Wisconsin
High Flying Five
These vintage Navy planes were part of the air show at this year’s E.A.A. AirVenture in Oshkosh, WI. I think it would be very cool to fly with a group like this.
I’m not positive about the type of aircraft, but I think some might be the North American SNJ-4, an advanced trainer for WWII aviators. (It was also called the T-6, the AT-6, and the Texan.)
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Star Bright
I went out to photograph a full moon…but ended up focusing on a star.
This is a long exposure, early evening view of the Kewaunee, Wisconsin Lighthouse. This is not the shot I was going for, but that’s the way it works sometimes.
I’d been watching the lunar calendar and decided the best evening to capture the full moon rising over Lake Michigan would be Friday. When it was time to head for the beach, I noticed a band of clouds in the sky but thought they might be high enough to not block the horizon. Turns out, there was enough “atmosphere” between me and the moon, I didn’t see it until much later in the night.
Since I was at the beach and had everything set up, I thought I’d fiddle around getting a night shot of the lighthouse. While fiddling, I thought the star filter I have might add a nice effect to the bright lighthouse light. The star filter is threaded so you can screw it on to the end of the lens. It creates an X pattern over any bright light source in the photo’s frame. I’ve often wanted more lines then the four it’s designed to create, but it is what it is. …or is it?
I took the star filter off the lens and decided to try and just hold it very still, by hand, in front of the lens. That worked better than expected. Next I took a shot and held the filter still it for a few seconds and rotated it a few degrees and, again, held it still. That gave me more points to the star…and it looked pretty good. I experimented a bit more to end up with this version.
This is a 20-second exposure. (20-sec, f/11, ISO 200) I was holding the filter in front of the lens – as close as I could without actually touching the lens. When I tripped the shutter (with a remote), I would count to five, rotate the filter, count to five, rotate the filter, count to five and quickly remove the filter for the remainder of the exposure. As you can see, that gave me three separate sets of star points.
Let me point out a few other interesting effects from the long exposure time. The lake wasn’t as smooth as it seems in this image. The long exposure has a tends to smooth out any motion. You might also notice a small, dark, oblong spot near the corner of the pier, just to the right of the lighthouse. That is actually a man who was fishing off the pier. He moved enough over the 20-seconds that all you see is a blur. And finally, there are a couple of thin lines of light that run horizontal through the frame…about level with the deck of the pier. Those are lights from a boat that was leaving the harbor, traveling left to right over the span of the 20-second exposure.
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Gold Fusion
The morning light provided a beautiful scene for a lone fisherman next to the lighthouse on Kewaunee’s pier.
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Crooked Spine Pine II
This is another view of my Crooked Spine Pine – a true quirk of nature. (See earlier post: Crooked Spine Pine – 2013)
Like Jack’s magic bean stalk, this pine tree is growing in a spiral at Potawatomi State Park in northeast Wisconsin.
It reminds me of a natural example of a rule of composition known as the Golden Mean, Phi, or Divine Proportion. It was made poplar by Leonardo Fibonacci around 1200 A.D. You can learn more about it in an excellent article from Digital Photography School.
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Zeros
Three vintage fighter planes circle back for another simulated strike during a reenactment of the attack on Pear Harbor. This was part of a spectacular air show at the 2013 EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Though I’ve had little opportunity, I could really get into aviation photography. I am not a pilot, but I love to fly and love all type of aircraft.
These planes are Japanese Zeros. Here’s some info gleaned from Wikipedia…
The Mitsubishi A6M Zero was a long-range fighter aircraft operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1940 to 1945. The A6M was usually referred to by the Allies as the “Zero”, from 1940, the year in which the aircraft entered service with the Imperial Navy. The official Allied reporting name was “Zeke”.
When it was introduced early in World War II, the Zero was considered the most capable carrier-based fighter in the world, combining excellent maneuverability and very long range. In early combat operations, the Zero gained a legendary reputation as a dogfighter, achieving the outstanding kill ratio of 12 to 1, but by mid-1942 a combination of new tactics and the introduction of better equipment enabled the Allied pilots to engage the Zero on more equal terms.
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Shades of Dawn
The morning clouds were thick enough to obscure the rising sun but light enough to create a stunning, luminescent backdrop for the Kewaunee, WI lighthouse and pier on the western shore of Lake Michigan.
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Look! Up In the Sky! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s…
…an Elephant…a Giraffe…a Shark…a teenie-weenie Cow…and other assorted colorful things.
Though they look more like creatively shaped balloons, these are kites – flying high at the Kites Over Lake Michigan kite festival at Two Rivers, WI.
The cow is my favorite!
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Crooked Spine Pine – 2013
FINALLY – We found it!! As you can see, this is a very unique tree. This tree has eluded me for years. Let me explain…
In 2006, while hiking on a trail through the woods, we came across this tree. It was in the middle of the trail, so we weren’t the only ones who’ve seen it. But I’m guessing most people didn’t look at it from the angle I photographed it, so they wouldn’t realize the cool curve of its growth.
I took a few photos of it. Sometime after that, I posted my best photo of the “Crooked Spine Pine” on Flickr. (That was before I had this blog.) It turned out to be one of the most popular photos I’ve ever posted. A number of people questioned its authenticity – accusing me of “photoshopping” it.
Back when I took the original photo, in 2006, I had a simple 5-megapixel camera. The photo of this tree was unique, but it really wasn’t a great image, technically speaking. Since then I’ve upgraded considerably.
For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find this tree again – to get better photos. However, I wasn’t sure exactly where it was. I thought it was at Potawatomi State Park, near Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. We spent a number of visits, hiking the trails looking for the tree. After having no success, I began to think maybe it was on a trail at Peninsula State Park, farther up Door County, near Sister Bay, WI. We had hiked trails and took photos at both parks. We also had to consider the possibility that the tree was no longer there – blown over in a storm or claimed by disease or insects.
We began to keep better track of what trails we had hiked on and in the process, we’ve hiked a lot of trails and even enlisted the help of friends, in search of this one tree. Recently, my wife and I spent a day hiking the trails at Peninsula State Park totaling about seven-and-a-half hours. No luck. So, maybe it wasn’t at Peninsula, but at Potawatomi.
Last Friday, Sara (my wife) and I decided to spend the day together. It was a nice day so we decided to hike the trails at Potawatomi State Park. We hiked the Hemlock Trail – about a two mile loop. While hiking, I noticed a spur off the trail and thought we should check that out some time. Hemlock turned back and we came along another spur that I thought might be the other end of the spur we passed earlier. We decided to head up that little stretch to see what was there and, low and behold, there was the tree.
In our search over the years, no doubt we had hiked the Hemlock Trail before, but never took that little detour. We were joyful to have finally located it, took photos, marked it on a trail map, took GPS coordinates. We will not have any problems finding it in the future. If you’d like to see it for yourself, hike the Hemlock Trail and take the bike trail in the northern part of the loop.
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Me and My Shadow
Today, it’s all about color and form…and fun! This pair of colorful kites was part of the Kites Over Lake Michigan – an annual kite festival held in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
There were many larger and more elaborate kites flying this day, but these two were standouts for me. I’m sure I’ll be posting more from this year’s kite festival in the coming days or weeks.
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Sundown Bay
A couple of months ago my wife and I took a few days away in Door County. On our first evening, we made our way to the shore of Green Bay to catch the sunset. The low clouds added a bit of drama to an, otherwise, calm day’s end.
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