and I was hoping to capture that with a close-up of the spillway itself. I was also going for a non-traditional image for this series as I knew the first two where kind of classical landscape views of dams. 😉

Patterns
Nikon D5100, Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4, 1/15s, 50mm, f/20, ISO 100