Several weeks ago I had to run to the store late at night and as I was driving along I-90 I saw the lights of Rushmore Mall and the surrounding motels reflecting perfectly in a small pond beside the highway. This is a perfect shot. I just have to get this shot, I thought to myself!

So, tonight I climbed in the car and drove along the backroads until I got the closest I could to this small pond. I grabbed my tripod and my camera and started trudging through the mud until the reflections were perfect. I set up the tripod in the muck and mounted the camera. I started to adjust the camera to take this beautiful scene.

I knew better than to expect the camera to be able to capture this view in automatic mode. So I threw it into manual mode. I knew I had to open the aperture all the way. The depth of field needed to be about a half mile. I couldn't get both the reflections and the light sources to both been in focus even with the aperture open all the way. So I settled for the reflections in this shot. I checked the light reading from the sources and the reflections. I could either overexpose the light souces or not read the reflections at all. I tried a few of the timed exposures and they where either overexposed or underexposed. Which left me using the bulb setting and winging it totally.

Once the camera finally got done sampling and storing the shot, I checked it with the little LCD. It looked Okay so I packed up and came home. As soon as I had the shot on the computer I knew it was pretty darn good. Just had to rotate the shot to make it look good and crop it slightly and I was ready to show the world. I hope you like it as much as I do.