Gear familiarity and scouting are essential photographic elements. It starts on your computer using Google Maps and Photo Ephemeris applications. The big question is: Where are the good spots within a 20-minute drive from home?

Doing so, I found several spots; look at these images.

https://landscapephotographymagazine.com/17/09/2023/riviere-des-prairies-sunset-montreal-quebec-canada
https://landscapephotographymagazine.com/24/06/2024/la-coulee-grou-sunset-montreal-quebec-canada

One day in the afternoon, again, the sky was full of fine white clouds. I recalled the above pictures, so I got back to the Rivières des Prairies sector. This time, I followed the setting sun. I parked the car on the side of the road and reached the river shoreline.

Facing the sun, I set up my tripod, camera, cable release and wide-angle lens. I used a 10-stop ND filter to smooth any wind ripples on the water surface. I waited 15 minutes to see the colored clouds. I composed the image using a 16 mm focal length. When I triggered the shutter, the camera exposed the scene for 241 sec.

The light wind had a gorgeous blowing effect on the colored clouds. Once again, I was guided by the live-time feature on my Olympus camera, which allows me to see the developing image and the histogram progress during long exposures.

Later, in postproduction in Lightroom, I created a sky mask and performed a dehaze set at +15. I duplicated and inverted this mask and put the shadows to +100. Then, I pressed the AUTO button in LR to let the software perform all the other adjustments automatically!

Looking at the final image, I was very proud to have captured this magic moment.