A couple photos of the surf on South Haven's north beach yesterday.
Of course - I went to see the lighthouse, hoping to find it covered in spray and ice. I guess it was a fluke of the wind direction and weather - no heavy waves on the lighthouse at all!
A couple shots of the South Haven, Michigan, lighthouse. The light in on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Today storm brought driving rains and wind gusts of up to 60 mph. The 40th anniversary of of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was just two days ago - today's storm was tame compared to the one the Fitzgerald endured but still is a reminder of how turbulent the lakes can be.
Here's an image that still speaks to me - the full moon setting over the South Haven, Michigan, lighthouse:
I made this image back in 2002 and of course on film. Got up early to get to the beach on time, and set up the camera and tripod on an ice dune along the shore, south of the lighthouse. It was -12F (-24C) - i.e. damn cold! - and a steady breeze blew off the lake. I loaded Kodak E100S (if I recall correctly) into my trusty Pentax Pz-1p and shot 3 rolls of film before the cold overwhelmed me. Back at my car I dropped my keys, and actually had a hard time picking them up and getting my fingers to work them into the door.
Another photographer showed up shortly after I arrived. Like me, he had watched the moon rise/set times on an online almanac and picked a time close to dawn when the conditions would be right for this kind of shot. (You need to shoot the moon in twilight if you want to balance the lighting between the moon, and the earth here below.) He had driven up from Indiana, considerably farther than my short trip. I don't remember his name, but we grabbed some hot coffee and breakfast at a nearby fast food joint.
The ultimate irony: the extreme temperatures were just too much for the Sigma EX 70-200 f2.8 lens I was using. When the lens chilled down the aperture opened up and would not close. In fairness to Sigma the temperatures were far below the stated operating range for the lens. So, when I picked up my film from the lab I was horrified to see that all of the frames were just blank - all but the first 3. So, here is one of three...
Lighthouses are not a subject matter that I seek out much these days, but I enjoyed photographing them in the past. I came back to this image as part of a project to rebuild my archive galleries on this website -which you can find here:
Another photo from Maryland - this is a replica of a Bay Lighthouse that is at the Marina in Cambridge, MD. This would have been a screw-pile lighthouse, built upon piles that were literally screwed into the soft bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. Unlike this one, they would have been out in the water, typically accessible only by boat. Click on the image for a larger file.
Infrared converted Pentax K10D with DA 17-70 f4 lens.
I had a little time today and a weather front was moving in, so I popped over to the beach at South Haven to see if the high winds would be making some nice wave splashes on the lighthouse there. Waves were indeed crashing and I got a few good shots. I am still experimenting with Ricoh’s Pentax K-3, and it still impresses me. These shots were taken with the K-3, my old Sigma EX 70-200 f2.8 (the non-DG and non-macro version). Hand held in high winds at ISO 800.
The wind was driving clouds in from the west, but there were a few breaks in the cloud cover. As a result the light was highly variable - sometimes the light was in full sunlight, which made the background appear exceptionally dark, other times there was only gloomy overcast everywhere.
Click on the images for larger files.
Here’s one where the sun broke out - more or less just on the lighthouse:
The waves were coming in from the NNW and they didn’t wrap around the lighthouse as much as the would have if they had be coming more due west. But I managed to get a few shots of the lighthouse wrapped in the mist of a breaking wave. Here’s one:
And while I’m enamored by Ricoh’s Pentax K-3 and the great capabilities it offers - these shots reminded me of an old shot from a decade ago, taken with a Pentax Mz-S (a camera I still use), A* 400mm f2.8 and Kodak E-100S film.
Here are a few snaps from an October trip to the South Haven Beach. It was mid October, two weeks after the B&W shots a couple of posts down, but a similar wind storm was raking the beach. This time I took the Pentax K-5.
Here’s the light at South Haven, along with some sea gulls. When the gulls saw me taking a picture they all turned to see what I was photographing - silly birds. (Click on the picture for a larger image.)
Some nice high seas:
But the rough water didn’t keep a handful of brave souls from venturing out into the surf:
There’s a flock of geese stringing along in the air just over the horizon on the left edge of the frame…
This guy managed to catch air a few times:
A few fun hours at the beach. The K5 acquitted itself remarkably well - though I’ve had it for a few months now I really haven’t used it much. The high ISO performance is remarkable - all but the first show here were taken at ISO 1600, the first one at ISO 800. (Of course, I worked a bunch of digital voodoo on all of these.) For lenses I used a Sigma EX 70-200 f 2.8 for the first and third shot, and a Sigma 135-400 f4.5 - 5.6 for the rest. I’ll be adding that to my review post sooner or later.
Last week I spent a day wandering along the Lake Michigan shore. It was windy and I stopped in South Haven and took a few snapshots of the South Haven lighthouse in the gale. I didn’t bring a digital camera, so I shot with the Pentax 6x7 - just two rolls - and then several rolls of 35mm B&W film in the Mz-S. I wanted a grainy look, and I needed fast shutter speeds, so I pushed Fuji Neopan two stops to ISO 1600.
Haven’t developed the 120 film yet, but here’s one of the better 35mm shots. The Neopan was developed in HC-110, Dilution B, 12 minutes for the 2 stop push. The grain came out real nice - smooth and not clumpy - it was a good combo.
Click on the image for a larger picture.
World pinhole day would have been last Sunday, April 24, but since that was Easter the folks how run the contest extended the time period by several days. (More about world pinhole day at http://www.pinholeday.org/)
Here’s my entry:
Of course, that is the South Haven lighthouse on the Lake Michigan Shore.
This was taken with my trusty Pentax 6x7 medium format camera with a pinhole body cap. The film used was some very old (and very expired) Kodak E100V transparency (slide) film.
I’m always trying to learn new things, so here are a few things I learned with this project:
1. The pinhole body cap does not form an entirely light proof seal against the camera body. In this shot you can see a mild light leak in the arching light areas to the left of the lighthouse. In some shots the light leaks totally whiles out the exposure. OK - I’m sure I was careless in how I mounted the body cap in a few cases, but I’m not sure if the body cap mounted on the camera is lightproof. (And then I wonder… why *should* a body cap be light proof, eh?)
I’ll be testing that…
2. The Kodak E100V had expired in 2004, but here we are, 7 years later, and it performed fine. It was stored in a deep freeze so that probably helped. I’ll be less worried about expired film going forward (good news since I have a freezer full of expired film…)
And BTW - I wouldn’t recommend slide film for any pinhole work, unless you can really get your exposure precise. I just really wanted to get rid of this film after looking at it in the freezer for the past 8 years, so I crossed my fingers and bracketed…