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…