This wasn’t the shot I was going for but it was the shot that I got! I was playing around with my ND filter to smooth out the waves and make the lake look misty. I got a little bit of that effect, but ended up making the picture more about the sunstar I was able to capture shortly after sunrise. The smoother water also lets you see the rocks above and below the surface clearly.
What’s a Talus Cave? Am I making up a whole new type of cave for my enjoyment? No, I am not. This is a unique cave made by boulders falling into a deep canyon, leaving an open space below. People walk through this cave, and under boulders hanging above your head, for fun. Also bats live in these caves. Good times.
I’m already mentally scoping out photo spots for my trip to Wisconsin this Christmas. Until then, I’ll have to settle for editing this icy image from last year. The combination of the sunrise and the ice formations from the waves crashing at Cave Point almost made it feel like being on another planet.
I spent a long time out in the dark to get this photo, but the good news is I had great company to make the time fly by! This isn’t the first time I’ve done star trails, but it is the first time I managed to get the North Star in the shot to make the movement look circular. In the end the wet feet and worrying about my camera ending up in the lake when I heard a big wave crash were all worth it.
Sunrise photos take work. Sometime it is just getting up when you don’t want to, but this time it was standing around in some chilly weather waiting for the sun to show up that took effort. The clouds were low on the horizon so it took a little extra time for the sun to find a gap in the clouds and light up the icicles just right.
I didn’t get my favorite puffy clouds for this cold sunrise, I got something much better. These branches at the edge of the rocks at Cave Point had survived the spray from some heavy waves, and were now covered in ice. The rising sun lit them up just right to show this crazy translucent pattern. Thankfully I didn’t slide into the icy water while getting this shot!
I took some photos in the Lava River Cave with a flash that I’m sure were very bright to the people behind us. Those didn’t turn out that great. For this photo, I probably just looked like a patient guy with a camera waiting for people to walk by to take the shot. Little did they know they were all unrecognizable and free labor to create the light trails for this photo.
This was the first thing I saw after emerging from a cave dive in Mexico. The cave was called Kukulkan. True, it was the way we came in, but from this vantage point I was still in the water after swimming through caves, and it looked quite different. I can’t say I was in a hurry to get out of this place, but the effect of the light at the end of the tunnel got my attention.
A diver in front of me on a cave dive in Mexico. This isn’t a technically great shot, it is a little blurry and funky, but I really like the effect that it has. It represents what scuba diving through this part of the the cave was like. It was dark and cold, and it felt like you just had to keep focusing on the one light in front of you and keep going.
This was taken while scuba diving in a cenote in Mexico. A cenote is an underground cave with fresh water flowing through it. They can continue on for miles and miles underground with occasional rocky cave like openings. There isn’t much in the way of wildlife down here, but cenote diving makes up for that with the interesting rock formations and effects from the light that you get from diving in a dark cave. This was my first time diving in a cenote and I was very impressed! What you see in the top of the frame is the surface of the water sending light ripples down into the water below.
