A Photo Day at Seven Bridges Natural Area

 

Most of my household chores were completed and it looked to be a beautiful fall day, so I grabbed the camera gear and off I went to the Seven Bridges Natural Area. I had been thinking of photographing the cedar trees there since my trip to the UP in late September.   There I watched as fellow photographer Nick Bristol worked a scene along the AuTrain River which included cedar trees.

The cedars at Seven Bridges are very unique. Their root collars are exposed and there is a grove of cedar where there is little ground clutter. Little did I know just how good the shooting conditions were going to be that day. 

 I started with a small area of cedars and had to work around groups of teens passing through. That was o.k. as the light at times was just too bright leading to unwanted hotspots. The one advantage though was the lack of wind. It was unusually calm and when the sun ducked behind clouds photography conditions were perfect.  For most of the photos I used a white balance setting of cloudy. This yields a warmer tone to the images. Yes, I was shooting RAW files and could have changed white balance when processing.  By presetting my white balance enabled me to see what I was getting. Almost all photos were shot using ISO 100.  The photo here was shot at f/4.5, 1/10 sec. @ 40 mm with a 24-70 mm Nikor lens.  I did extensive processing in Lightroom and I will explain my processing in another blog post later.

 

 

 

Continuing my work in the cedar grove I really liked the two photogenic cedars framing the grouping further back. I was very conscious of keeping the bright sky out of the images. It added nothing and only served as a distraction.  ISO 100, f4.5, 1/8 sec. @ 40 mm.

I have been to Seven Bridges before and it is very difficult to shoot down the entire river due to the depth of the river and rapids. Too the trees crowd the edge of the river. So, I decided to work with what was available. And the trees with their exposed roots became prominent in many photos. Such as this one. ISO 100, f/14, 1.6 sec. @34 mm. Have to love all the lichens and mosses on the trunk and the ornate roots. Too I decided to include a little of the river and liked the other cedar hanging on the river bank. The fall leaves on the ground added a nice touch too. This is the essence of Seven Bridges.

There are a number of bridges that cross the river., and I have never really stopped to count  ISO 100, f/14, .6 sec., @24 mm  

 

 

 

And shooting from these bridges is really the only way to capture most of the river unobstructed. As luck would have it that day, late afternoon sun was spotlighting a fall-colored beech and reflecting in the water. I waited for a few people to cross the bridge as it was bouncing. And too, after shooting  a few horizontals, I knew I needed a vertical to show the motion of the water in the foreground. The wind was still calm so I had not problem with dancing leaves. ISO 100, f/14, .8 sec @ 32 mm. I love the warm/cold colors and the motion in the river in the foreground.  

 

After a pizza dinner in Kalkaska I headed home to process the images. I did the processing on my older desktop computer which still has Lightroom6.  Some of the cedar trunks were a little too yellow, which is not natural,
so part of my processing was to use the paintbrush to change the color temperature to a colder and less yellow cast. There was a little work too with adjusting exposure and a light touch of vignetting on the edges. As always when shooting RAW, I made adjustments to the vibrance and saturation along with working on contrast through highlights, shadows and blacks. Much like Ansel Adams who did extensive post-processing from his negatives, myfinal images were a process of work in the field and a lot of work in my digital darkroom. This last image was ISO 100, f/14, 2.5 sec. @31 mm.