In late September, my husband, mother-in-law and I traveled to Sugar Pine Reservoir, located in Northern California, to spend the day wandering around. I had heard stories from my husband and his family about how beautiful and peaceful the area was, but had not yet had the chance to visit.

This was all about to change.

In preparation, I purchased a new SD Card for my camera, a nearly-ten-year-old Canon EOS REBEL T3. In previous years, I have shied away from shooting photographs in RAW. My excuse was that SD Cards were expensive and I would rather take more photos and experiment, rather than have to stop early and miss something because I didn’t have card space.

These days, SD Cards don’t really cost all that much and I have no excuse not to ensure I have ample room for the photos I need to take. I never had any excuse, to be honest.

And after editing RAW photos in Adobe Lightroom Classic recently, I don’t think I will ever go back to using only Adobe Photoshop. For photo editing, if I don’t need to edit people out of them or work on a design, I can see myself using Lightroom for most retouching instead. It’s amazing for organization and batch editing. I love it!

Let’s get to the photographs, shall we?

Photograph of trees and shrubbery at Sugar Pine Reservoir in California, September 2019.

It was fun editing these photos, pulling out vivid colours from what would have been, in a few cases, underexposed photographs.

Speaking of which, have you seen my recent post on editing landscape photography? I feature a number of photos from this trip, and go into detail about my process. There’s also a peek of the before-and-after the editing process. Feel free to go check it out! (I’ll wait here. 😉 )

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Photograph near the parking lot at Sugar Pine Reservoir in California, September 2019.

This next photo below is another of my favourites…

Photograph of trees and azure skies at Sugar Pine Reservoir in California, September 2019.

The sky was so blue against the green of the forest, and the above photograph does a great job of showing that off.

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We spent a number of hours exploring the paths around the lake, and will definitely need to go back… there was still so much to see! There were stretches of water that were vivid greens and magenta, seemingly unnatural colours for water.

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I would love to hear your feedback on what you see here. Which photo was your favourite? Do you want more posts similar to this one? What would you like to see instead, if not? Please let me know in the comments, or send me an email! ⭐

Part 2 will go up on Thursday! is ready now!