Living Large

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This has been a marvelous evening. I FINALLY had an “RV” evening. By that I mean after Chessy and I took a little stroll along the lake (no I didn’t let her take a swim), I pulled out my portable gas grill and cooked dinner. After a hot day it was cooling off nicely, so I got Chessy’s outdoor leash, attached it to the picnic table and ate dinner outside.

I then pulled out my folding chair, relaxed and read the USA Today I purchased this morning as I was departing Two Harbors. The icing on the cake was leisurely reviewing the some of the Wisconsin travel material I had received prior to my departure. I even mapped out my exact route to the Door County Peninsula for tomorrow. We sat outside for about an hour after dinner. I even brushed Chessy.

It seems as though I’m always cramming too much into each day and not taking the time to kick back and just enjoy the moment. Tonight I did that for a change.

But there’s still room for improving on the laid back RV evening. I could have had a fire and enjoyed a glass of wine!

I worked on a couple of images to share with you. Two of them are not scenic views of the North Shore but incorporate a new technique I discovered during my workshop. They also will be used in a couple of photo essays I’m working on.

For all my photographer friends who are keeping tabs on the journey (and anyone else too, this “contest” has no restrictions or requirements) take a look at the images titled Smiley and Liberty Canoe and Winnebago, too. Tell me what I did that’s “different” in capturing these images (and how I did it). There’s no prize other than the thrill of figuring it out. I’ll share the answer with you in a few days.

Also I spent a little time on my Split Rock lighthouse light painting image. I’ll include the jpeg version that had very little work done on it (which you saw in the previous entry) and the same image edited in Photoshop from the RAW file. This is not a before and after to say that shooting RAW is better, just that you sometimes have a little more information to work with. I wish I had captured it in a high resolution JPEG file and done the same things I did to the RAW file. But this time it was only a 300 Kb jpeg file vs. a 2 or 3 MB file I could have saved. The RAW file - by comparison - is a 7 MB file.

I hope everyone enjoys seeing these images.

I look forward to comments (you can enter them from the travel blog. I will review them and post them if you’d like) or emails from you.

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Photos

Smiley
There's a really great story I could tell about this RV (and will one day). This is a Corvair powered 1969 Ultra Van. As you can see, it was parked next to the Two Harbors Lighthouse (which is now a B&B). This is one of the images captured using a great new (to me) technique. Can you figure out what is different about this image and how I did it?

Liberty Canoe and Winnebago, Too
Here's the 2nd image captured using the great new "technique" I learned this past weekend.
Not only did I use a new idea to get a different look and feel to the image, but this also underscores an important "rule" about photography. That is when you see a shot - take it because it won't be there later. I thought I was running late and possibly going to miss talking with the owners of Smiley (I took the Smiley image earlier on Sunday morning and went back an hour or so later and talked with the owners before they departed) so I almost waited to take this image until after the workshop ended. Instead, I went ahead and took the couple of minutes and got it before I left the campground. Good think I did because when I returned about 1 pm these folks were GONE. Not just the Jeep, but they had moved on completely.

Split Rock light painting edited from RAW
Here's what I was trying to accomplish with the light painting at Split Rock on Saturday evening. As I mentioned before, two 1 million candle power flashlights were used to illuminate both the rocks in the foreground AND the lighthouse which was 1/4 mile or more away.

Split Rock light painting jpeg image
I wish I had captured this in high resolution JPEG as well as RAW, but I had my camera set on RAW + small JPEG. It would have been interesting (to me anyway) to have made the same edits in Photoshop to both the RAW and JPEG file to see how close the final results would have been.