Here’s a shot I took this weekend up in Sturgeon Bay. I was originally thinking there would be giant icicles hanging from the metal on the right side of the image but found there were none when I got there. On the flip side, I got a pretty good sunrise (for winter) so it all evened out.

Location

The lighthouse is located near the Coast Guard station in Sturgeon Bay. There’s a bunch of warning signs around telling you not to trespass on the Coast Guard property. They even go as far as to draw a line down the middle of the driveway leading to the water that says public & private on it. Regardless, if you’re worried, the lighthouse on the water is open to the public.

I got there plenty early for once, even though it was about a 1.5 hour drive to the location. The pier is pretty long and was pretty icy. I walked about 200 yards out to get closer to the lighthouse. You can’t actually go up to it as it’s on an cement island. Because of the ice, I almost got trapped out there as I jumped down to the lower cement area. The issue was the wall was full of ice so I couldn’t easily pull myself back up to the main level. Fortunately, I found a large nut holding the metal structure down that I could grab on to and pull myself back up. A shorter person wouldn’t have had such good luck.

Composition

When I arrived, I knew I wanted to be pretty close to the lighthouse so I walked about 20o years down the pier. Eventually I saw some rocks in the water that were full of ice and I thought those would make a good foreground subject. I started off with my 6 stop ND filter to do some 30 second long exposures. As the sun rose more, I switched to my 10 stop ND filter to maintain the 30 second exposures. As I was driving up it was almost clear out, but when I arrived I discovered there were a lot of clouds in the sky. I didn’t get to see the sun rise above the horizon right away, but because of past experiences, I knew if I waited longer, the sun would eventually light up the tops of the other clouds and that’s what you see here.

Post Processing

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

This is one of the few photos I built off of a single exposure. The histogram was fairly balanced when I started working on it. One thing I did spend a fair amount of time on was trying to correct the distortion in Photoshop of the lighthouse. I didn’t like how much it was leaning so I tried to fix this with the puppet warp tool. After making those corrections I did the rest of the edits in Lightroom. I probably spend 5 hours on the photo split between several days of working on it on and off. Overall, it turned out really great and I’m happy I took the chance to head there during winter when I would usually be too hesitant to shoot due to poor conditions.

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