Boulder Bay at Big Bear

Author's Comments

The boulders are the entire reason to come, and they only really work as foreground when the light is low enough to model them. Mid-day flattens everything here. The granite goes gray, the lake goes silver, and the photograph you make at noon is the photograph everyone else has already made. I prefer Boulder Bay in late January, an hour before sunset, when the alpine light starts to warm and the rocks at the water's edge are still wearing their ice collars from the morning freeze. The texture is what you are after. The way the granite holds shadow in its fissures, the way a thin rim of ice catches the last horizontal light and goes briefly gold, the way the forested ridge across the lake softens into blue while the foreground stays sharp and warm. That contrast is the photograph. The pullout off North Shore Drive is small and easy to miss. Bring the Adventure Pass. Bring a polarizer if the lake is glassy, because the reflection of the San Bernardinos across the water is half of what you came for and the polarizer lets you choose how much of it to keep. A wide lens works for the establishing frame, but I find myself reaching for something longer more often than I expect, isolating two or three boulders against the far shore and letting the lake become a band of color rather than a subject. Stay through blue hour. The crowds, what little of them there are, will leave at sunset, and the ten minutes after are quieter and stranger and frequently better than the sunset itself.

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