South

The Drive South:
So Spring had to work at eight in the morning on Monday so I just left when she went to work. That meant leaving at around 7:30 eastern time (a big part of Michigan's U.P. is in eastern time) and then driving on and off and stopping to take pictures and for snacks and whatnot I got back to Lancaster at 8:30 (in good ol' central time) that evening. I stopped and took pictures at four waterfalls on the way...unfortunately most of the pictures were taken in the midday sun. The harsh light of the midday sun makes for bad pictures. So I was at these cool falls and taking all these pictures that I thought would be cool but turned out to be kind of junky. Your eye (and brain) does a much better job of taking in and interpreting contrasting light than cameras do. To use an example relating to this post if you take a picture of whitewater rushing between the brown rocks of a canyon the camera's light meter chooses settings for the camera that average the light bouncing off of both the bright objects (the whitewater) and the dark objects (the brown rocks) and so the whitewater is overexposed and burned out and the brown rocks are underexposed and look like a black blob. So anyway, my excuse for not having many good pictures is that the light was bad for photos.

The falls I stopped at were Long Slide Falls and Smalley Falls (both were on Sullivan Creek), 12 Foot Falls and Daves Falls (both were on the Pike River. Some readers may remember that I stopped at Daves Falls three weeks ago on my way back from Marquette as well). In my opinion the coolest to see was Long Slide Falls. It was a small rocky stream and the falls were small enough that you could get close to them without fear losing your footing, falling and being swept over them to your death. “Intimate” would be a good word to use to describe them. Unfortunately the pics I took weren't very good.

These three pictures are virtually the only decent pictures I got out of the drive back south.

Since I got only a few pictures that turned out to be worth a snot I decided to include some pics of rivers that I've taken in the past. I took all three of these pictures last October when I was on a photo trip to northern Wisconsin.

This was taken on the Black River (not the one with the falls that I showed in the last blog entry...the river in western Wisconsin that gave Black River Falls [the town] it's name) just below the dam that backs up the river to make Lake Arbutus.

This was taken on the Eau Claire River at Big Falls county park. The falls are very cool but the name “Big Falls” strikes me as pretty unimaginative. I managed to get extremely lucky with the light for this picture. It was taken just as the sun was setting and the low angle of the light caught the water just right.

This was taken in Willow River State Park kind of near Minneapolis/St. Paul. I am not generally an early riser and the morning I got this picture was no exception - but the canyon this falls was in was deep enough that the sun didn't shine directly into the canyon until well into the morning...which is when I got this picture.