Hint: It wasn’t Ridgefield.

It rarely gets cold enough in the valley to freeze even the shallow lakes at Ridgefield. This sunrise is equally rare, the sun is just about to crest the hills to my left.

I spent most of my time at Horse Lake this winter watching wigeon, pintails, ring-necks, and a juvenile heron that often worked the water’s edge. But I couldn’t resist a scenic picture when I saw the shallow lake had frozen and was reflecting the colors of the sunrise. It wasn’t until a long while later while playing around with the image on my iPhone that I wished I had also switched to my telephoto lens to isolate the distant shore.

It’s so easy and fun to play around with composition on the iPhone and iPad, I wish I had them when I was first getting started in photography many years ago, but better late than never.

A heavy crop of the picture above shows what I wish I had taken with my telephoto lens.

A wider shot of Horse Lake, where in the past I haven't spent much time since it is the first lake on the auto tour and attracts a lot of visitors. It's more of a large pond than a small lake, but this winter I spent a lot of time there and came away with a number of nice pictures.

After driving through the auto tour at Ridgefield early one winter morning, the refuge shrouded in heavy fog, I stopped at the start to use the restroom. When I returned to the car, the fingers of the rising sun started punching through the fog. I scrambled to change lenses and take a quick handheld picture as within seconds the effect was gone. I darkened it when processing, I liked how it looked more like the aurora borealis than a sunrise.

I like to shoot with two cameras when I can tolerate the extra room and weight. While at Oxbow Bend to photograph Mount Moran at sunrise, I noticed these three young men grinning from ear-to-ear while paddling a canoe off to my left. Leaving my main camera on the tripod with its wide angle zoom attached, I grabbed my backup camera with the telephoto zoom and grabbed a quick snapshot. There’s more than one way to enjoy the Oxbow sunrise.

I took this picture in 2006. At the time, the Canon 20D was my main camera and the 10D the backup. When Canon announced the 7D, I wanted to get it and move the 20D into the backup role, but you can’t always get what you want …

It’s been 10 years. I registered the racphoto.com domain on October 25, 1999.

The site itself is much older as I started it while in graduate school at Virginia Tech and ran it off the personal storage I had on the servers there. I didn’t keep track of when the site first went live — which is a shame but who knew what was to come? — but at the latest it would have been 1996 and might have been a year or two earlier. To put that in context, Google didn’t launch until September of 1998.

But 1999 was the year the site grew up and got a real domain name. While the pictures have improved as I’ve improved as a photographer, the look of the site hasn’t changed much in the past decade. I still hand code the main site and while there are things I’d like to do to improve it, my focus has always been on keeping things simple to make it easier to maintain.

The blog is a relative newcomer and didn’t arrive until January 2006, starting off with a story of Templeton swallowing a sewing needle, and I certainly don’t hand code it and use WordPress instead.

This picture of Mount Moran at sunrise comes from 2006, taken from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. Everybody, and I mean everybody, photographs the mountains from here. I’ve done it on a couple of different occasions, but I also enjoy photographing the southern part of the range where you can watch the sunrise in quiet solitude.

On a trip to the coast back in 2005, I arrived at Yaquina Head at dawn and walked down the steps to the beach to photograph harbor seals in the surf. I took a quick shot of the lighthouse with the subtle colors of the northern sky but unfortunately underexposed it severely. I corrected for it in post-processing but the resulting noise mars the subtle details in the scene.

When I’m in the moment, I’ve never been that great at remembering the technical side of photography, and have made only small steps forward as the years progress. It didn’t help that I was then shooting with the Canon 10D, which doesn’t let you check the results of the image you just shot while there are images still in the buffer.

I got the Canon 20D shortly after this trip, which is properly double-buffered and allows a quick review, it’s a shame I didn’t purchase it just a little bit sooner. Nevertheless, there’s an old saying that the best camera is the one you have with you, and I’d much rather have these shots, imperfect as they are, then not have them at all.

Another foggy morning at Ridgefield, a gap in the fog momentarily opened where the sun was about to rise, so the orange colors of the sunrise were surrounded by the gray fog. I pulled the levels down towards black instead of gray — it didn’t look like this in person, but it emphasizes what made me take the picture: the sunrise struggling to escape from the prison of the fog.