The Duck on Mirror Lake
The elusive duck on mirror lake
One of the most interesting hikes we did at Yosemite was the short hike to Mirror Lake from Yosemite Valley. My friends Aaron, Lorie and I woke up at 4:45 am to make the short trek so that we could be at the lakes at sunrise. We hiked for about a mile and we came to what we thought was a creek that had a sign saying it was mirror lake. Based on some pictures we saw in a Yosemite photo book which depicted a large and wonderful deathly calm lake we were absolutely positive that the sign was a mistake. We kept trekking down the stony path for another 30 minutes until we came to a dead-end. Realizing our mistake we back trekked to the Mirror Lake creek. When we got back we realized that you had to actually follow the creek around and there were parts that the lake formed nicely.
We came to one interesting part of the lake formation where the mountains and sky seemed to have a perfect mirror image in the lake. There was this duck that was there floating when we got there. Aaron and I rushed for our cameras to capture the floating duck on the lake – the duck would appear on the lake where the mirror image of the mountains would be on the surface of the water but it would not be in the sky above. Well the duck got scared and swam off. We were disappointed. Aaron and Lorie left for a little bit and I continued to snap away trying to find the perfect image. It was hard because we were there too early – the sun was not light enough to light up the trees and landscape close to us, but it was too bright and would wash out the sky if we turned the exposure too high. All of sudden the duck swam back towards me, and got into exactly the position that I wanted. I snapped away, trying to capture a nice image. I did finally get an ok image, not tremendous but enough to satisfy what we were looking for.
Photography requires a lot of patience and you never know what you are going to get when you go out taking photos. It’s oftentimes not really up to you, its up to mother nature.
