This was an unanticipated, but wonderful surprise photo. I had arrived late on an overcast day and the weather forecast suggested that cloudiness would continue. So I was thinking this was a recon day. When I got to the parking lot and found that I was the only car there, I was thinking that other photographers were not counting on a nice sunrise. But when I got onto the bedrock shoreline just past the trailhead shelter I found that there were several photographers already on site working compositions.
My focus for the day was to recon the five points shown in the below map. My plan was to start from the Trails Center in the morning to look at shooting point 3, then work the bedrock shoreline eastward to shooting point 2 looking for interesting compositions. From there I wanted to continue eastward along the shoreline to shooting point 1. However, once I got onto the bedrock shoreline and worked that area from point 3 to 2, I found that at this moment in time there was a shot along the rocky shoreline East of the bedrock where point 2 was marked, which is this image.
This composition allowed me to capture wave splashes against some shoreline boulders. There were rocks along the shoreline that created a natural leading line to the lighthouse. In planning this composition I noticed that the foliage had pleasing fall colors that blended nicely with the anorthosite that dominates the cliff. For the foreground there was an anorthosite boulder that in the lower left of the frame that drew the viewer immediate attention that I was able to use to point to the splash of waves hitting the black diabase stone that made of the shoreline. The key factor that I needed to succeed with was to capture a well defined splash with motion blur on the waves rolling over the other rocks. Once that I found that 1/10 sec would freeze spray and blur the white wave crests. I had to bump up the ISO to 200 and I shot it using Shutter Priority under an Average metering mode. The splash occurred in front of the middle ground that cuts across the lower third of the image.
I had decided to make this trip when I found that the Minnesota Fall Color Finder was showing that fall colors had just peaked and were starting to fade. I had wanted to make it up there in late September, but I couldn’t break away from work. The high saturation of the leave colors was picked up when the image was dropped into Adobe Color showing the color values registering on the outer edges on the color wheel and the “Y” in the split complementary color theme as revealed in the Extract Theme tab. Though the saturation is higher than I normally want to have, I think that it helps with setting the mood of the story in the picture. What do you think?
