Banks Lake Sunrise in Lakeland, GA - and some older digital photos

Lakeland, GA, as its name suggests, boasts one of the biggest lakes in south GA. Banks Lake is a popular spot for fishing, birding, and hiking. It is located just west of downtown Lakeland and is definitely a place to visit if you are in the area and enjoy nature.

Banks Lake has been a favorite of mine for photographs for quite a while. One of my first forays into astrophotography was done there (see photos below). A few days ago I was up early and decided to go see the sunrise there as I had not shot anything there on 4x5 yet.

This photo was made just as the sun rose to the left of the frame (I am looking roughly south). I took a couple b&w shots and a couple color shots that have to be developed still. This image was taken with the Schneider 90mm f/8 at f/16 for 8 seconds:

This image illustrates one of my frustrations with large format. The density range of the negative far exceeds the capability of the scanner. While the negative could be printed optically with some work I really should have used a graduated neutral density filter to get a good scan-able negative. In situations like this though, time is of the essence and I did not have time for setting up a GND.

The sunrise was not particularly colorful that morning but I have seen some spectacular sunrises at Banks Lake before. Here is an image taken with a Pentax 67 medium-format camera with a 200mm lens. Exposure data is unknown, but the film is Velvia 100 (not 100f):

I haven't posted any digital photographs (other than informational ones) on this blog thus far, but I thought these next ones would be appropriate. They are a couple of my long-exposure pictures from Banks Lake that I have taken in the last couple of years: