Great subject for overcast day

 

We drove by several times at the Arched Bridge in Somesville on Desert Island, Maine. It is a busy place because most tourists like to visit and snap a picture. We chose to stop there on the only "bad weather day". This was actually a good decision. First the light on this wonderful bridge and the little museum was very soft because of the heavy overcast, and second, there were a lot less people than we have seen on other days. With other words, it wasn't so difficult to make an image without someone in the frame. The small village of Somesville is a National Historic District and the bridge is not the only interesting structure there. Overall we saw very few houses in Maine that were not in good shape. If you go there, don't miss to have a look in the little museum. It is a nice display of the local history.

The top image needs actually a little more head room above the roof. I have a few more photos of the bridge without that little flaw, but really liked the reflections on the water in this one the best. Walking around and working the subject a little more led finally to photos two and three. They leave no doubt about what time of the season we visited this nice piece of architecture, and I can tell you, I didn't miss the sun a bit this day...

Fall colors 2013

 

I like to interrupt my stories about Maine for the results of some actual photography. We are able to postpone all kind of events but we can't keep the progress of the season on hold. It was obviously that here in Eastern Iowa the fall colors are at their peak. We don't know if there will be any leaf left next weekend but I still hope so. If we "camera owners" wanted to catch the essence of the season we had to go out and shoot this weekend, no matter how bad the weather was. It was actually not too bad, a little too much gray in the sky, but the colors of autumn have definitely been there. Because there are too many trees that are bare already, the key for success was to extract the colors optically from the surrounding area and the background.

I went to the White Pine Hollow State Preserve, a nature area only a few miles west from our home, to give it a try. This is as good as a National Park. You have to walk in, there is no road going through, and I haven't met a single soul all afternoon there. If you walk down the path from the parking lot on the East side, you end up in a canyon that has been carved by a river. It is wild, there is a lot of dead wood, but if you open your eyes you may find the colors of fall in front of a good background.

While checking out a ravine that leads to the bottom of the canyon, I found this wonderful looking mushroom growing on a tree. I removed a few dead leaves for this shot and mounted the best lens for detail shots in my bag, the Carl Zeiss Distagon T*, 35mm / f2 ZF, to the Nikon D300s. It is a lens with manual focus but I love its color rendition and unbeatable sharpness.

It is easy to look just for the big color contrast in the fall between a real blue sky and the reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves, but if there is no blue sky we need to work with the elements that are available. 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...

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.

You know it is fall, if ...

 

You know it is fall, if you pull in your driveway after a long return trip from Maine and the road is completely covered with leaves. I skip to show you a picture about this mess (I didn't even make one ;-)  ). You know it is fall after you wake up the next morning and the bird bath is covered with a thin ice crystal that looks like a Christmas ornament, a safe sign for the first night frost. And you know it is fall when at the same time the early morning sun back-lights the leaves of the grapevine on the balcony.

I love the quality of light that autumn brings us and I thought I share this with you before I may post a few more images from our travels to the coast of Maine. I hope you enjoy...

Maine style

 

I'm sure I will post more about the New England architecture here sometime but I like to share with you today this nicely decorated house that we saw this morning. We are wrapping up our trip to Maine at Acadia National Park and this image was made at Bass Harbor near our current campsite.

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... ;-)