Photo Carousel #10: "Boathouse Restaurant"

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "Boathouse Restaurant".

We spend some time almost every summer vacationing at Lake George in upstate New York.  It’s a terrific vacation place centered around the beautiful (and big!) lake with many water activities to enjoy and a nice town with a ton of restaurants and other land-based activities.

This is one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken of Lake George, and there’s not even much of the lake in it!  But it captures the spirit of the place for me and for that reason I consider it a successful photo.  I hope others enjoy it as well, even though it may not have the same emotional connection for you.  Click on the photo above to learn more about it…

From a creative perspective, there’s a lot going on in this photo to look at…which is precisely why I captured it.  It’s all “calm” stuff though, so it allows you the time to look around it to explore.

You have the overall scene itself of the restaurant and the reflections of the lights on the water.  I liked the colors there.  Their reach across the water was what initially grabbed me about this scene.  Then there’s the people eating in the upstairs alcove in the upper left.  The boats at the dock, the waitress in the red shirt all the way on the right, etc.  To me it says what it is:  A waterside restaurant, and to me they’re very relaxing.  A great way to spend an evening after a day on the lake.  Pull up to the restaurant, dock, and relax.

I took a number of shots of this scene as the sun was setting.  The most effective ones were after dusk when the lights of the restaurant impacted the scene.  For shots like this, it’s best to try to capture them while there’s a little bit of light left in the sky so it doesn’t appear as total blackness in the final image.  If I had waited just a few minutes longer, the blue sky would have turned black and that would have changed the mood of this scene in a direction that I didn’t want it to go.

I intentionally framed this with the restaurant at the top to allow the lights maximum room to spread across the water.  As I look at this I can almost hear the water lapping against the boats and the laughter of the people on the dock enjoying dinner.

What I really wanted to do was go back to shoot from this same location with a more telephoto lens on a night when the restaurant was more crowded so I could pick out scenes on the docks, in the upstairs bar, etc.  It would have been a cool vantage point to capture the hustle and bustle of the place on a busy night.  But I never got the chance to go back on this trip.  I’ll try again in the future.