Lake Arrowhead Village Waterfront

Author's Comments

Lake Arrowhead is a strange place to photograph because so much of it belongs to someone else. The lake is private. The shoreline is private. The houses tucked into the pines are emphatically private. What you get as a visitor is the village promenade, and for a long time I treated that as a limitation rather than an invitation. I was wrong about that. The village waterfront has its own photograph to offer, and it is best in the last hour before sunset in October, when the air at five thousand feet has gone clear and cold and the conifers on the far shore turn nearly black against a sky still holding color. The Arrowhead Queen sits at her dock like a piece of nineteenth century theater dropped into a Sierra postcard, and if you frame her low against the wooden pilings with the lake stretching behind, the composition almost makes itself. The trick is reflection. You want the water still, which means you want the morning before the boat traffic starts or the evening after it has stopped. Winter helps. The lake in January, with a dusting of snow on the docks and the pines holding their weight in white, is a different photograph entirely from the summer version, and far fewer people are around to make it. Bring a longer lens than you think. The far shore is further than it looks, and the houses among the trees compress beautifully at 200mm. The wide shot is the obvious one. The compressed shot is the one I keep.

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