What Part Did Instinct Play in This Photograph of Dawn at Lake Louise?

Operating on Instinct

Bill Neill: This image of dawn at Lake Louise is my favorite image of all time, of all the images I have taken. It is a very simple landscape that includes a foreground element and middle ground, and mountains in the distance. It's highly simplified.

It's a great example of what can happen when you have practiced your craft and operate on autopilot.

This was taken at five in the morning. I was hoping the clouds would clear and the glacier beyond the clouds would be visible. I waited and I waited and I waited, and I watched to the east to see if something would happen.(click the image for a larger version)

Because I had gotten up so darn early, I just felt like I had to take something. I took two frames with my 4x5, one vertical and one horizontal and then moved on. I was on a three-week trip and I came home, got film processed and started looking through several hundred 4x5s and came across this image and was shocked. I couldn't remember taking it.

I had three weeks full of sunrises and sunsets, etc. and many images I was anxious to see processed. This was not one of them. But it's been my most successful photograph and, as I said, my favorite. It's kind of an "operating on instinct" photograph.

Audri Lanford: Wow, and it's so gorgeous. Is this how it came out of the camera? The light is just so amazing.

Bill Neill: It was pretty dark and it's a two minute exposure which gives you some of the blurriness in the clouds. The lake is a turquoise lake. The long exposure has something to do with the intensity of the color, but it's also heavily silted lake with glacier silt and that makes it very turquoise.

The huge Columbia Glacier is off there behind those clouds. It's massive, probably not as big as it was when I took this photograph in 1995. It's probably smaller now.

Audri Lanford: Yeah, I'm sure it is, which is a topic of a whole different podcast.

Bill Neill: Another subject, yes.

Audri Lanford: Was this a wider angle lens?

Bill Neill: Maybe around a 40mm, equivalent in 35.

In Closing

Sometimes it's the photographs you don't remember taking that have the biggest impact. That's why it's so important to practice your craft and learn to shoot on instinct. Bill's picture of dawn at Lake Louise is a perfect example of what can happen when instinct takes over.