Up North!

           

            Some people think retirement means sleeping in until late morning, savoring a slow breakfast, and then lounging around the house while waiting for the mail. Those people aren’t married to Kim.

            We do enjoy a leisurely breakfast, most days, though it’s generally at 6:30 when I finally get up, but we don’t do a lot of lounging. Especially when we are in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula taking a photography workshop with John and Barb Gerlach. We were expected to meet in the motel parking lot so the wheels of our cars would actually be rolling at 6:30. This meant that in order for us to eat and have our Senior Plumbing function, we had to be up by 5:00. Kim has tried without much success to get me up and out the door at these times, but I suppose it took my “don’t be late for class” training to make it work.

            Why so early? That’s when the cool temperatures mean the bugs don’t fly, and much of the session dealt with macro photography of butterflies, dragonflies and the like. Early morning anoints them with dew, leading to sparkling highlights on many of the images. I suggested that perhaps we could learn from the bugs and also not fly so early in the morning, but my colleagues were too busy taking photos to hear my idea. Besides, I’m not sure I want to encourage Kim to sprinkle sleepers with water.

            Enough grousing. We learned a ton, mainly about the use of flash in outdoor photography, which happens to be the subject of the Gerlachs’ next book. Here are a few samples:

            Not all of our work involved macro photography. In fact, my competitive side encouraged me to shoot other subjects so my shortcomings in the macro world would not be so noticeable. 

(I do note that all but one of my shots of the glorious cliffs seen from Miner’s Castle and Beach ended up in the trash.)