Behind the Lens – Frozen Lake Winnipeg

I haven’t been out to shoot on Lake Winnipeg this year. I usually like to go multiple times in the winter as the lake changes quite a bit.

Before I head out shooting I usually like to have a couple of ideas in my head about what I want to shoot. This can sometimes be difficult when I don’t know what type of conditions I will encounter. I knew I wanted to do some self portraits wearing a dress. (sometimes not the best idea in winter but I still wear my winter boots and arctic base layers)

To me the best time to head out shooting is either before/after sunrise and before/after sunset. Since I like to head to the Matlock area I usually do a sunrise.

Access to the lake in the winter time can be tricky. I know of an area that allows easy access to the lake. That was the place that I headed to first and I ended up getting lucky with having a ice ridge close to shore. I wanted to stand on the ice ridge for the self portrait shot. (Ice ridges can have soft ice that can give away. The only reason I stood on the ridge is because there was no soft ice around the ridge and it was less then 2 feet from shore in what I knew was low water)

Upon arriving at the lake I walked up and down the ridge looking for something that drew my eye. I manage to find some texture in the snow that created a leading line towards the ridge.(the texture in the snow is created my high winds blow over the snow)  My thought process was to include that leading line in the image. I decided to place myself at the end of that leading line so that the views eye would follow that line. The other thing that I really wanted to include in the image was the crescent moon that was in the south-eastern part of the sky. I thought that the crescent moon added a little something different to the image. It gave the image a little bit of a day to night feeling to it. For the pose I had a completely different idea in mind but it just wasn’t working out and one of the poses that I really liked ended up being a happy accident.  The shutter clicked at the right time.

 

The other pose was a pose that I have done often. In post processing I decided to crop the image so that there wasn’t as much empty space at the bottom of the image. To me both images work well.