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Friday Slide Show: Silver Lake
18 September 2026
Our friend Holly escaped the city for a few days in the mountains. She sent us photos of her adventures, hiking at an elevation of 7,200 feet, knowing we haven't been anywhere higher than 900 feet in years. So we enjoyed something of a vicarious vacation this week.
She went on a few hikes around Silver Lake in the Sierras just south of Lake Tahoe with her folding Samsung smartphone. We liked the photos so much, we asked her if we could share them here and she agreed.
So you get a vicarious vacation, too.
The mountain you'll see is Carson Mountain. The island is Treasure Island. The mirror surface of the lake attests to its double duty as a fishing spot and a reservoir. The fishing includes lake rainbow, brown, Lahontan cutthroat and the occasional brook trout as well as native tui chubs.
One resort has posted September Fishing Pictures to prove the point.
Holly, who tap dances (when she isn't hiking) and introduces herself as "Holly like Hollywood," isn't the only celebrity to visit the place. Many Hollywood celebrities of the past discovered Silver Lake and built cabins around the lake, including Wallace Berry, Noah Berry Jr., Frank Capra, Walter Lantz, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, among others.
They, however, didn't send us any photos.
As captivating as images of the place inevitably are, we couldn't help but wonder how these Samsung smartphone photos would look after a little processing in Camera Raw.
And after we'd found out, we were dying to share them. Like our recent re-edits of digicam photos from the early years of digital photography, we were able to improve the tonality and color of the captures with modern software.
Holly was happy to share them but she thought her phone's camera wasn't very good. "Not a great camera, I don't think," she wrote.
For comparison, see Cassie's iPhone 15 Pro Max shots of Long Lake and our own Nikon D300 images of Bucks Lake from 2018.
But, you know, Camera Raw doesn't care what device took the image. You might even say it relishes a challenge. An image that hasn't been optimized in the camera is just uncooked meat to its blazingly hot grill.
So, as we sat at around 900 feet editing photos taken at 7,200 feet, we extended our vicarious vacation from minutes to a few delicious hours.
Without any fear of mosquito bites.
