In mid-February 2020, I attended a photography workshop in the amazing Charlevoix region of Quebec. Such workshops are very useful both to improve skills and to discover local sites for amazing shots. The morning of the session, the leader took the group to the St-Laurence River shoreline near Baie-St-Paul to catch the sunrise.

The river has tides that can reach seven meters. That morning the tide was out. I was drawn particularly to a massive low bank of clouds blocking the sunrise and struck by the colors just beneath it. Initially, it looked like the cutout of a huge red ship hitting the shoreline!

As always, I wanted to have a perfect exposure (ETTR), so I had to overexpose by 1.7 stops. That morning it was -20 C (-4 F). Probably the temperature contrast between the river and the ambient air had intensified the low cloud cover. In such extreme cold, warm clothing is vital and changing lenses bare-handed can be disastrous.