Nature Photography in Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Mike Goldstein

Nature Photography in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

By Michael Goldstein

Part 3

Sunset

We caught two wonderful sunsets at Sand Point, just outside Munising, Michigan, on the Lake Superior shore. During the first, with the western sky beautifully lit after a rain shower, a fantastic double rainbow developed in the eastern sky! This beach contains a huge amount of driftwood, as well as a number of dead trees. The problem for me in making a photo was that every good subject for a foreground seemed to have a photographer and tripod in front of it! On the first night, I limited myself to photographing the photographers, and was happy to have the second chance the following evening, in making this image.

Trillium 1

Trillium 2

Trillium 3

Trillium 1, 2 and 3

In May, the dominant wildflower in the UP seems to be the white trillium, Trillium grandiflorum. Acres and acres of them line the road into the Miner’s Castle area, not far from Munising, Michigan. You can spend all of a cloudy day, playing with composition, and never run out of subject material.

My white trillium images were made using manual exposure, spot metering on the petals of the flowers, then opening up 1 f-stop, to ensure the detail of the petals was preserved. The nice thing about photographing the same subjects on a cloudy day is that, once you’ve established your exposure, you can pretty much forget about it, and concentrate on your compositions.