Hollow Rock is simply beautiful as the first light of a summer day washes over it. I love the really calm water that is common this time of year. It makes for wonderful reflections on these calm mornings. I sure do feel fortunate to be surrounded by so many wonderful things to photograph!
It was a pretty dull morning for shooting sunrise over Lake Superior today, lots of clouds and just a gray sky. So, here is a sunrise shot from last week to provide a little sunshine and color for your day!
'Tis the season for baby animals! I have seen fox kits on a couple of occasions, but never for long enough to get any pictures of them. Goslings seem to be everywhere, with several of them along the road we live as well as at the state park where I work. There has also been a family of mergansers residing along the shoreline in front of our house and I did manage to get a shot of them the other day. They are so cute when they are babies! They have a tough life at first, though, with many hazards to overcome. Usually when an animal has so many babies it is because so many of them don't survive to adulthood. Having more increases the chances that some will survive. Personally, I hope of the best and wish that most if not all of these little mergansers survive to live a long adult life :-)
Here is one more image from the night of the big solar storm on June 23, 2015. After photographing the amazing display of lights over Hollow Rock on Lake Superior, I decided to try composing some photos with trees in the foreground. So, I walked back up the beach away from the lake and looked for a nice set of trees to photograph against the sky. It didn't take long to find a composition that I liked! This was a group of trees in between two of the cabins at Hollow Rock Resort. It was also a windy night, as you can tell from the movement of the trees in this photo. Since the northern lights are often caused by the solar wind I thought that might make a nice title for this image.
This is what the night sky looked like the evening before the big geomagnetic storm hit earlier this week. This was the night of the summer solstice and the aurora borealis was supposed to hit our atmosphere big time but it ended up being delayed until the following night. Since the aurora forecast was so good, Jessica and I headed out and spent the entire night waiting for the lights. We had a little showing of them between 2 and 3 AM, but nothing at all like what we ended up witnessing the following night. Still, it was an unbelievably beautiful night. The views of the Milky Way were some of the best I've seen. The night was so dark and the stars were so crisp and clear. It was a surreal experience to stand and gaze up at such an incredible sky!
For the past week we've had a lot of company hanging around in our flowering crab tree in the back yard. A group of about a dozen waxwings have been working the tree over, actually eating the petals off the flowers. It seemed like such an odd behavior. It's the first time we've ever seen them doing this. In all the years living in this location and enjoying the beauty of these trees I've never noticed waxwings on them before. Maybe it's normal behavior for them? Has anyone else ever noticed this before? Whatever the case, they seem to be gone now but we sure did enjoy having them in our yard for the past week!
This is what the sky looked like directly overhead during the geomagnetic storm in the early morning hours of June 23rd. The lights were going so strongly straight up in the sky for so long that I was really appreciating the tilting LCD screen of my Nikon D750 camera! I had my camera pointed straight up for 15 to 20 minutes and during that time the lights were changing constantly as I made one exposure after another.
In a sequence of over 100 photos pointed at the same spot in the sky, I ended up with over 100 completely unique shots. The patterns and shapes were different in each image, despite there only being a second or two between each shot. That's how fast the lights were changing.
It was a mind-blowing experience to witness such a strong aurora storm. I believe these types of images really spark the imagination. For example, when I first viewed this photo I immediately saw a large bird swooping down from the top of the photo. You might see something completely different. I'd love to hear how your imagination speaks to you when you view this image!
