There are 129 lighthouses in the State of Michigan and during some recent windy conditions I decided to visit one nearby. It’s called Point Betsie lighthouse and marks a point and shoal area on the Lake Michigan shoreline.
The winds had been out of the south or southwest most of the day and had the lake kicked up pretty high. The waves were crashing into the break walls at nearby Frankfort so I thought I’d go check out the action at the lighthouse. When Karen and I got there earlier in the day, the winds were still gusting into the 30’s and we were getting sandblasted by the wind driven sand. I didn’t even pull the camera out. Nothing worse than sand in your camera gear. We decided to try again later that evening. The winds were supposed to diminish as evening approached.
I wanted to take advantage of the golden hour light on the lighthouse so we went back around an hour before sunset. There weren’t a lot of vantage points to shoot from without getting into the water. That wasn’t going to happen with this wave action. Karen found a spot where I could catch the breaking waves and also balance the lighthouse in the composition with the surf. It looks like I was in the water from this vantage point but the shoreline curved out to a small point for me to stand on. The waves were breaking pretty close to my tripod.
I stood there for quite awhile timing the waves and firing away at 5 frames per second whenever a big wave hit the break wall. This image was towards the last series of shots I took. The sun was getting very close to the horizon and was casting a nice warm glow on the shoreline and the breaking waves. For photographers this is an important time of the day. Golden hour. Roughly an hour before sunset or after sunrise give or take. The quality and warmth of the light illuminates landscapes in a very pleasing way and the harsh shadows of the mid day sun are gone. Since the light was starting to fade I did boost the ISO to 400 so that I could get a fast shutter speed at f/8. I wanted to freeze the breaking waves and surf.
I had to do a fair amount of post processing to bring the image to what you see here. First, there were a lot of people around as this is a popular sunset location. Fortunately they’re fairly easy to remove in Photoshop using the clone stamp tool but it does take some time to do it right. Second, I brought out the color on the breaking waves and shore break using some curve layers and a brightness/contrast layer. A simple mask on this contrast layer allowed me to adjust these characteristics on just the breaking water. For most of my images I use the Color Efex Pro 4 filter from Google’s Nik Collection to add a little dynamic contrast to the scene. Lastly I did some noise reduction using the Dfine module in Google’s Nik collection.
Bad weather can be good times for landscapes. Just before a storm hits or just as a storm is clearing can produce some dramatic skies or waves or other atmospheric conditions that make for good photographs. Just gotta get out there.
Nikon D810 with Nikkor 70-200 @ 100mm. f/8 at 1/400 sec. ISO 400
