Steven Bourelle Digital Arts

As you’re driving along the shore of Lake Michigan just north of Kenosha WI, you come upon this cool view of the harbor area to the south. I’ve loved this view since the first time I saw it.

On this day it was quite beautiful with the stormy clouds flying in the air and the play of light and shadows on the water. I didn’t even notice this shot at first. There were five kite boarders on the lake and I was photographing them. I happen to look to my right just in time to catch this image. Luckily I had just changed from my telephoto lens to a wider angle one when I saw it.

I guess the lesson learned is to always have your head on swivel and be looking all around. If I had stayed focused on closeups of the kite boarders I most would most likely have missed this beautiful scene off in the distance.

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This photo is of the Humpback Covered Bridge in Covington,Virginia. We stopped there on our trip to Norfolk back in March. I hadn’t posted any of the pictures from that day because I wasn’t real happy with them, but tonight when I looked at this image I saw something in it that I hadn’t seen before and this black and white was born.

This bridge was built in 1857 and remained in public use until 1929. In 1953 the bridge was reconditioned and the land around it was purchased and turned into a park. This is one of the few remaining “humpback” (Meaning the middle is higher than the sides.) covered bridges in the country and is the oldest covered bridge in Virginia.

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Here’s the next image in my 35mm slide scan series. Before I put it on Flickr last night, it had never been seen online. It’s also my newest black and white, well sort of anyway.

This photo, taken at the Eureka Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park, is actually the very first black and white that I made in Photoshop back in 1999. I don’t know if it’s still there, but there use to be a print of it hanging in Speed of Light Photo in Mammoth Lakes. I have no idea what happened to the original black and white file of this image, so I remade it last night.

Eureka Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park, CA

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How often do you think about photography and the photos that you take? I do it all the time. Not a day goes by that some thought about photography doesn’t pop into my head. Many times these thoughts are ideas, or visualizations, about pictures that I want to take when the conditions are right for a certain subject

Take this picture of the Wind Point Lighthouse along Lake Michigan in Racine, WI for example. Not to long ago I read a blog post by Greg Russell on his website Alpenglow Images. The post is titled House on Fire ruin – A Vertical Panorama and it’s about how he shot a vertical panorama by stitching together three horizontal pictures. The minute I finished the post I knew the subject I wanted to try this technique on, Wind Point Lighthouse.

Having shot the lighthouse many times, under many different and conditions, I knew in my mind the composition I wanted and the conditions that I wanted to take it in. Let the waiting game begin….

About a week later the conditions I wanted came to be. We had been out shooting an old mill in Illinois when, on the way home, I realized the conditions were perfect for my lighthouse shot. So we drove out there and I took my three horizontal pictures of the lighthouse. When I got home and stitched the pictures together, I was blown away by the result. There in front of me was not only the image I had envisioned, but something much nicer. This was the best picture I had ever taken of the light.

Then another vision came into my head, I saw this picture in black and white. I immediately began to work on the black and white version that I saw in my mind. Everything fell together nicely and within an hour I had this image.

I find that as I get older and more experienced in photography, I’m pre-visualizing photos much more. I still love going out, being spontaneous and taking what Mother Nature gives me, but there is a certain, wonderful feeling when you see an image in your mind, wait for the right conditions, and then make it a reality.

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