Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Tag Archives: Sleeping Bear


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Spellbinding

Finally. Since my mid-May camping trip to Sleeping Bear in northern Michigan I’ve been working on my night sky images. I’ve also been backing up my laptop, and experimenting with an external hard drive.

The Platt River, flowing into Lake Michigan, with lots of light pollution from a nearby town.

You know how new things, especially technical new stuff, flummoxes me. So many days went by when I looked at my laptop, sitting over there on the table and didn’t feel smart enough to try.

Looking up the river toward the Milky Way that was just coming up.

But more new photos are filling my camera’s memory card and I have this rule that I can’t download new images until I have finished processing the ones already waiting on the laptop.

Waiting for the Milky Way to rise, I turned the camera to the east at this tree. You’ve seen this image before but I loved it so much I decided to put it in this post too. That’s the northern end of the Milky Way to the right of the tree.

Silly rule. I have so many more pretty things to show you and I’m still wallowing through these stars.

Barr Lake and the Milky Way on my second night of shooting. Do you see the dark horse?

I guess that’s not such a horrible problem to have.

So I’ll show you what the night sky looked at back in May. Recognize that you won’t see the sky like this just by looking up wherever you are, even if you’re in a very dark place.

The tail end of a star-link line of satellites, it was very long, and right behind me as I was shooting the Milky Way over Barr Lake. By the time I got the camera swung around this was all that was left to see.

The camera sees much more light than our eyes do, and then I’ve processed them to bring more light out so that you can appreciate the shapes and patterns that hang out up there.

To the west of me was an outlet for the lake to flow into Lake Michigan, which is just over those dunes.

I’ve tried not to process them too much, but I do have to lighten them some because WordPress and Facebook both post images darker than they appear in my work on the laptop.

I hope you enjoy looking at the night sky. I like having company when I’m out there, and I often think of all of you while I’m shooting, hoping you can feel a little bit like you were there too when you see the images.

This is a stacked, horizontal, image of Barr Lake. That means I took multiple (11) images and stacked them together to weed out image noise.

I can’t wait to get back out there and bring you more.


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Something beyond stars

Well not really beyond.

On the drive up I stopped for this patch of trillium.

A friend and I were camping in the Sleeping Bear National Park earlier this month specifically to spend as many nights as possible shooting the stars in that big beautiful dark sky country.

Arriving at site 312. It had electricity!

But let’s be honest, I took a lot of other pictures too. After all, what does a photographer do all day while waiting for it to get true dark?

All set up for our 5 night stay.

Well, we sat in camp a bit. And cooked lovely meals.

Yum. She brought the fish, I brought the chicken salad and bread.

We enjoyed the campfire in the cool evenings.

Trying to get warm.

And we got a little shuteye as we waited for the Milky Way to rise.

All buttoned up for a nap.

Of course we also went on a hike or two through the countryside, enjoying the newly greening forest…

This hike it was all about the late afternoon light.

…and the wildflowers pushing up from a long winter nap.

I can’t remember what this is, but it sure was pretty!

There’s plenty to do while you’re waiting for the stars to come out.

Hiking past a lake made during the times of glaciers. We were cold just thinking about that.

I haven’t even begun to process the images of the old barns and the orchards in bloom that we saw. And I still have seven stacks of star images to process.

Pretty sure it’s not edible.

So there’s going to be plenty to share once I get all the work done.

While you’re waiting you might want to go on a walk somewhere pretty too.

But it’s going to take awhile.