Sunday, June 17, 2012

Bass Harbor Lighthouse

My wife and I just got back from vacation in Maine.  We make the trip to Bar Harbor every couple years or so to visit family.  While I'm there I also try to take some new shots.  This time I was determined to get a decent shot of the Bass Harbor Lighthouse.  After scoping it out earlier in the day, I decided that around sunset may be the best time to shoot it. I headed back out there with my brother-in-law Brad (One of Bar Harbor's Finest!) on Tuesday evening. The clouds were thick, but I was hoping that the sun would breakthrough near the horizon.  It never did and here was what I ended up with...


Not a bad shot but not quite what I was hoping for.

Wednesday was a washout.  Rained most of the day and Diane and I ended up going off of Mount Desert Island back to the mainland where I took some photos of some junked up houses and the lupines (purple flowers), that dominate the land.  On our way back we stopped by the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner, then headed back to Bar Harbor... or so we thought. Two miles before the bridge back to the island we ran into some backed up traffic.  We waited.  And waited.  It turned out that a truck was in an accident with a tour bus that was leaking propane... right at the bridge.  They closed the bridge and it did not reopen again for almost 6 hours! We didn't get back to the house until 10:30pm!

We decided to stay an extra night, so Thursday was my last chance at the lighthouse.  This time not a cloud in the sky.  I actually would have preferred some clouds for the sunlight to play off of, but you take what you can get.  This time I was alone as I scrambled down the rocks to the shoreline with my tripod and camera.   The sun was just going behind the rocks...  A slight miscalculation on my part.  I thought I would be able to see the sun meeting the water, but at this time of the year, the sun is about as Northwest as its gonna get before it starts heading due west again.  I snapped off a quick shot before I even set up the tripod as the sun disappeared behind the shoreline...


Now, I figured my only chance at a decent shot would be to wait until after sunset and see if I could get some nice color out of the sky.  I switched to my wide angle lens so I could get more of the rocks in the foreground while still getting the top of the pine trees next to the light house.  I was there for over and hour as the night approached and the other photogs that had been camping out left. The mosquitoes came out in full force.  Even though I had sprayed "Off" on me, they were still having me for dinner.  I was bracketing my shots, taking one at 2 stops under exposure, a second right on and a third 2 stops over exposed so that I could combine them into a single shot later.  This way the sky wouldn't blow out all the detail in the lighthouse and rocks.  The longer I stayed the more vibrant the color got on the shoreline. It was also getting darker, so my exposures were getting longer and longer, helping to smooth out the waves in the water.  I was quickly losing my battle against the mosquitoes and at about a quarter to nine, I fired off my final 3 shots and called it a night.  When I returned home I put the final 3 shots through the HDR processing with Photomatix...


I was pretty satisfied with the result.  Except for that red blur in the water.  I thought it was pretty cool at the time I was shooting it that the light from the lighthouse was reflecting in the water, but it just ended up looking like a distracting red blob.  When I went into Photoshop to make additional tweaks in the brightness and contrast levels, I took out the reflection.  After a final cropping, I'm pretty happy with the end result...


Tech Stuff: 3 shots at f/16 at 4, 15 and 30 seconds ISO-100 Focal length - 10mm