At the far eastern end of Michigan’s fabeled Upper Peninsula, Whitefish Point marks a turn to the south in the shoreline of Kitchi-Gami, as the biggest lake narrows and leads by decrease to the St. Mary’s River and the great locks of Sault-Sainte Marie. In late-September, and 180 degrees in the opposite direction, the post-equinox sun slips away under a horizon line divided between the ancient dunes and the Big Sea Water. The often-cited gales blowing south over Superior are, indeed, a late-autumn concern, especially when they come a bit earlier than is customary, as the S.S. Edmund Fitgerald, discovered to its peril on November 10, 1975.
A focal length of 78mm, slightly short-telephoto, gave me the angle-of-view I wanted and a wee bit of magnification. An aperture of f/22 provided depth-of-field and a shutter speed of 1/15 second at ISO 100 gave me a somewhat-darker-than-medium exposure. In choosing these values, I accepted that my foreground would be a bit darker than my eyes experienced it, but the mood they created was an off-setting consideration that worked as I wished for it to.
The eastern UP sometimes seems a bit out-of-the-way from the great and colorful maple forests farther west; but its place in the beauty of Kitchi-Gami is without question.
Love this image. It goes counter to what I try to do in my sunrise/sunset photos. I normally try to show the brightness, and a lot of lighter tones. The darker clouds and beach really make this picture though. The tree remains in the foreground, even though dark, really stick out (in a good way) for me. Also like the jagged line along the seashore. Now I have another new composition style to try. Once again, it just goes to show that there are no hard and fast rules for composition. Thanks for sharing.
Good morning, Don. I could really feel the shore, the breeze, the quickly diminishing warmth of the sun. Terrific image. Who among us hasn’t attempted any number of sunsets only to be left with nothing memorable or inspiring?! But you have given us a wonderful image, especially that frothy rich band across the top. While I’d like to know more about the log on the sand, the darkness creates some intrigue. I can only imaging the spectrum of light values here was off the charts and near impossible to wrangle. Am enjoying Andre as we mosey around the Berkshires.
Hi Don, Very interesting image. My first response was, it’s very foreboding, not in a sense if evil, but of coming change. Again you show what can be done to make an image speak what you want it to say, in this case toning down the brightness of the image. It gives a feeling of suspense. It makes me look harder at the driftwood and separation of land and water. But the composition of four tiers of light and dark in the sky really, for me, make it say much. Thanks for sharing another wonderful image.
Nature can be a forbidding foe, as your image conveys. Yet, you managed to respond to that fearsomeness by creating an awesome image. Gordon Lightfoot did the same musically in the 1970’s with his song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” It topped the charts in Canada and the U.S., and Lightfoot reportedly considered it to be his finest work. That’s the triumph of the human spirit.
Hi Don, I love the composition of the scene, but was curious what it would look like if you had used an HDR series to capture a little more detail in the foreground. When we were last at Purchase Knob, I had taken an HDR series with similar elements. I must admit that it looked great on screen, but I am having difficulty printing it.
Day is done, gone the sun… It’s still a beautiful scene, but it looks like everyone left early. You stayed for the final curtain and was rewarded for it. It’s a very nice closing for a beautiful day. Thanks for sharing.
Good afternoon Everyone.Thank you very much for joining me for this conversation. I continue to be amazed at and grateful for the excellent comments and expressions that show up each week. You all are a wonderful group of observers, and if you learn as much from each other as I learn from all of you, then we are building a delightful community of creative photographers with hearts that “see” as if they were eyes.
Hey Kev. What an excellent conversation we shared this week; I’m really looking forward to our autumn adventure. I think your final comment pretty much says it all:”…there are no hard and fast rules for composition.” If an image creates a positive response and is organized in a thoughtful way, its composition is successful. This image could have been rendered more to the +side of medium and there would have been nothing untoward about that. It would certainly have created a different mood. When we get to John DiGiacomo’s observations, I’ll have a bit more to say about that; but I do appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Hi Ray. I hope you had a great trip north, and I really appreciate your kind words. I’m looking forward to hearing about your adventure. Although I had not necessarily intended that this Image would stand to this proposition, it does, and we can acknowledge that it does. One of the truisms about exposure is that when you select exposure values and determine what you wish for the overall result to be, the meter will try its best to give you that result within the tonal range of the tones in the composition. If you have an overall medium-toned composition, but you wish to photograph it darker-than-medium, the meter will comply within certain constraints: If there are lighter-than-medium tones in the composition, those tones will also be darkened, but no more than the amount of the decrease in overall exposure value. In this image the values for the tones of the sun were quite a bit lighter than medium, which meant that when I reduced the values of the medium tones like the dunes to darker-than-medium, the sun tones would be reduced to somewhere lighter than medium, but not a great deal lighter. This could also get us into talking about “dynamic range” and ways to compress it, which I did not do here; and we could talk at length about post-processing tools. I liked the mood and I decided to stay with it where the exposure was.
Hey Chuck. You have described the process very accurately: my choice of exposure values can – among other things – allow me to change the brightness of the image, thus altering the mood that the image expresses. Of course, not every image can be manipulated in this way, but many can. Suspense and foreboding are good words to describe the alterations introduced. Hope all is very well; walk in beauty.
Hey Donald. What an excellent history lesson you have shared. I so often think of the Fitz and Lightfoot when I am standing on the shore at Whitefish Point. The human spirit does, indeed, triumph; I just hope that our humility will allow us to acknowledge that Nature will ultimately make the last call, and it will be to our everlasting best interest to learn to heed that call and to live within its scale. Be well, my friend.
Hey John. First I want to say how much I have been enjoying your wonderful loon images. I believe you are fast closing in on the subject matter of an excellent book, for naturalists or children. I want to hear the outcome of your efforts to print the Purchase Knob image you mention; I recall it well from our adventure there. As I mentioned to Kevin and Ray, there are several ways the foreground of this image could have been opened up, and the overall exposure values increased as well. HDR is certainly one of those, and I think the you are becoming very proficient in its application. Next time we are together, let’s find some locations/opportunities that lend themselves to HDR applications and see what we can create. Hope all is well in the Upstate and on Long Island.
Howdy Nancy T. I really enjoyed talking with you earlier in the week. It’s good to learn that things are moving in a positive direction. No, we ain’t gonna quit now. I appreciate your suggested lesson here: Don’t leave ’til it’s over; and it’s not over ’til we say it’s over (So said John Belushi). There are rewards for hanging out ’til the end; and even if there aren’t, it’s just fun anyway. Thanks for your kind and thoughtful comments and take very good care.
Thank you all, again, for such inspirational thoughts and comments. Our sharing is the thing that uplifts me, and being in Nature makes it real. Be well.