Roadtrip Images

While working on the sailboat to get it ready for spring launch, I still plan to get out and make photographs. It can’t be all work. Gotta have a little play in there too. Case in point is this recent image from Manistee, MI which is near where we’re working on the boat.

The sky looked promising that evening so I decided to drive to the lake shore and see what might develop. Before I left I took some time and opened up the Photographer’s Ephemeris app. I have this app listed in the resources section of the website and I use it often. The image below is the app with the location set at the pier heads of the Manistee harbor entrance and lighthouse. The orange line is where the sun will set in relation to the pin I set at the beach. This told me that the sunset will line up with the lighthouse when I’m standing on the pier.

The yellow line is for sunrise, the blue lines are for moon rise and moon set. The app has lots of data so it’s a very useful tool for doing research on your shoots before you head out.

From a composition standpoint the pier makes an obvious leading line into the image so that’s what I initially sought out when I got there. I wanted the lighthouse and the sunset to coincide so that meant either standing on the pier or right next to it. Since the pier makes a jog to the right it looked better for it to be on the left side of the image and angling into the picture. If it started out in the bottom middle then it would look like it was turning out of the frame to the right. That would tend to draw your eye out of the image rather than into the sunset. The catwalk makes a nice vanishing point perspective out to the lighthouse to give the image some depth. This was a single image capture with no filters. The light was pretty balanced between the foreground and sky so no special techniques were needed.

The lake is still pretty cold this early in the year and the wind was off the water. It was chilly standing out there. The fishermen were out however and some were fishing off the pier. One guy and his wife were heading out as I was setting up my tripod. He just had to tell me that he’d been around the lakes for 44 years and had seen so many sunsets he was sick of them. “They’re all the same” he declared. I just smiled and said “you’re not looking hard enough then”. He gave me this crazy look and turned around to keep walking out on the pier. Pretty sad to hear that he’d seen so many of God’s wonderful creations that he was sick of them. Whatever, it takes all kinds.

Sunsets. I think they’re all different and I never grow tired of them.

Nikon D810, Nikkor 16-35mm @ 35mm.  f/8.0 @ 1/4sec, ISO 31