Winter ‘23 - ‘24 Photography
Hi everybody! While the first day of Spring isn’t technically until mid March, I think most of us in Michigan can agree that Winter is pretty much over. Aside from that two week period of January where we had a good blizzard that gradually melted away, this has been a very lackluster winter.
I did however try to make the most of the season while it was here, and found some other subjects to focus on from time to time throughout the season to keep my skills fresh. I even revisited some old photos from years past to remaster them into my styling today.
So without further ado, here are the photography highlights of this past Winter!
If you are interested in a print of any of the images in this blog post, you can check out the pricing for standard sized prints here, and contact me to place an order or receive a quote for special printing requests.
I ended 2023 with another one of my photographs published in Photography Masterclass Magazine!!!
Robber Fly (2023)
Canon EOS R7
90.0 mm @ 90 mm
6.0 sec at ƒ / 11
ISO 100
One of my niche subjects I like to photograph from time to time. Every now and then I like to break out the macro lens to get up close and personal with the tiniest creatures on the planet. This Robber Fly was hanging out in my studio when I was working on a project one day in the summer of 2023. He seemed pretty comfortable and wasn’t going anywhere fast, so I invited him to visit my display box I use for photographing insects and had a little photo shoot. He was very cooperative, held very still, and I was able to capture the intricate details of these incredible eyeballs that caught the attention of the magazine editors.
I also got another request to feature 2 more of my images in the magazine’s Reader’s Gallery, but those won’t be published until July of 2024, so I’ll share more about those selections when the time comes.
A First Snowfall Day Trip Up to Manistee
Granted, this outing technically wasn’t planned for the official winter season, but rather the end of November. We had our first big lake effect snow storm of the season right after the Thanksgiving holiday, so it was the perfect opportunity to get some winter photographs in a newer location while having moderately clean roads to drive on.
The first snowy excursion brought me to the Lake Bluff Bird Sanctuary in Manistee, MI. We received much more snow in the north than we did around Holland with this first snowfall, so the trails were well covered, but some of them were quite narrow, steep, and slippery. I managed to find a path that brought me through the woods alright and brought me around to a good viewing area of Lake Michigan.
Unfortunately with the wind and cold temps that day, I didn’t spot any birds, but did see something else quite interesting and unexpected indeed.
Apparently Michigan is home to 3 Giant Sequoia Trees!!!
Allow me to share with you some information on the trees from the placard at the site, as well as a little extra details I found online:
In the 1940's, six 6" sequoia trees were brought over from California and were planted at Lake Bluff in Manistee, MI. Today, 3 of those trees are still standing and thriving, with it's largest tree standing over 100 feet tall. Forestry experts say this is an important success as we consider where to potentially plant these trees as the climate changes.
Left Image Title: Michigan’s Champion Sequoia
A lot of the time when I find places to go take pictures, it’s a simple Google search to find beach locations or places with trails I can walk, so sometimes a find like this comes as a complete surprise to me when I get there. Some landscape photographers that I follow and take inspiration from might possibly chastise me for not scouting and researching more thoroughly before going to a location, but personally I like being surprised and reacting in the moment to what I find. This sequoia tree discovery is just another pleasant surprise that reminds me how truly diverse and amazing the mitten state can be. Granted, the 300 foot tall specimens out on the west coast I’m sure are far more astounding, but who knows, maybe someday these ones in Michigan might be able to rival the ones out west. Time will tell.
Staying in true fashion with with the reason I was in the magazine in December, I found some more critters in the basement to photograph. This cricket was far more skittery than the Robber Fly, so he was a little harder to work with to get the crisp and detailed head shot I was going for. I got it eventually, and I’m sure he was happy to finally go along his merry way when I opened up the little enclosure I made for him.
So we had that first snowfall in November where I went north to Manistee, but it wasn’t long after that that the snow completely melted. We then proceeded to have about the warmest December I can remember. Sure we had one good snow during the month, but I was taking my Christmas vacation from the office, and I chose to be a very bad photographer and sat on my butt the whole time the snow was actually on the ground, and then it melted again. I lost my battle with laziness that week.
So December was rather uneventful in terms of photography, however I had one day near the end of the month where I did get out for a little bit. There was a day where I found it would be best to be out of the house for an event that was taking place on one of the days I was working from home. Rather than be distracted or be a distraction, I took a longer lunch break from work and walked the trails at a park near my home. There was no snow on the ground, in fact it was spitting misty rain at the time, so I decided to focus on the little things as I walked around, killing time before returning home. I found a few neat opportunities to create some images on that short escape from my work day.
With the continued lack of snow, I wasn’t motivated to get out much once the new year dawned, but I also didn’t want to get complacent with my photography, so I forced myself to go out on the first official weekend of 2024. Much like past years, my first outing of the year ended up being to the Outdoor Discovery Center to walk the trails and to visit the Bird of Prey Center. The scenery wasn’t all that desirable without snow, but I had a few moments on the walk that hit me just right for a shot.
The majority of my hike this day was devoted to the birds. Typically the same species are there from year to year as they have their resident birds. But this year I was fortunate to be blessed by a Snow Owl at the center again. This gave me an opportunity to take another crack at that species to compare them to how I captured it back in 2021.
Icy Stare
I also had my other resident owls at the center to photograph this day.
Eastern Screech Owl
Great Horned Owl and Barred Owl
Then there were the resident falcons and hawks:
And also the Golden and Bald Eagles as well
For the remainder of January, the photography outings were a little sparse. We had a two week period where the winter weather was in one sense perfect for photography in terms of snow on the ground, but in another the temperatures, wind, and precipitation were so extreme that it was a matter of safety that kept me indoors. Then when that batch of harsh weather was over, things got immediately warm for this time of year, and that knee deep snow we had pretty much melted away over the course of the next two weeks.
With such a wide swing of weather in the month, here’s what I was able to capture: from deep blizzard packed snow, to the warm and foggy melt that followed it:
So as the season continued on, the weather got abnormally warmer, and the last of my snow disappeared. So I had to find other subjects I could focus on that wouldn’t be marred by a less than desirable landscape.
First off, repeating an activity I’ve done the past few years when the season didn’t live up to my expectation at times, I did a little birdwatching. A visit to Ottawa Beach yielded the reappearance of some of my favorite bird species, and also a few new ones that I haven’t gotten in past years. Surprisingly (to me) I spotted an American Coot. Not only is that a new one for my portfolio, but when I looked it up in my bird book (that same one that every bird watcher in Michigan probably owns), the Coot is commonly in the Holland area during the summer, not the winter. Let that be a sign as to how lame this winter has been for the most part, the birds are just as confused as I am by this weather.
Another thing that I have been doing lately is remastering some of the old photos in my portfolio. As you can well imagine, I have thousands upon thousands of photographs that I’ve created through my 12ish years that I’ve been doing photography, and there are some gems from the old days that I absolutely loved at the time (and in some cases still do), but my skills in photography and post processing back then don’t quite match up to where I am today. With the enhancement of my skills, and the new technologies I use in my post processing, I’ve found it fun to revisit some old photos and edit them from scratch (if I could) again.
In my portfolio of images from Indiana, I shared some of the remastered photos I took down at the Wolf Park in Indiana back in 2019 after my 2023 trip didn’t yield much new results. You can see them here. Below, I will share some of the other remastered images I’ve revisited since then.
The Last Frontier (2o13)
This shot is from my 2013 trip to Alaska. Back then I was early in my photography career, and the poor college student in me hadn’t yet sprung for Photoshop editing programs yet, so the original photo was edited in the Apple iPhoto program that was the default on my old laptop back in those days. Fortunately, that Alaska trip was one of the few instances in my ignorant photography youth where I actually saved the original unedited photos along with the edited versions, so I was able to redo this shot from scratch.
This shot was taken through the window of the van we were driving around in during that trip, so I do not know exactly where this was taken in Alaska anymore (I didn’t have the GPS coordinates system in my workflow back then either). Because of the van’s movement as I was taking the shot, there was the tiniest bit of motion blur in the shot as my window of view was always moving, and I didn’t have much control over what trees happen to whiz by in the foreground as I pressed the shutter, plus I was too excited being in Alaska to the think about it that much back then.
For the 2023 remaster, I sharpened the overall image, and dehazed the sky to pull out more blues and details in the clouds and distant mountains. To polish it off, I used the new AI tools of today to remove those distracting foreground trees, thus adding more balance to the shot by creating a even landscape for the foreground to coincide with the mountains and sky that make the middle and background of the shot.
360 Degree Rainbow
This remastered shot was just for fun, I’m sure neither version of this shot will find their way on the walls of someone’s lovely home, but I wanted to remaster this one for the memory of the moment.
On a trip to Tennessee for a church mission trip (of which I was a group leader), we ran out to get groceries for some of the people we were helping out. While in the parking lot, one of the other leaders pointed out the rainbow directly above our heads, no doubt caused by the effect of the moisture and mountains around us.
To get the shot in 2017, I actually had to lay on my back to get as much of the rainbow in the shot as I could, but it wasn’t enough to get the whole thing, and that always bugged me. But thanks to the new AI tools of today, I played around with expanding the scene and completing the rainbow. I also took the time to remove the cloud that broke the consistency of the rainbow’s arc, and cleaned up the noise and sun flare as well.
Again, I wouldn’t call this shot a winner in the before or after, this one was just for my own satisfaction.
For the Moments I Feel Faint
This shot, back in the day, all the way through today, has been one of my favorites I’ve ever taken. Much like in the Alaska picture I remastered, the original was not edited in Photoshop, and with this one I didn’t have the original unedited files, so my remaster was built off the first edit, not redone from scratch. Still, I think I managed to redo this shot in the styling of my skills today. I cropped the shot so the sun is no longer in the center of the frame, but on one of the third lines of the framing instead. Then the remainder of the edit was to remove some distracting elements like the foot prints in the sand or dust spots in the sky, sharpening and denoising the shot, and enhancing the colors to pull out the subtle purple tones.
Power of the Heavens
Much like the previous remastered shot, this one I didn’t have the original unedited file, so this was another edit off the old edit.
This shot, throughout all my years of photography, I say is still the most epic shot of lightning I’ve ever captured. Back in 2012, I had no idea how I could get so lucky, being as new to the craft as I was at the time, and frankly I still don’t know how I got so lucky. Every lightning shot I’ve gotten since then has not been as epic or electric as this one. They’ve either been just a simple single bolt, or have little trailing arms that sparked off the bolt, nothing quite like this.
For this remaster, I mainly enhanced the color and smoothed things over. In the original version, the color of the sky has a noticeable drop off in light as your eye moves away towards the edges. While that can be the case with the rain in the sky and natural behavior of light, I wanted a smoother transition as the color darkened off towards the edges. After than, it was a matter of removing the power lines on the horizon, something I didn’t think to do back in the day, and I also removed the one taller trees from the silhouetted horizon that I felt was a bit abrupt to look at.
To the Land of the Midnight Sun & The Aleutian’s
I paired these two shots together as they were taken minutes apart from each other as we landed in Alaska during my 2013 trip.
For my aerial shot of the Aleutian mountains, the remastered edit involved a lot of dehazing to bring out the contrast and colors of the scene, so a simple re-edit.
For the sunset/rise shot of the midnight sun, this re-edit involved improving the color, contrast, and sharpness of the overall scene. The original unedited version of this shot also had the plane’s wing in the upper right corner of the frame. In 2013, I cropped it out, which meant sacrificing part of the scene to avoid seeing the wing. Since now I’m much more skilled at removing distractions from the scene, I was able to crop the scene that way I preferred, giving it a little more of a panoramic feel, removed what was left of the wing after that, thus being able to include more of the clouds in the shot than in the previous version.
Miracle Lodge
This was one of my favorite shots from my 2013 trip to Alaska, the scene just makes me want to take a seat in one of those chairs, bask in the grand forests and mountains outside of the frame, and enjoy the natural silence.
When looking at the original version, the whole scene just feels cramped to me, back in the day I didn’t know the benefits of giving the subject of a photo some breathing room in shots like this. For the remastered version, I used Photoshop’s new AI tools to expand the scene an eliminated that artistic claustrophobia. Beyond that, the edits were mainly to add sharpening, and keep the colors under better control compared to the slight over saturation I did in the original version.
Now, at this point, I’ll admit I may have gone a little overboard on remastering old photos, especially from the 2013 Alaska trip. So rather than continue to expound on each image and what I did to improve them (in my opinion anyway), I’ll just show off the rest here. I hope you can see and appreciate the changes between the old and new versions. You can click on the photos to open up a letterbox and browse them at full screen.
Then for a final stop on the remastering spree of the early winter season, there were a few other photos from my 2013 Alaska trip that I worked on as well. With these, however; they were not remasters of photos I originally edited back in 2013, but instead first time edits all together for these shots. Back in the day I may have choose not to edit them due to my knowledge and skill set with post processing, or perhaps with the abundant amount of shots I took on that trip I simply decided not to work on these. However, with my knowledge and skillset today, I felt it was time to do something with these shots in particular.
With all that, thus ends my winter adventures of the ‘23-’24 season. Stay tuned, as in a few months when I post my spring blog, you’ll get to see some warmer looking scenes and subjects added to my portfolio, including my annual trip to the Butterfly exhibit in March, the Tulip Time festival, and this big one: a planned trip to New York state to photograph the long awaited solar eclipse, and also a few select natural landmarks of the state for good measure.
Thanks for reading!
Bible Verse Images of the Season
If you are interested in a print of any of the images in this blog post, you can check out the pricing for standard sized prints here, and contact me to place an order or receive a quote for special printing requests.