by the lake, part II

Since I'm stuck living back on Long Island for the time being, I thought it might be nice to really explore it while I'm here. I've lived on LI since I was 9 years old (read: many many years) and there are still *so* many places I've never been to. I'd even lived in the town of Lake Ronkonkoma for awhile when my ex-husband and I first moved in together, and I had never actually been to The Lake. There was a restaurant there, The Bavarian Inn, which I knew to now be abandoned and all grafittied-up (bettye-ism), a setting which is much to my liking. Sadly, when we got there that day we discovered that the restaurant was newly fenced-in (urgh) and not in a "oh, *I* can get in THERE" way, but...yeah. We were not shooting there. So we moved to Part II: The Lake.

My thought for the lake portion of the shoot had been a) capturing backlit and sun flare-y photos and b) evoking soft femininity in this vintage nightgown. It was a big fail on the sun shots (!) as I miscalculated our time, AND had been unaware of the tall trees around the lake, which knocked off 15 minutes of our sun-time. Live and learn! I should download one of those sunset time apps! It's amazing how much earlier every day the sun sets. I always sort of thought it set one minute earlier each day...but it's more like ten! So the difference from one week to the next is pretty drastic.

I like the softness of the water and sand shots...and so enhanced their paleness and fragility in post-processing. The images with the trees in the background, however, were a little more contrasty so I edited them with stronger tones. What do you think?

Even though we didn't have the sun directly, it was *such* beautiful light that evening, even after the sun dropped down below the trees, its glow lit the model's face so nicely.