An Afternoon with Friends at Lake Lanier

A while ago, our good friends Kathy & Larry gave us a coupon for a half-day boat rental at Paradise Rental Boats on Lake Lanier. So we got together with our friends Christoph, Carmen, Chiara (the baby), Melissa and Alex to spend an afternoon on Lake Lanier. After we had arrived, we checked in and got a brief safety presentation – kind of like on a plane

A couple of minutes later, we were on our way to…well…we didn’t really know where to go I remember Larry recommended to check out Sunset Cove but we couldn’t find it on the map, so we just cruised around a bit, towards some of the smaller islands on the lake. While I was stuck driving the boat, the rest of the crew could enjoy the sun and get some tan (which some of us really needed).

After a while we decided to drop the anchor and have some fun in the water. Shortly after most of us jumped into the water, a duck showed up waiting for some food or left-overs and Alex had the great idea to take a picture of Chiara’s rubber duck next to the real duck. Since the duck didn’t care much about a picture, we had to throw some breadcrumbs next to the rubber duck into the water to make her stay

Then it was time for Christoph to show off his legendary “salto mortale”…looked more painful than legendary, but what do I know

But at the end, he made it back out of the water without any major injury!

After we had lunch on the boat we continued cruising across Lake Lanier and decided to check out another island. This time we could drive the boat all the way onto the sandy beach, instead of having to drop the anchor again. Since the sun was already getting a bit lower, I took the opportunity to shoot a couple of backlit pictures of the girls. First, I asked them to group up and jump into the air. Unfortunately the three ladies had some issues keeping their movements in synch with each other and jumping at the same time

As you can see in the picture, the background is much brighter than the foreground. So if I had taken this shot in Aperture Priority mode the three girls would have been way too dark as a result of the meter in my camera measuring a very bright scene. I could have used exposure compensation but decided to switch to manual mode. I took a close-up reading (ISO, aperture, shutter speed) of Kathy’s face, so the meter would not see a lot of bright background. Using those settings I shot the scene above.

Of course using the meter reading from Kathy’s face on the massively backlit scene with the three girls, my camera screamed “over exposure”. And in fact the background ended up being over-exposed but I mostly cared about a correct exposure of the three girls

Next I took some portraits of Melissa and Carmen holding Chiara. The girls looked pretty without any re-touching, but in case you wonder, I added some skin smoothing and glamour glow using Nik’s Color Efex Pro.

Then I took a group shot of the four girls, including Chiara who had a blast playing in the sand!

So I’d be in some of the pictures as well, Christoph offered to take my camera for a second and shoot a couple of frames of Kathy and I. It sure helps that both Alex and Christoph shoot Nikon’s as well, so you can just hand them the camera and they know how to use it

Then it was time to head back to Port Royale marina to return the rental boat. On the way back clouds were moving in partly covering the sun – looked pretty amazing. Kathy took almost the same picture (in landscape orientation) using her Sony Nex 7.

We sure had a blast on the lake, even though the 4 hours went by way to fast. We’ll certainly do that again some day but maybe for a full day, so we have time to grill out on one of the islands. Thanks again to Larry and Kathy for the coupon!

Equipment

• D7000
• 24-70mm f/2.8
• Nikon GPS-1