Michigan: Part 4

OK, one more picture of Michigan. I hadn't really noticed this one until I was showing some pictures to Brad Spence, and he liked this one. It's pretty simple, and I guess it never really stood out against the other 400 or so pictures I took that week, but the more I look at it the more I like it. It's a 10 second exposure (with a tripod of course) taken after the sun had been down for a while, so it looked a lot darker to the naked eye than it looks here. The water was pretty calm anyway, but the long exposure makes it look even smoother.

ISO: 200
Exposure: 10.0 sec
Aperture: f/14.0
Focal Length: 18mm (35mm equivalent = 27mm)

Michigan: Part 3

While on the lake I had some fun with fire and long exposures.

We built a fire on the beach one night.

When you throw balsam branches on the fire, you get a lot of sparks.

Here's a shot of those sparks flying through the air.
1.6 second exposure

More flying sparks. Click on the picture to get a closer look and you can see large "ribbons" of light from some larger pieces of ash that flew from the fire.
1 second exposure

My brother waving a burning branch in the air. (don't blame him, I told him to do it)
5 second esposure

This is a shot of the dock illuminated by the fire. I used a tripod and did a 10 second exposure. I used automatic ISO so it was taken at ISO-560. I should have manually set it to 200 (the lowest setting on the D40) which would have resulted in less noise in the image.

Picture of the sky. Click on it to see the large version, and you'll be able to see the stars.
30 second exposure

Michigan: Part 2

Here are some pictures from our trip to Michigan.
I'll try not to post any that Katie's already posted.


This is the view of Wilderness Bay from the end of the dock.
You can see the Sheppard's dock that I mentioned in my last post.

The view of the bay from the base of our dock.

Thought this was a cool picture of the sun glistening across the water.

The american flag at the base of our dock.
This is an un-retouched photo. The sky really was that blue.

The sun setting across the bay.

Another shot of the sunset from the end of the dock.

The afterglow.

Michigan: Part 1

These are the Les Cheneaux Islands, where we went on vacation last week. It's a group of islands on Lake Huron in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, part of the towns of Hessel & Cedarville. I've been going up there since I was six months old (and lived there for a year and a half then). The biggest island is Marquette, which is where we stayed. If you look real close you'll see a white box drawn around part of the island - the next picture is a close-up of that area.

As you can see from the satellite images, there's not a lot of development on the island, which is really nice if you like natural stuff. There are no roads, just walking trails through the woods You may be able to make out a few lines running through the island that look like roads, but those are the clearings cut for the electrical power lines. Again, we're going to zoom into the liitle white box to have a closer look.

The only access is by boat, so most every cabin has a dock. In this picture you can see our cabin, named Foxfire after the glowing wood that can be found in the surrounding woods. In the upper left of the image is the Sheppard's dock & boathouse, which can be seen in a lot of the sunset pictures I'll post later. As a point of reference, the docks are roughly 400 ft apart. It this image you can also clearly see the distinct drop-off in the water. So that's the background info, soon I'll post some more interesting pictures.