For over ten years my wife and I have been on a quest to travel for landscape photography and visit national parks. One of the places that I had long wanted to visit was Crater Lake, so in 2014 we took a two week trip to Oregon.

Crater Lake was formed just under 8000 years ago by the collapse of the volcano Mount Mazama. It is the deepest lake in the US at 594 m. The water of the lake is the darkest blue that I have seen anywhere. Sometime after the caldera was created, additional volcanic activity built the small cinder cone that became Wizard Island.

We booked several nights at the national park lodge on the crater rim, so that we would be close to things here. It was June, and there was still some snow around. The crater rim road was closed on the eastern half because it had not been cleared yet. I was initially rather disappointed by that, as we had some plans for the closed area. However, I got over it as I found the compositions from the western side to be more interesting because they could feature Wizard Island more prominently.

Much of the time, to take in the scale of the lake, I was shooting very wide on a full frame camera. Even then, I did some multi-shot panoramas. Occasionally, I would see a different, tighter composition. This is one of those shots, taken at 130mm, closing in on Wizard Island, surrounded by that deep blue water.