A Tail of Three
Tag Archives: Photography
What to send?
The library here hosts a photography contest every fall. Residents of our township submit up to three 8×10 images which are numbered and affixed to big display boards.
We have the month of September to submit photos. Then they are on display at the library through the end of October.
People get to vote on their favorite. There’s an adult and a kids division.
The only rule is that the images have to have been taken in our township.
I love looking at all the pictures. Lots of times I think, “darn! I’ve seen that exact image and always thought I should stop and take a picture!”
The first year I submitted three images, things I thought were artsy, interesting, technically good.
I realized right away when I saw which images won that the people voting are not judging skills, but rather are voting with their hearts on things that touched them.
So I changed my strategy and tried to see my photos from a casual observer’s point of view.
What would catch someone’s eye? Make them smile or even laugh?
What image would make them come back and look again?
All of these photos are from around my yard. You’ve seen most of them before. I have to pick three.
What’s your vote?
Waiting on the Milky Way
So what does a person do all day while waiting for true dark to arrive? Besides nap that is.
Well, on the one day the skies were clear while I was in the UP I wandered the Manistique waterfront looking for other things to photograph while impatiently urging the sun to hurry up and sink.
The mouth of the Manistique River was being dredged so I watched that for awhile. It was sort of interesting, but you can only watch so many piles of mud being moved before you have to move on.
I couldn’t resist walking out on the causeway leading to the shiny red lighthouse. It was such a pretty day.
I spent quite a bit of time out there waiting for the sun to go down. And watching the light glint off the water.
A couple of guys were fishing but they hid behind the lighthouse for me to get some shots.
But as the sun lowered I came back into shore.
The evening light makes everything so pretty.
And then, slowly, slowly, the sun sank and the blue hour began.
Earlier in the day I had scoped out a place to set up, hoping that the Milky Way would be near the lighthouse from my vantage point. The compass said it should be. But I knew I only had one night so I hoped I wasn’t wrong.
I waited impatiently. It takes forever for the night to get truly dark. And then….a few stars decide to turn on their lights.
I still couldn’t tell exactly where the Milky Way was going to shine…but the stars made me smile anyway. And then….finally, finally, there it was. It was pretty darn amazing. I don’t know why the beach wasn’t full of people just staring.
I stayed out there a long time. A lot of it not shooting, just standing there, in the moment.
Because, really, how many shots can you take of the same lighthouse with the Milky Way? Well, as it turns out…several dozen. You see, the dark sky requires that you have a high ISO and a wide open aperture and that causes grainy shots.
But you can stack them. Did you know that? There’s software that will lay your photos, one on top of the other, and match up your stars and eliminate anything different. And that clears up a lot of the grainy noise. Huh. So I was taking 7 shots of each shot, in preparation for stacking. But I learned, just this week, I should have taken 10 to 15 shots to stack.
Ah well.
So, anyway, these are single images, no stacking here, just a little editing to bring out the whites and sometimes to lift the shadows.
I still have so much to learn…so many technical things that I can do to make the images more clear, more beautiful. But the Milky Way season here in Michigan is almost over. There will be one more chance in October, just a few nights, and then I’ll have to be patient until 2023.
Yea right. I can hardly handle waiting for the sun to set in a single evening. How am I going to get through months of no Milky Way?
It’s gonna be tough.
So, on to the UP – ey?
Let’s see…last you knew I was hanging out in Mackinaw City waiting for it to stop raining so I could continue on over the bridge to my next adventure.
Yep, I was feeling pretty good. Almost kinda certain that I had gotten some decent Milky Way shots at my last location. Of course I didn’t really know, but was feeling good about it.
And I was so excited to be heading to a new (to me) location to find more dark skies. I had a campsite booked for three nights at Fayette State Park which is located at the bottom of the “Garden Peninsula,” a piece of land jutting down into Lake Michigan from the southern edge of the UP. Should be perfect, right?
Well…wrong. When I arrived at the park about 4 p.m. and drove to my site I found a very small site (not necessarily a deal breaker) that was entirely sloped, about the size of 2 cars, and totally a mud pit.
I sat there in the drizzle for the amount of time it took me to say”H*LL NO,” and then I drove the long 14 miles back up to civilization where I sat beside the road and searched the internet for a cheap hotel.
Along the way, down and back up, I did note that the Garden Peninsula itself was beautiful. With lots of barns and windmills and such.
So that made it a bit easier when I had to drive back down there again to formally check out of the campground that I never camped in so that I could get a refund for the other two nights.
A sixty dollar refund was worth the drive too. I should have just checked out the evening before when I decided not to stay but I was so freaked out by the campground I just ran.
I made reservations at another state park, Indian Lake, which pretty close to the town of Manistique. It was a much nicer place, with larger camp sites and grass. It wasn’t full my first night so I had a distant view of the lake, though the second night someone camped behind me. Still, I had plenty of room.
And it was only three miles away from the lighthouse where I spent a lot of hours waiting for a sunset and hoping for a chance at a decent Milky Way image.
Did I get that image? Well, as usually this post is getting too long, and I still have lots of images to edit. So I guess you’ll have to wait and see.
I just had another 2 hour lesson from my Milky Way teacher and I now know more about what I don’t know. I guess I need to get out there for another practice session!
Oh darn.
What am I doing?
I’m off on a grand adventure. Well. An adventure of some sort anyway.
Have you ever wondered what people do all day when they’re camping? Since I grew up camping I never considered that a question. It’s always been obvious to me. You do stuff.
On my current adventure I’ve been reading. And entertaining this guy who tried to climb into my lap on several occasions.
I haven’t gone exploring or walked the trails. I’ve been here before, many times, usually with Katie. At this exact site. So I spent a lot of time staring up into the sky and talking to her.
And crying of course. Because I miss her so much. She was definitely with me these last couple of days at site #43.
But mostly what I have been doing is waiting for it to get dark. And hoping that the sky will remain clear. So I can do this.
Well, not exactly this….on this shot the center pole decided to slowly sink and swing the camera around in the middle of the 15 second shot. Still, it’s cool.
No, I was working more toward this.
But not exactly this either. I took a lot more, and I’ve only processed a couple of the images from that first night under the stars.
Actually there’s only been one night under the stars. Because the second day it poured rain.
And when it wasn’t raining I sat and worked on the images from the night before.
I thought about where I’d be going next. I knew it was across the bridge.
I’d never been to the state park I was headed to over there before so I was kind of excited. Not so excited that I wanted to drive across the bridge in the pouring rain though.
So I waited.
And waited. And waited But the rain never stopped so eventually I took a deep breath and slowly drove across the bridge to the Upper Peninsula. Where it was raining.
So what happened next? I can’t tell you because I need to take a shower and check out of my hotel room.
Stay tuned.
Wordless Wednesday
And Day Three
Here it is already a week since we drove home from our UP adventure and I still have more to show you. Maybe I should stop talking and just let you look.
On our third and last day in the UP we got headed west toward Grand Marais where I assured my friend we’d find more stones.
But along the way we drove up to Deer Park, north of Newberry, and then along Lake Superior’s coast and stopped at a delightful little beach with the prettiest stones!
I don’t think I found any flat white ones, but my friend found quite a few beautiful souvenirs.
And we left a souvenir for someone else to find too.
And then we headed over to Grand Marais.
Many people searching this beach are looking for agates. I wouldn’t know an agate from a rubber duck, so I just looked for flat white stones to paint. I didn’t find many of those either.
But the weather was beautiful with big fluffs of white clouds dressing up the sky and we had a great time wandering.
We didn’t stay long, we were hungry and still had miles to go to get to Munising, our next stop. But we left a painted treasure for someone to find before we left.
It’s kind of a long way to go for a sandwich, but we enjoyed the glimpses of Lake Superior that we found along the way. We were hoping to stop at a couple of waterfalls in Munising before heading back to Whitefish Point for the sunset.
We ate at Subway, noting exotic, but filling. And of course we stopped for a visit with Munising’s Bigfoot, where we left another treasure.
The traffic was terrible in Munising, backed up for miles coming into town from 3 directions. We decided to nix the idea of getting in line to get out to one of the waterfalls, and headed to one that was on the way out of town, Wagner Falls.
There’s a short mostly flat boardwalk back to the falls, and we were lucky that there weren’t many people stopping for a visit.
We took a few pictures…
…and then hid our treasure and were on our way back toward Whitefish Point.
We had a long drive to get there before sunset, but we arrived early enough to appreciate the golden light on all the driftwood, and the clouds streaking the sky. This could turn out to be a stunning sunset!
We wandered the beach, noticing how pretty everything was in the evening light…
… and how the beach moves and changes every day.
We found a couple of places to hide more treasure and then waited for the sun to settle down and set.
Most people left the beach once the sun was below the horizon, but we were out there for the long haul (and to find Yooper Lights) so we waited in the cooling air to see what would happen next.
And we were rewarded by intense color and beautiful shapes. It just kept getting better until it finally died into grey. The sun was done for the day, but we weren’t.
After the sun was down we looked for Yooper Lights (stones that glow in inferred light) along with a few other late night stone addicts.
Though we didn’t find any that night, the night before, on a cold windy evening, we witnessed a young boy and his dad find a stone that glowed. The boy was soooo excited, jumping up and down in the cold Superior waves. We got him and his dad to show us what the stone looked like, and in the midst of the conversation the boy turned and looked at us, his eyes wide and said:
“I really wish I was wearing long pants!”
We roared in laughter, in all the excitement he’d been running in and out of the water of the coldest lake around without a care. Until he stopped to talk to us.
And that’s kind of the way our whole trip was. We didn’t always find what we set out to see, the perfect rock, the perfect view, the perfect sunset.
But the excitement of the whole experience kept us motivated to continue the adventure regardless. And though there were moments we wished we were wearing long pants, on the whole, it was a perfect summer trip. Mosquitoes and all.
And just think, there are all those treasures out there just waiting to be found.
So, as I was saying…
Let’s see, before Katie decided you needed a Katie fix I was about to take you over the Mackinaw Bridge and on into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My friend, who was in the passenger seat, got some really cool shots of the bridge as we drove over it. I should ask her to share them here…but meanwhile let’s go see what we saw once we left downstate behind.
You might think that the UP (short for Upper Peninsula) is nothing but trees and lakes and mosquitos. You would, of course, be wrong. Thought not far wrong…there’s plenty of all that too.
For example there’s the lighthouses. Did you know Michigan has more lighthouses than Maine? Yea…I forgot, I told you that factoid a few years ago when we were traveling in Maine.
We visited one of them on our first full day in the UP. It’s a lighthouse that’s not easy to get to, and they tell you on their website and in their literature not to try to find it using GPS.
Trust me, they know what they’re talking about.
There’s no GPS or any kind of service out there, and you get dropped while you’re still miles away in the middle of the middle of nowhere. You need to follow sandy, sometimes two track roads. But the route is mostly well-marked (except for one very important corner where I had a 50/50 chance of guessing right but went left) so if you pay attention and follow the signs you will eventually get to Crisp Point Lighthouse.
It’s definitely worth the multi-mile drive through the woods on roads filled with deep holes and standing water. Actually, the roads are one of the reasons I love it so. There are fewer people (but not NO people!) out there. You definitely won’t want to take your RV on those roads, and there’s nowhere to turn around, but if you have a car with a bit of clearance you’ll be fine.
Anyway, once you’re finally there, and have breathed your sigh of relief, you’ll be able to climb the tower if volunteers are on duty to open it up. We were lucky and got to enjoy the view from the top.
And then, since my friend is into rock picking, we walked the beach looking for perfect stones. Though to be honest they all looked like perfect stones to me.
She’s a rock painter, someone who paints rocks with cute colors and pictures and than hides them for people, often kids, to find. It’s a thing. And I found out how fun it is to hide her painted stones as we left more than a dozen behind during the three days we were out exploring, tucked into crevices across the UP.
So I looked for smooth, white rocks that would be good for painting, and she looked for specific types of stones, like quartz (we both found some of that) and granite (lots of it!) and pudding stones (maybe!) and all sorts of others. I don’t remember most of it, but I was pretty good at finding smooth white stones.
Eventually we had to leave this perfect place and find our way back to the world of paved roads. We intended to spend the evening at Whitefish Point, several miles up the Lake Superior shoreline. Maybe there would be a sunset. Maybe there would be stars.
Maybe…just maybe we’d get to see the last super moon rise up from Lake Superior. And, of course, there’s a lighthouse there too.
Well, it turns out there wasn’t much sunset, though it was still beautiful.
And the moon obliterated most of the stars…so we didn’t stay real late, and we made it back to the hotel in Sault Ste. Marie shortly before midnight.
Just in time to get a good night’s sleep in order to get up and do it all over again in the morning!
Were should we go next?
Change Is Hard 