2013 – Looking back, part 6

 

Without any doubt our vacation trip to the coast of Maine in October was something I really have looked forward to. It is a wonderful landscape with many facets and endless opportunities for photography. I have loved boats and harbors since I was a little boy. Watching the lobster boats going out or coming back from a catch and all the busy activities in a wharf still fascinate me. Getting up early or staying late in the evening is the key for catching the boats in best light.

Many of the lobster boats got very “colorful” names by their owners. I talked to this lobster man after he landed his catch. I told him I liked the name of his boat “JUST BITCHIN”. He said that it was his two sons who told him to name it this way, because that’s what he is doing all the time, “just bitchin”… I thought that was a funny little story, worth to be told here in the blog.

Going for the good light

It is this time of the year when I like to look back and see if there was any evolution in my photography. Working with the available light in low light situations was one of the things I wanted to focus on in 2013. I’m still not done reviewing all photos in detail from our trip to Maine this fall but I'm getting there. A day with heavy overcast and nothing but dull light, like we had today, is the perfect time for sitting in front of the computer and do nothing but post-processing. I dug up a few images that I like to share with you. I hope you enjoy.

The first one was made at 8AM, just after shooting a lighthouse all morning long (see my last post). The light was about to loose its “morning quality” but still good enough to work with the reflections on the water, the fall colors in the upper left corner, and the beauty of this little wharf.

Exposing strictly for the highlights by compensating with -1EV was the key for this image. All clutter in the water or elsewhere is left behind in the black that surrounds the boats. The photo tells the story that everybody shares the same dock, the lobster man who needs his dingy to go to his lobster boat as well as the tourist, who uses his kayak or canoe for recreation.

One of my favorite things to do in Maine was to watch the lobster boats going out very early in the morning. If the harbor faces East, like New Harbor, there is a good chance to photograph the boats while the first rays of sun light strike. It doesn’t get any better than this and there is no light for the next 10 hours that comes even close to this quality.

Every lobster man can identify his lobster traps by a unique color pattern on his buoys. After they are out of service the buoys are quite often used for decoration, like here at a restaurant right beside a lobster wharf. I left my dinner alone for a couple minutes when the last sun of the day made the colors even more pop on these old buoys.

Fine Art Gallery - "Pemaquid Point Lighthouse"

 

Back to our trip to the coast of Maine in October. Joan and I were up very early that day. We had scouted the location of Pemaquid Point Lighthouse the evening before and had already some good ideas about how to shoot the lighthouse in the morning. I have posted here before some photos of the lighthouse that were made around sunrise. The fact that there was almost no cloud in the sky forced me to rethink my ideas for some black and white photos. This building has some strong graphic elements, like the conical shape, the window, or the fence, and this is what I was going for in this image. This is my first approach but I have a lot more photos to choose from. I like to try different things before I consider to make a final print on paper. I like it but I don’t think I’m there yet…

Fine Art Gallery - "Sea Pride"

 

I knew immediately when we saw the “Sea Pride” sitting on the beach of Mackerel Cove, a bay on Bailey Island in Maine, that this was maybe a good image for Black & White. I made a few clicks but the clouds didn’t cooperate and were just a gray soup in the background. But the wind moved them around after a while and suddenly they opened up and let the blue sky shine through. This makes for a much more dramatic shot. I love the lines of this lobster boat and the image leaves room for speculation about the story why this boat was on the beach at the end of the bay and not in the water.

This might be my last post for a while. Tomorrow morning I’m flying to Germany for a family event and some business as well. I might be able to make some clicks but I’m not so sure about if there will be time to write a blog post… I’ll try, so please stay tuned! :-)

Let the details tell the visual story

 

We all get overwhelmed sometimes by the great “postcard views” or focus only on the iconic elements a particular shooting location has to offer. It is easy to overlook the details that surround a great place. Sometimes the light that hits those details has a  particular quality that makes them stand out and tell a visual story.

We have visited many of the lobster wharfs along the Maine coast. Beside eating there fresh lobster big time, we found countless opportunities to make the click. The detail shots I show you today are from different locations and different times of the day. There are some early morning and late evening shots and a couple were made completely in the shade. But they all got some quality light that brings the colors to life or pronounces the shape and suddenly a rough working place like a lobster wharf reveals a lot of beauty…

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse - a job for the graduated ND filter

 

I wrote in my post from October 16, 2013 that I may show more from Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine. It is such a magic place that allows to shoot from many different angles during sunrise and sunset. Joan and I had the place well inspected the evening before and so I knew exactly where I wanted to place my tripod for this image the next morning. Maine is in clear weather every day the first state that is hit by the morning sun in the United States. Not that it really matters but it was kind of interesting to think about that everybody at home in Iowa was still in the dark of the night, while we enjoyed the warmth of the first sun rays touching the continent. The layered rocks in the foreground are a wonderful mix of metamorphic and igneous rocks, with veins of quartz, and slabs of schist and gneiss.

I used a 3-stop graduated neutral density filter for the photo. This allows me to keep your eye on the lighthouse or maybe let it wander over the rocks in the foreground. The Schneider Optic 77 mm ND.9 SE filter became a very useful accessory during our journey along the Maine coast. I like the optical quality of this piece of glass much better than my older Cokin ND filters. They are made out of resin, which is not a problem, but I always had the feeling that they also shift the colors slightly. Finally, very little adjustments had to be made in Camera RAW for this image and this is how I want to go with my landscape and wildlife photography.

Back to the only stormy day

 

I like to come back to the only stormy day we had up in Maine at Acadia National Park. The rocky coast between Otter Cliff and Thunder Hole is a great place to watch the surf on a day like this. I used my polarizer in front of the lens and closed down the aperture to f/16 in order to extend the exposure time to 1/3 s. I know, you can make the water even more silky by using a neutral density filter but I just liked to keep some of the dynamic in the movement of the waves. I do have several ND filters in my bag but I was happy with the results and in particular with this image. It was actually the last shot I made after almost two hours of having a blast on these cliffs. It was gray most of the time but the light just picked up some quality for a few minutes at the end of the day. I hope you enjoy.

Bass Harbor Lighthouse

 

This is Bass Harbor Lighthouse in Maine and this is an image I really, really wanted to make. Joan and I scouted the place three days earlier in the evening. There is only one spot between the rocks where you can make the click with the lighthouse and its reflection in the tide pool. I arrived almost an hour before sunrise but it took me some time to climb down in the dark to the slippery rock platform where I wanted to set up the tripod. I started shooting at 5:56AM and I may post an image from the blue hour sometime here.

The inspiration came again from Moose Peterson, who had published a very detailed article about photography in Maine in his own BT Journal. The Bass Harbor Lighthouse is on the cover and since I saw this picture the first time I wanted to go to this magic place. In the iPad version of the BT Journal is another photo of the lighthouse that has a lobster boat coming into the scene. I always thought, how lucky can someone be, having this awesome morning light and in addition a boat bringing some life into the scene. As you can imagine I was really happy when the same thing happened to me. It is actually not so uncommon as I thought, because the little harbors of Bernard and Bass Harbor are right around the corner, and at this time of the day the lobster boats leave for their daily tour.

Talking about Acadia National Park and more stormy days...

 

It sounds silly, but I wished we would have had a couple more stormy days during our time in Maine. We had only one day that made watching the surf real fun. A great place to photograph into the surf is the Southeast shore of Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. It is supposed to be the best part of the park to photograph classic rocky coastal scenes and dramatic seascapes. I just like to confirm the above statement I read in the book "The Photographer's Guide to the Maine Coast" by David Middleton and Bruce H. Morrison. This is by the way a very useful book if you go to Maine and try to find the best locations for photography.

Speaking of Acadia National Park, while we have been there it was officially closed because of the governmental shutdown. As you can imagine, this was not very popular among the people that have been up there at this time. Even the most conservative redneck that I met didn't like what the congressmen and women of his party tried to accomplish...

Acadia National Park has access from many different directions, unlike Yellowstone or Grand Tetons National Park. People took advantage of it, parked their cars outside of the park, and walked into the park wherever they wanted to. The park rangers (I saw only three of them within five days) tolerated the fact and obviously only persecuted those who ignored the road blocks with their cars.

OK, let's talk about photography. I have never photographed the surf along a shore intensively and so I tried a lot of different things, made many clicks, and finally deleted quite a few images after reviewing them in the safe harbor of our home...  It was actually a very gray day and the whole time, while the waves were rolling in, I was thinking about black and white as the format for the final image. But there were these brief moments when the sun would throw a little more light through the clouds and suddenly a color image wasn't a bad idea anymore...

I hope you enjoy.

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund

 

There is an old German saying, "Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund", which means about "Morning hour has gold in its mouth". This has probably to be your mindset if you are a lobsterman. As a photographer you have to get up way before sunrise if you like to see the lobster boats leaving the little harbors. If you do, and you choose a harbor that faces to the East, like New Harbor on the Pemaquid Penninsula, you may get rewarded with some awesome light. This was what we were looking for one morning when we climbed out of our sleeping bags very early and headed for New Harbor, not far from our campsite.

We asked very polite one of the young men, who helped to load the boats with barrels of bait fish for the lobster traps, if we could shoot some images from the dock of their lobster wharf, and I promised we would stay out of their way while doing so. He smiled and replied, "Oh yes, go ahead, you are actually the first one who is asking for permission this year...". We thought this was a funny reply because it was already late in the year...

We started shooting about half an hour before sunrise. A tripod is of course essential. The first image here was made about two minutes before sunrise. Many lobster boats had already left the harbor and the one in the background just drove into a golden morning.

The following minutes were just great for story telling photography. It was fascinating to see how one lobster boat after another got prepared, loaded with bait fish, plastic trays for the lobsters, or new lobster traps. A lot of inspiration for this trip to the coast of Maine came from an article by Moose Peterson, a photographer that I really admire, but what we found in Maine exceeded my expectations by far. I can't rave enough about the quality of this early morning light we had at New Harbor this morning...