At Forest Gump's turning point

 

Last Saturday night I zapped through the programs on TV before I went to bed. Sure enough, one channel had Forest Gump with Tom Hanks playing. It seems there is always a TV channel that has this movie running on Saturday nights ;-). It happened to be that I just joined the movie where Forest Gump started running all across the United States. That includes the scene where he reached the east coast and turned around to run in the other direction. This scene was shot on the wooden bridge of Marshall Point Light in Maine, a place that we visited during our vacation tour in the fall of 2013.

This lighthouse is an iconic landmark and we were not the only people visiting as this image may imply. I don’t manipulate much in my photos but here I used “content aware fill”, a feature in Photoshop CC, to make five people disappear after only a couple minutes of work. Love it! It is a very useful tool for a situation like this.

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.

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…

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.

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.

The other way to use a tide pool

 

I showed you an image of Pemaquid Lighthouse before (click HERE for the older post). This one was made the evening before the first one. This beautiful lighthouse is one of the most iconic places at the coast of Maine, great for photography at sunrise and sunset. Having enough time on hand I experimented a lot with perspectives, exposures, and depth of field. If you follow my blog regularly you may have read yesterday about the interesting role the tide pools can play at low tide for your photography. Finding a tide pool that reflects the subject, which is without any doubt the lighthouse in this image, can make for a much more interesting photo than the one that another photographer makes just three feet away from you. Well, I can promise you this will not be the last picture of Pemaquid Lighthouse I may publish here in the blog. It is way too pretty... ;-)

Light in the tide pools

 

We were extremely blessed with the weather during our trip to Maine. It was very mild the whole time and most days there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. As you know, we photographers don't really like this, because a plain blue sky during the day provides less chances to make dramatic images that tell a story. But it wasn't a hopeless case. There are ways to find light if we keep our eyes open.

The constellation of the moon made sure that we had low tide in the morning. This can make sometimes for a not so pleasant foreground but it also allows to go closer to the water and leaves tide pools between and on the rocks along the shore. And this is where you can make the click. If no wind ripples the water you can enter a world of colors and interesting subjects below the water surface. Beside all kinds of shells, colorful stones, seaweed, and the occasional crab can be found. If you can keep reflections out of the frame you have your image that tells the story about the life and beauty in these tide pools.

Nature clicks #186 - Minke Whale

 

One of the most emotional moments during our travels along the coast of Maine was my first encounter of a whale. Joan, Cooper, and I went on a whale watching tour (yes, the dog wanted to go too...;-) ). We were more than twenty miles out in the Atlantic Ocean when we saw the first Minke Whale. We saw it several times and even the crew wasn't sure if we saw always the same whale or maybe a second one. Everybody on the boat was very excited and I was very happy that I was able to make a few clicks. I thought shooting out of a kayak was already difficult but catching the brief moments when the Minke whale appeared (and you never know where it will come to the surface the next time...) was even a bigger challenge. As you can see the whale is not tack sharp but hey, it was a first sighting for us... ;-)