The history of this light is very interesting. It was originally built in 1855 on a bluff 100 feet east of it’s present location. The first tower was 28 feet in height, but because it was on the bluff, it towered 107 feet above Lake Michigan.

In the 1870′s, shore erosion along the bluff caused 16 feet of the lighthouse’s front yard to fall to the the beach below, so the government decided to rebuild the lighthouse 100 feet farther inland. The new lighthouse was finished in 1887 and was 39 feet tall. The keepers quarters were built the next year in 1888.

At the turn of the century another problem hit the lighthouse, the trees in Lake Park began to block the light and ships on the lake could no longer see it. So instead of cutting the trees down, congress in all of it’s wisdom, stopped funding for the lighthouse and it was shut down in 1907. Later that year an organization in Milwaukee went to work to get the light back on. In 1909 a bill was passed and in 1912 work began on a 35 foot steel structure next to the lighthouse. When that structure was finished, the old light tower and it’s lens were rebuilt on top of it to create the 74 foot tower we see today. The lighthouse remained in operation by the US Coast Guard until 1994. The lighthouse is currently owned by Milwaukee County and leased by the North Point Lighthouse Friends.

This photo didn’t take much thought, the composition was right there in front of me. The trees grow in such a way that the lighthouse is perfectly framed by them. Whether the trees grow like that naturally, or have been trimmed that way, I don’t know. It sure makes for a great photo though.

I knew immediately that this was going to be a black and white image. I wasn’t looking to give it an old time feel, I just wanted a nice black and white photo. The contrast of the white house and tower work great with the dark trees. Though the sky is overcast and washed out, it isn’t as much of an issue in black and white as it is in color. I really like how this image turned out.

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The Bounty is a replica of the original Bounty that was part of the British Navy in 1787. She was built in 1960 for MGM Studios for the movie Mutiny on the Bounty. The original drawings from the British admiralty archives were used in the building of the ship. She is currently owned by the HMS Bounty Organization LLC, and is used for educational purposes and the teaching of square rigged sailing.

The Bounty has also been in many other movies. She played a roll in Pirates of the Caribbean II, and was also in the modern version of Treasure Island, just to mention a couple.

My next rendezvous with the Bounty will be in Port Washington this weekend. I’m so looking forward to seeing her close up and walking her decks. I’m sure there are hundreds of photos just waiting to be taken on the wonderful ship.

To learn more about the HMS Bounty, visit her web site at TallShipBounty.org

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Making a black and white image of this photo has been an interesting project for me. I’ve worked on it off and on for months, thinking all along that it would make a great mono chrome image, but never finding  that special combination of contrast, light and emotion that makes black and white so special.

I think one of the problems had to do with the color version of this image, I really like it. It’s a very nice picture with lots of fall color in it. So taking away that color was a difficult thing to do. Yet something kept telling me that this would make a great black and white.

A couple of nights ago I began playing with the picture again, and once again I couldn’t find what I wanted. I even resorted to using some Lightroom presets, but nothing worked. Then I tried something that I’ve been doing with my renaissance faire portraits but have never done with a landscape, I washed out the edges with a whitish vignette. The image jumped off the monitor at me!  There it was, this is what I had been searching for. The vignette laid the groundwork for all that was to follow and within an hour I had my mono chrome version of the covered bridge.

I guess the lesson learned is to always experiment because you never know what will work.

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.

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.

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

]]> http://sbdigitalarts.com/erureka-sand-dunes/feed/ 1 http://sbdigitalarts.com/the-art-of-visualization/ http://sbdigitalarts.com/the-art-of-visualization/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:31:38 +0000 Steven http://sbdigitalarts.com/?p=499 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.

Last night I was glancing through some  older photos when this shot of the Minarets, in California’s Sierra Nevada, caught my attention. Now, I’ve had this image for 5 years and I’ve never imagined it as anything other than a color image, but when I looked at  it last night, I immediately saw it as a black and white and knew exactly how I wanted it to look.

It’s moments of inspiration like this, that keep my love of photography so strong. With the modern digital dark room anything is possible, and it’s a wonderful feeling to know that at any time one of my older images can be reborn.

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When I shot this photo last November, I remember liking the way the main elements in the image contrasted. To me, the chaotic nature of the tree branches working with the simplicity of the tree trunks and snow covered ground create a very interesting scene. That contrast didn’t show up to well in the color version, but in the black and white it’s very powerful.

When I began working on the black and white image I had a hard time getting the scene to look like I wanted it. The tree trunks kept going black on me and the branches had way to much contrast. I also had problems with the snow on the ground wanting to blow out and go pure white. I was getting  pretty frustrated and  considered giving up on the image. That’s when I had an idea that I had to try. I thought maybe  if I did an HDR of the color image and then turn that into black and white I could keep some detail in the tree trunks and the snow. It worked nicely. Not only did the HDR keep the snow from blowing out, it also preserved the shadows on the ground that are such an important part of the image.

I then proceeded to process the image the way I do all of my black and white images. In Photoshop, I use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro and adjustment layers to get the look I want, (Someday I’ll have to do a tutorial on my B&W technique.)

We drove 150 miles, one way, just to see this beautiful little mill. It was worth every mile. When we got there it was very cloudy, perfect conditions for shooting the mill. The sun came out a little later and the scene became way to contrasty. Along with the mill there is an old blacksmith building, a bunch of grinding stones and three old rusty turbines.

In processing this image I did something I’ve never done before. I used Lightroom’s develop presets. Normally when I work on a black and white, or in this case sepia image, I do all the work in Photoshop and use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efexs Pro and adjustment layers. I wanted to do a black and white image of this scene and for some reason I started clicking on the presets. When I clicked on the sepia one I liked what I saw, then I clicked on a couple more and things really got interesting. I played around with the contrast, added a vignette and then exported the image.

Then I opened it up in Photoshop and continued to play around with it. I used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to add a little more vignette and to reposition it a little. I also did some burn work here and there and did some more contrast work with adjustment layers.

Before we left on this trip, I had a vision in my mind of the image I wanted from the mill. This image is pretty close to what I saw in my mind. It’s almost as if my subconscious knew what I wanted and clicked on the right Lightroom presets to give it to me.