Colorado landscapes: Maroon Bells

 

One of the most photographed locations in the Rocky Mountains is the view across Maroon Lake to the peaks of the Maroon Bells. And if the sky is blue and a few clouds are in the air you can’t go wrong with this picture. It is a simple click, even with the camera in your phone. If after a day of rain in the valleys the first snow of the season has fallen at higher altitudes and the aspens start turning yellow, you even have a bonus for your image. The wind made a few ripples on the surface of the lake but that didn’t bother me a bit while making this photo. We hiked up to Crater Lake, just below the Maroon Bells, after this photo opportunity. The air was really clear after the rain in the morning, but it got a lot hazier and I didn’t like any of my shots I made up at Crater Lake later in the day…

Iowa landscape: Upper Iowa River

 

Joan, Cooper, and I went out for another paddle adventure last weekend. This time we explored the Upper Iowa River, northwest of Decorah, Iowa. This is a very popular river among paddlers and people that just want to drift downstream in an inner tube. We used a shuttle service on both days that brought us and our kayaks to an access point of our choice upstreams and then we paddled several hours back to our campsite in Bluffton, Iowa.

I didn’t take the camera with me on Saturday because we had never paddled a river with partly fast flowing water and ripples before. After the first tour I felt more comfortable and really wanted to make some images of this gorgeous river valley and the rocks and bluffs. Sunday was also a lot more quiet and we saw more wildlife than the day before.

Creating the photos was a little like making lemonade out of vinegar. The wonderful sunny weather created of course some very harsh light, but this was the only challenge that I had to face beside keeping the gear dry.

My subject is the landscape and I used the canoes and kayaks on the water mainly to create some scale for the image. Since we paddled part of the river the day before I had already some ideas where to stop. By using the reflections of the bluffs and rocks on the water as part of the composition I tried to give the scene in these photos a romantic touch.

We have paddled only a few sections of the Upper Iowa River yet, but there is a lot more to explore and we really want to go back there. And the dog? Well, Cooper “The Kayak-Hund” decided to jump out of the boat into the water a couple times, always at moments when he was not supposed to do it… But this is the fun you have when a dog is on board… ;-)

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.

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... ;-)

Nature clicks #174 - Double-crested Cormorant

 

The Double-crested Cormorant is a summer resident in the Mississippi Valley. It seems that a few may use the Green Island Wetlands as their breeding grounds. At least I see more of them than during the years before. That doesn't mean it is easy to make a photo of this bird. Quite often they take off as soon they see something approaching, like a car, and many times they were gone even before I came in a reasonable distance for a picture. The grass beside the gravel roads that go through the wetlands is very tall at the moment and maybe this helped to camouflage my approach this time. I was able to make a few clicks while the cormorant was still swimming but it finally took off. At most places in the wetlands you have to shoot from slightly above the water level and if the sky puts nasty reflections on the water the pictures do not look very flattering. Here I was lucky that the cormorant had just entered an area without reflections of the sky.

Love those evenings...

I wrote two days ago that I love the evenings on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake. Landscape photography is probably much more rewarding during the winter and spring because of great clouds that move fast over the lake and along the surrounding mountains. If you like feel free to click HERE to see what I mean.

However, the wind calmed down Thursday night and even some clouds moved in. A sunset is always nice but it is the hour after it that I enjoy the most for landscape photography. The little marina on the island was my anchor for this image with great reflections on the salty water. The Carl Zeiss Distagon T*, 35mm / f2 ZF is a wonderful sharp lens for this kind of photography. It has manual focus, something that many people probably not even consider anymore, but the quality of this lens is hard to beat. Still more to come...