fstopandsee

Covered in moss and covered in light makes for quite the combo.

I love taking photos when I travel, and my trip to the Midwest this year had some great opportunities to do just that! The sky seemed clear earlier in the evening, but later crazy lightning streaked almost sideways across the sky for at least 45 mins. The weather is just more exciting in the Midwest!

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.

Pebble Beach on Washington Island has many rocks, but you can’t take any of them home! That would be against the rules. Instead I just enjoyed all the layers of color in the water.

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!

This might not be what you think of during the summer, but this was a common scene when I was a kid. Corn lined the country roads as far as you could see. Later this week is the last day of summer, which brought back memories of days that looked a lot like this.

Normally I’d worry that clouds like these meant a storm was coming. After a day of swimming and boating on the lake, I wasn’t concerned that this crazy sky would ruin the day as we’d already had our fun.