New Snowy Wildflower Photo (and a Lake Tahoe shot)

There was some wild weather up here in Tahoe yesterday. My brother was in town, and we got out for some Lake Tahoe shoreline hiking and photography fun. It was beautiful out! Until it wasn't... The wind, rain, then snow came in fast and seemingly out of nowhere. Tragically, some boats capsized on the lake and about six people lost their lives (the news story).

This is how the lake look prior to the bad weather. When it started getting windy and rainy, we hiked back to our car.



On our drive back home, it started snowing! I asked my brother to turn up a rough road that I knew went up to a very high elevation. The snow was actually sticking to the ground up there. We went to a Mule Ears wildflower grove that I know about. The flowers were in bloom, and they were covered in a thin layer of snow. Perfect! I got out the camera and went to work. This shot below was my favorite.

Shot with a Canon R5 MarkII and a 24-105mm lens, set at 43mm. It was a handheld shot so the shutter speed was fast, 1/200 of a second. The lens aperture was as small as it could be so I could get the best depth of field as possible, f/22. This led to the ISO being a bit higher than I usually prefer, ISO 2000.

Now available as large fine art prints on my website, HERE.

Thank you for looking, and I hope you all have a safe and great day!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com - Art
Scott Shots Photography - Services

Lake Tahoe Surface Reflection Abstracts

Although it was an incredibly beautiful day yesterday, fishing on Lake Tahoe, I was struggling to find any super photogenic scenes to shoot that would make nice large prints. But at one point, the light breeze created an interesting look to the surface, and I saw some potential for some fun abstract reflection shots. I posted a wider angle view as well, so you can see where these reflections came from. And I posted a photo of the fishing rod I was using, just because I want to brag about how beautiful and incredible of a time I had out there!

Abstract prints aren't my best sellers even though they are some of my favorite photos. What do you think? Do you like these Lake Tahoe surface abstracts? And can you picture seeing them on your wall?

Shot with a Canon R5 MarkII and a Canon 100-500mm lens. The ISO was 1600, the lens aperture was f/20, and the shutter speed was 1/1000. Handheld. The abstract image were flipped upside down in editing, I shot with that in mind as I thought it would be a better look.

Here's a wide angle view of the scene, below.

Yummy! The mackinaw we caught was delicious!

Thanks for looking, and I hope you have a great day!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com

Oh, and I'm posting this room mock-up so you can image how the image would look printed big on a wall. We have a gallery here in Truckee that sells tons of large abstract paintings. I like the abstracts they exhibit, so here's my attempt at the look.

Fannette Island "Abstract" Photo

After shooting yesterday's sunrise at Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe... I hopped in the car and started heading to my buddy's house to meet up for some fishing fun. But on my way out of Emerald Bay, I looked over and saw the early morning sunlight reflecting brightly off of the water, creating a silhouette of Fannette Island. It looked incredibly cool, so I decided to turn around and see if I could capture the scene. I'm glad I did because I kind of love this shot! I don't know if it's a true abstract, but it definitely has an abstracty feel to it. And even though it looks like a black and white photo, it's actually a color shot! It's one of the only digital photos I've ever taken that I decided needed zero adjustments to it. This is a straight-out-of-the-camera photo.

Shot with the Canon R5 MarkII and a 24-105mm L lens, set at 105m. The ISO was 100, the lens aperture was f/22, and the shutter speed was 1/500 of a second. Handheld, no filters were used.

I personally think that this one would make a very cool large print in the right location. What do you think? (If you agree and are interested... Prints can be ordered HERE.)

Thank you for looking and I hope you have a great day!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com

This Morning's Emerald Bay Sunrise

I got the invite to go fishing on a friend's boat at 9am, on Lake Tahoe today. Sweet! But I had time to kill in the morning, so I decided to wake up early and drive to Emerald Bay first. The sunrise forecast wasn't looking great, but you miss all the shots you don't take. So I took the risk and was rewarded with this beautiful scene!

Shot with a Canon R5 MarkII and a 24-105mm lens, set at 24mm. The ISO was 400, the lens aperture was f/8, and the shutter speed was 1.3 seconds. A tripod and two a graduated neutral density filter were used.

And in case your wondering... No fish were caught while fishing. 😞
It was very windy out, we almost didn't launch the boat, and we didn't stay out very long. Oh well, it was still fun to get out on the water.

Thank you for looking, and I hope you have a great day!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com

New Website Announcement!

I'm super excited about this... I officially launched my new website today!!!! www.TruckeeTahoePhotos.com

It has been a lot of work, and I'll probably still work on the website more as I fine tune things. But it is live! It is functioning! And the shopping cart works! A test order has been delivered to my mother, who ordered a jigsaw puzzle a few days ago. The puzzle was delivered today, everything went smooth! The puzzle was delivered to Los Angeles, but prints can be delivered anywhere in the world!

Above is a screenshot of the website. Everything seems to be working great on my end, but if you visit it and notice any bugs or glitches, please do let me know.

And below is a little video I put together for the announcement. I've been sharing this video on all my social medias today.

I hope to be adding more images to the website and most of the new images that I capture and share here will eventually be added to the website.

Thanks for looking and I hope you all have a great day!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

XC Ski Lesson With MVB Coaching

Yesterday afternoon was a lot of fun. It started with a group cross-country ski lesson with my friend Martin of MVB Coaching. Martin is an endurance sports coach who offers coaching to folks all over the world, through the magic of the internet. I've shot many photos of him for his website and social media, and Martin gave me my first XC ski lesson last year.

The group lesson was great for beginners, and it was good to be reminded of the basics as I know I've developed some bad habits... After the lesson, the two of us got out for a long ski and we tried to find a nice spot for a sunset shoot. There actually wasn't a lot of nice lake views at the Nevada Nordic ski area, but we did find a couple decent spots. For some reason, my Garmin watch did not record the activity, but it was a lot longer of a ski than I'm used to, I was exhausted when I got back to the car.

The sunset was not as explosive as we had hoped, but we still got some nice shots with Lake Tahoe in the background. Here's a couple of them below.

Both of these photos were shot with the Canon 5DS R and a 24-105mm lens.

The shot above was ISO 400, the lens aperture was f/14, and the shutter speed was 1/320 of a second.

The shot below was ISO 1000, the lens aperture was f/5.6, and the shutter speed was 1/200 of a second. A flash was used for this shot, or else Martin would have been looking very dark.

Martin was giving free hour-long lessons all day, my group was a fairly small one compared to the other big groups. He was passing out business cards in hopes to get some folks signing up for his lesson/training packages. It was a smart idea!

And of course, the obligatory selfie with the camera, lol.

Thanks for looking and I hope you are all having a great weekend!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe - Sunset Photo Shoot - Video

 

Join me for a behind the scenes look at my recent sunset photo shoot above Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe. Camera settings and techiques are discussed. The "keeper" photos are shown throughout the video.

Prints are available of the images in this video. For more information, please visit my "Recent Work Gallery"

Thank you for watching!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

Christmas Eve Sunset Photo

The Sky Fire app was calling for a nice sunset on Christmas Eve, so I got out again to Lake Tahoe for some photography fun. Well, Merry Christmas to me, it was a great one! It was also a short one... The sunset colors only lasted a few minutes, I was feeling lucky to have captured a nice panoramic image above Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe at the peak of the colorful explosion.

This first image is a stitched panoramic image. Meaning, I shot several photos while panning the camera on the tripod. I then stitched the images together using a program called PTGui. In my opinion, PTGui almost always does a better job of stitching images together when compared to using Photoshop's panorama tool. It is 14 photos, that are combined in to one wide high resolution photo. Shot with the Canon 5DS R and a 16-35mm lens. The camera's ISO was 50, the lens aperture was f/16, and each of the 14 exposures were 10 seconds long. A tripod was used, and a 1.2 stop graduated neutral density filter was used on the front of the lens.

This second image was also shot with the Canon 5DS R, but a 24-105 mm lens was used, and the lens was set at 88mm. It is a much closer look at the intense sunset colors, most of the colors in the clouds had faded by the time I set up this shot.The camera's ISO was 50, the lens aperture was f/16, and it was a 10 second exposure. A tripod was used, and a 1.2 graduated neutral density filter was used on the front of the lens. Yup! It was the same settings as the images for the photo above, the only difference was the lens choice.

And this selfie... well, it was shot with the Samsung S22+. Happy photographer!

Thank you for looking!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

Lake Tahoe Photos From Yesterday's Fishing Adventure

Yesterday was a good day. I was invited out on my buddy Pete's boat for a day of fishing on Lake Tahoe. Just being out on the lake is good enough in my book. But add a couple of caught fish, and some "keeper" landscape photos, and it was a very successful day too!

Pete caught this huge brown trout right at the beginning of our day. It put him in a great mood! He believes it was his personal best for brown trout. I netted the fish for him and I couldn't believe how heavy it was for a brown. Yes, there are bigger fish in the lake, mackinaw get quite a bit bigger. But a brown trout this big is special. It was released so it could go breed and make more mega browns.

I was hoping to keep this second fish for dinner, but when we brought it up onto the boat, we saw that it was incredibly skinny for how long it was. It's hard to tell from this photo, but it looked weird and I didn't trust it. Perhaps it was sick? I don't know but I decided I didn't want to eat it so it was released as well.

It was a long fun day of fishing, not a whole lot of catching... but any day out on the lake is a good day.

Alright. I'll admit that I didn't personally catch any fish :( But... I did catch a bunch of incredible scenes with my camera. There were hardly any wind or waves, which gave the lake surface a mirror-like effect. The clouds were looking great, and with their reflections, they were incredible!

This one below was my personal favorite of the day. The wispy clouds, the incredible blues, the thin mountain line... I love it! It should look great as a large print on a wall.

Both images above were shot with the Canon 5DS R and a 24-105mm lens, handheld. The ISO was 200, and they were both quick exposures. No lens filters were used.

As we were pulling the boat out of the water at the end of the day, the clouds fired off with beautiful pink colors. Unfortunately, there were tons of buoys near the dock so I wasn't able to get any great horizontal wide angle photos. I shot some, but meh... the buoys ruined the shot in my opinion, so I didn't work on any of those. This vertical above was the best of those images.

Below is a photo of the boat launch and the dock. There were hardly any other boats on the water, here you can see why. Launching a boat on an icy ramp isn't easy, but Pete does it often and it was no problem for him.

It was another great fishing and photography adventure! Those kind of days are my favorites.
Thank you for looking and I hope you have all been having some great adventures too.

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe Sunset

The sunsets and sunrises have been incredible up here in the Tahoe area lately!

I had a busy day with the camera yesterday. After I shot two real estate photo jobs, I ended up getting dinner at my favorite little Mexican food stands. Their Chimichangas are incredible! After I got my order, I drove across the street to Kings Beach, where there were plenty of unused picnic tables. The clouds were looking like they might make for a nice sunset so I hung out at the beach for an hour and waited.

I'm glad I waited! The sunset was a real stunner. The oranges and reds were intense, and it was one of those sunset where the color stuck around a looong time.

These were both shot with the Canon 5DS R and a 16-35mm lens. No lens filters were used, however, two flash units were used in order to light up those trees and get those fall colors to pop.

Happy photographer, once again. I have been getting a lot of new photos for my website lately, which yes, makes me smile!

Thank you for looking and I hope you all had a great day too!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com

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Printing And Stretching A Canvas Print

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I received another print order recently, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some of the production steps of a canvas print. I print these canvas print personally, on an Epson 9900, here in Truckee, California.

Prior to printing on canvas, I need to add a 2 inch mirrored edge to the image, this is the part that will fold over the wood stretcher bars. I then print it out on the Epson 9900, it can produce prints up to 44 inches wide and quite a bit longer which is perfect for making 40x60 inch prints. This Long Lake sunset print is 20x60 inches.

This print order is for a coated canvas. I paint on a glossy UV/water resistant coating. It turns rather hazy after it is painted on, but then it dries clear and looks incredible. Two coats are applied with about two hours of drying time between the coats.

Here's the tools required to use the type of stretcher bars that I prefer. They are a little different than most stretcher bars, they come pre-cut and ready to assemble. The wood is kiln dried poplar, which makes for a very sturdy stretcher bar that won't warp over time.

All of my prints that are size 16"x20" or bigger are part of a limited edition. They come numbered and with a certificate of authenticity.

Here's the finished product! I delivered this one personally today here in Truckee, but shipping is of course available.

This photo was actually shot while hanging out with @jarvie when he was in town. It was a fun and productive visit. Here's the original post about this image: "a-long-panorama-of-long-lake-last-night's-sunset" And here's the un-cropped version of the photo:

Currently, my work is available at Gallery 5830' in Downtown Truckee, at Art Obsessions Gallery in Reno, Nevada, and at The Genoa Gallery in Genoa, Nevada. Big and small prints are available at all three galleries. And of course, prints can be ordered through my website as well.

I hope you enjoyed that little behind-the-scenes look at a Scott Shots print production, and I hope you all have a great weekend!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com