For breakfast we headed back north into Ephraim. There we found a little breakfast place called The Chefs Hat Café (#48 on the map), I say found, it was the first place we became across. If you are in the area though, having only tried this one place for breakfast, I can tell you, its the best around. I think we all had some combination of eggs bacon and potatoes, but the special sauce came in the form of blueberry scones! They come with breakfast if you choose them over toast and believe me, you gotta go scones, its the only way! Needless to say we returned to this place on Sunday morning, mainly for the scones!

After breakfast we headed to the Peninsula state park, a park that we both learnt ourselves and were told later, was the busiest state park in the midwest! Still there is a reason for that, one of many was the lighthouse which we headed straight for.

At the lighthouse, I took some of the longest exposures ever, some as long as ten minutes or more, needed no ND filters though…. Tourist, wait, wait, shoot, aaa another one crept into the frame, wait wait, shoot . I can’t complain, we were tourists to. Images of the Lighthouse to follow once processed.

After the Lighthouse we walked across the road; quite literally, to shoot the ‘forget me not’ covered woodland floor. I don’t shoot many flowers in a non-macro setting, so flowers and 24mm is quite a challenge for me, we’ll see how that turned out, for sure it was a photo op!

Josh and myself briefly shot some of the silver birches which will be awesome in the fall, after which time it was time to head south to check out Fish Creek as a potential Sunset location and to get something to eat for lunch given it was about 2pm now, the fog was still holding. Now we were hoping it would burn off in time for Sunset, no sign of that happening!

To be continued…

I’m documenting this Door County trip as much for my own purposes as anything. We’ll for sure be planning another trip there for the fall colours, so I wanna make sure I remember everything about this first trip, what worked, what didn’t, part of that is getting the camera bag right, here is what I took:

• Gitzo Tripod + RRS BH55 head
• Canon 5D mark II
• Canon 35 f1.4 L
• Canon 24 f3.5 TS/E L II
• Canon 17-40 f4 L
• Canon 24-70 f2.8 L
• Canon 70-200 f4 IS L
• LensBaby Composer
• 1.4 Teleconverter
• Canon D500 Closeup Filter
• Filters (ND 10stop, ND 3stop, Circular Polarizer 82 & 105mm, ND Grads)

I used all lenses except the LensBaby. I used the 17-40 about 80% of the time, the TS/E about 15% and the rest split between the 24-70, 70-200 & 35. I think I would have used the TS/E about 60% of the time had my adapters arrived for the Lee Filter holder. As it is my Circular Polarizer doesn’t fit that great on the Cokin 4×4 filter holder, and I didn’t fancy dropping my 105mm Circular Polarizer anywhere, but especially not in the water, which we were close to for much of Saturday, hopefully by the time I next visit Door County, my 82mm adapter for the Lee Filter holder will have arrived, allowing me to use the Circular Polarizer, ND Grad and 10 stop all together, or in any combination there of.

That said, the 17-40 is an amazing lens, excellent landscape photographers lens, not that fast, but when you’re mainly shooting at f11 and above, f2.8 versus f4 doesn’t make much of a difference. I did find myself wanting a little a little wider sometimes than 17mm, had my filters on the TS/E been more operational, that would have solved that problem via a 3shot panorama stitch; still, love the 17-40, it hardly left my camera.

The Circular Polarizer was a must for this trip at least, highly effective in cutting the reflections on the water and on the woodland foliage.

Batteries were a constant pain point for me. I only have 2 for the mkII, I use liveview 100% for landscape photography now to adjust manual focus, so it was eating batteries. Still I am sure when I bought the camera I shot in minus 20f conditions all day on one battery, with a short lunch time recharge and live view. Luckily the hotel wasn’t that far, so between each location I’d drop a battery off for charging and pickup a freshly charged battery. That almost caught me short on Saturday evening when we arrived at our sunset location, I found I had only 24% battery life left, so I had to hastily drive back to the hotel to swap batteries.

I had enough memory cards, using three 8Gb cards over the day and a half’s worth of shooting, about 750 images in total.

On the whole, I think I got the bag right, there were a couple of wild bird photo ops which the 400L would have been useful for, thats about it.

3.45am soon arrived and after a quick slurp of coffee brewed from the night before, we were on the road to Cave Point. We were at the correct location this time before 4.45am; predawn, and ready to shoot shortly thereafter. We couldn’t really see what we were going to shoot as the fog was thick, still we started. As the morning progressed, the light improved, though we didn’t get to see the sun until much later in the day. As previous experience had taught us though, fog can burn off quickly; in minutes, or presents a unique opportunity for photography, especially in a place like Cave Point where the fresh water is crystal clear with no pollution, or garbage to be seen and the scenery magnificent.

Slowly we made our way southwards photographing every angle we could find. From the carpark, there is a woodland path which closely follows along the top of the rocky bluffs and outcrops, you can’t get down to the water all the time from the path, but there are a good number of outlooks and places where you can clamber down using your hands, feet and knees, quite interesting while carrying a camera bag and tripod. Photo opportunities are endless, speaking for myself I know I only covered a small percentage of Cave Point and only time will tell if I did that well enough.

Other than the AWOL sun, everything was going to plan, there was no equipment hiccups for anyone, a slight scare for myself was that I thought I had left my cable release at home, luckily it was just not in it’s usual pocket of the camera bag, that would have meant no long exposure shots for me.

Another lesson learnt though, if it’s foggy head for wooded areas, the fog really works well  when combined with trees and the dampness associated with the fog helps add contrast and saturation to the foliage, that coupled with a circular polarizer and you’re in business.

We eventually made it to the visitors center where I had been the night before and decided to head back to grab some breakfast, by now it was about 9.30am. On getting back to the carpark, the place was full of fellow tourists now, to us it felt like the middle of the day, it’s was just beginning though for most people.

The fog was still present, ebbing and flowing through the morning, but generally showing no signs of going anywhere, by this point we were praying it would stay with us for the day, it was diffusing shadows nicely allowing us to shoot where we wanted as long as we wanted which was a huge advantage, our original plan was to take naps in the middle of the day while the sun was too harsh to photograph, but at 9.30am there was still plenty of shoot time for us, but not before breakfast!

To be continued…

After seeing many photos from many photographers of Door County a few of us finally decided to organize a weekend photography trip there. The weekend of the hotel booking arrived and it was time to head north, approximately 300 miles north straight up the lake. The weather didn’t look great on the Friday and due to work commitments we each set off separately at separate times. I headed up at lunch time, figuring I’d have some light when I got there to scout out a morning shoot location, given that sunrise at this time of year is about 5.15am I knew there would be no time to hang around in the morning!

Trip went pretty smoothly, made good headway past Chicago and through Milwaukee. Shortly after that though the weather really turned, visibility was down to about quarter of a mile or less for much of the trip north of Milwaukee right up until about 20 miles south of Sister Bay in Door County; our destination.

After stopping at Wilson’s for something eat I made it to the hotel, dropped my bag then headed straight out to scout out Cana Island Lighthouse as a possible sunrise location. I had heard you had to get wet feet to get onto the island, so I went prepared – shorts and sandals; less to get wet! But this is America, a single track road to the island had been built to alleviate wet feet. The light was beginning to fade already, but there was enough time for me to scout the location, realize that as awesome as it would be if there was a good sunrise, it had limited photo opportunities, which given we only had two sunrises and a sunset to take advantage of, we had to maximize photo ops.

From there I speedily headed 10 miles south to Cave point for the next scouting target. As fast as I was driving, the light had pretty much gone leaving me in dim twilight to work out if the location was better. As it was I took a wrong turn and ended up at the Cave point visitor center which on reviewing via google maps, was not the place to head for in the morning, but still the scouting trip was the time to make such a mistake.

By the time everyone arrived, it was 11pm, which left only 4 hours 45 minutes to wake up time. We had to get to Cave Point for 4.45am; pre dawn, in order to be in place for sunrise. The fact that I couldn’t see any stars in the sky at 11pm was a concern for the morning, still as they say, you have to be in it to win it, so with alarms set for 3.45am, we turned in with the hope of a clear morning for sunrise shooting.

To be continued…

This weekend I’ll be heading up to Door County,WI for a photography weekend with three other photographers. This is something we’ve talked about doing for a long time and finally got around to organizing the weekend, well I say organize, I mean book a couple of hotel rooms for a couple of nights!

We’ll all be heading up there at various times on Friday (tomorrow) and heading back on Sunday, but that should hopefully give us two sunsets and two sunrise opportunities, so far the weather looks to be playing our game too!

This will be my first time to Door county, so hopefully a productive one, my MO consist of photos and scouting camp grounds for later return trips with the family

Location:W Spring Ave,Naperville,United States

Version v1.1.1 (free update to previous versions) of PerfectShot is in Apples approval queue. This update adds labels to the Filter Strength & Brackets selector and adds native iPad support.

Take care
Jonathan

Went over to the Joliet Iron & Steel works with a good buddy and excellent photogapher – Mark Baldwin. Lately we’ve been hitting the road to go further afield at 4.30am, so this local jaunt felt quite relaxed, even got to lay in a bit and we still made it there for 7am. As we had suspected, the park was open at 7am even though it states that it doesn’t open till 8am, there was a chain across the parking lot entrance, but it wasn’t in use. Had this not been the first time we’d visited this site, we probably wouldn’t have bothered, the light was terrible, nothing in the sky at all, but it was close, not cold and dry, so we checked it out anyway. There are some shots in this place, just not sure I got them today, I think once the snow has gone and perhaps with a little more colour in the sky the shots would be better, as it is I think more intimate detail shots were the way to go on this occasion, basically anything that didn’t include the sky. I did manage a few shots worthy of processing, the colours in the bricks are amazing, but the remnants of snow made framing difficult.

Across the road was a different story, some really colourful old disused factories which would make for some amazing photographs, unfortunately one end of the factory was still in use, and thus the whole place was fenced and gaurded off with security; shame, especially as in trying to see if there was an easy way in I managed to add a nice shiny bolt to my front right car tyre. It looked to be lodged in the tyre very well, so we drove on it home rather than attempt to pull it out, we made it home and the car is in the shop as we speak .

For a couple of hours today it looked like I might be making a 1am trip up the coast to north Wisconsin to get to Cave Point in time for pre dawn at about 6.30am tomorrow (Sunday), thats a 5 1/2hr drive from Naperville, then sanity dawned and I decided to save that one for another day, had I not had to work on Monday I’d have probably gone, good luck up there Josh, sure you’ll get some awesome shots and I’ll wish I’d joined you!

Instead a few of us are gonna be checking out the more local, now defunct Joliet Iron & Steel Works. From my flickr scouting there looks to be some interesting stuff there, but not too many good shots, so I’m wondering if this is target rich for photography or not, we’ll see, not too far away to find out, the bigger issue is knowing which set of lenses to take, usually when this happens I end up taking every lens except for the one I needed! We’ll see. We plan to be there for 7am, the place opens at 8am, but doesn’t look like entry is blocked before there, hopefully the morning light will be a bit better than today and worse case we’ll know if this place is worth a revisit or not!

Was lucky enough to have the opportunity of making the most of the long weekend, celebrated Valentines Day on Saturday with Stephanie and then met up with flickr contact Andrew who I’d met the week before and had been following his photo stream for a while.

I set off from my house at 4.30am, collected Andrew on the way, then hit I55 towards Chicago, next stop Michigan City Lighthouse, Indiana. We made it there for approx 6.30am, bang on schedule for the sunrise, not a minute too late actually as the sun was already on the move. Sunrise is a difficult subject on the south & eastern side of Lake Michigan as it rises over the land rather than over the water, and most often, the skyline of the land is not something you want in a photo in this case! The Michigan City lighthouse is great for sunrise however as you can get to the sun lit side of it quite easily, this time of year there is so much ice that you can happily walk well out into what is the lake in the summer to get some unique angles on the lighthouse…

Once the sun was starting to become harsh, we made a move and headed for Big Red in Holland, Michigan. The weather looked good, but everything we’d read was telling us it should be cloudy, though experience told us that the weather forecasts are often not accurate, especially after looking closely at the radar map the night before, still we felt we needed to move while we had the light.

We jetted up the interstate into Michigan and northwards along the east side of Lake Michigan, slowing only for the Highway Patrol . Three miles from Big Red and it was starting to cloud over, two miles from Big Red and it was a complete snow blizzard white out, so close! We made a uturn and headed back south towards Saint Josephs, we felt we were in a bit of a race now as the clouds where moving south.

We beat the weather to South Haven, but the subject was a little less interesting that Michigan City, very little ice also compared to the previous year, still we made a few photos then hit a diner for lunch, we knew we were not gonna outrun the weather for much longer, so just went with it…

Next and final stop was Saint Josephs which is a very similar design to Michigan City, by now the clouds had caught us, not so bad though as there was some texture in them, Black & White photos seemed like an obvious choice. Ironically other than the clouds, Saint Josephs was quite civilized, there was little ice, the concrete break water was dry, a little windy, but actually quite pleasant shooting conditions. There was plenty of movement in the clouds for long exposures also…

From here we headed home in time for dinner in the end, though we nearly got stuck in Michigan, we had got chatting away and I didn’t notice the gas warning gauge, luckily we were only a couple of miles form a gas station, I think we had 1/2 a gallon left in the tank! A long day but a pretty productive day, next time Big Red, next time!!!

Not much time for any Landscape shooting this weekend, but after watching United resoundingly beat Arsenal today, Cole and myself headed to the Arb to check out the Husky dogs and a demonstration of sled pulling, well kind of, there wasnt much snow, so they were pulling bike like contraptions, as good as it was in Coles eyes it didn’t compare to the climbing frames that he knew the Arb had on offer, so we quickly headed over to the expansive play area. It really is true that kids don’t feel the cold, we spent a full two hours there, I just couldn’t feel my feet, but I got a few shots of Cole out of the afternoon, first of 2010 in fact! Took the 5DmkII with the 135L attached, the snow is awesome for fill light when the sun is out.

As for Ben, he wasn’t a happy camper today and instead spent the afternoon sleeping off a cold!