Sister Bay, WI on a cloudy autumn afternoon in between rain showers.

Back Story

This photo is actually a remake from a series of shots I took in Door County back in October, 2009. It was a raining just about the entire weekend, but I did manage to get a few shots in between showers.

This has been one of my favorite images in my Door County portfolio, so why did I decide to remake it? Well, here’s the original version that I published in 2009:

Sister Bay – Original Version

Your Take?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? The original – more monochromatic version – has it’s own autumn feel to it, while the remake captures more of the colorful beauty that is Door County in autumn.

Leave your comments below and let me know what you think.

– Kris

Grabbing a hold of Grandma’s hands while playing at the dinner table.

Back Story

With less than two weeks before our son’s first birthday, it was time to carve the turkey with my wife’s extended family as we’ve done for so many years past.

With my mom tagging along as well, she had her turn to play with our little guy, and I captured this image during that little exchange. May be one of my favorites from the day, if not the favorite.

You can check out the rest of the photos from the holiday in the Turkey Day gallery, and let me know which one you like the most.

A great holiday image in front of a festive, decorated tree.

Back Story

As we try to do every year, we made our way to the mall on Sunday to start our holiday shopping before the madness begins after Thanksgiving.

While we were there, we spent about 10 minutes to shoot holiday photos in front of the 3-story tree they have in one of the courtyards. Even in such a limited time, I still managed to get a few keepers that are just itching to compete for the title of Holiday Card this year. We’ll see how that goes, with so many candidates of our young family taken this year.

You can see more photos from Sunday in the new gallery page – Old Orchard Holiday, Nov. 2011

– Kris

Christian enjoying some down time on the ground in between car rides.

Back Story

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a month already, but this photo was from our weekend in Door County, WI at the end of October. It was our third road trip with Christian, and now that he’s getting bigger and more mobile, staying buckled into his car seat while on the road makes him a little impatient at times.

That just means once he’s out and roaming around, he’s that much happier. As you can see here.

Too see more photos from this weekend, visit the Door County, Oct. 2011 gallery, or click on the photo below.

Posing with Mama on a warm, autumn evening.

Back Story

As far as photographic weekends go, last weekend had to be one of my favorites. Well, in this timezone anyway, Maui is still No Ka Oi!

This shot was from a short sunset shoot we did last Sunday wrapping up a 3-day span of photo shoots staring the Friday before. The weather was just so nice and it’s the time of year where the colors of the leaves are really at their peak in our area.

Sunday evening, we made our way to the forest preserve near our house, and wanted to take advantage of some of that after sunset glow that’s so precious to photographers. The sky had literally been cloudless all day, so trying to get shots of a nice sunset were pretty much out of the question – just no sky candy, as I like to call it.

But that’s fine, the warm glow coming from the sky just after the sun dipped behind the trees was good enough for me. I wasn’t sure at first which would last longer, the warm light after sunset or our son’s attention span, so I worked fast and shot a few shots like the one above.

It wasn’t long before I had my answer, though, as our son quickly became distracted with his stroller nearby. So while he was occupied with that, I snapped a few images of my wife just before the forest preserve ranger (is he really a ranger if it’s the suburbs?) drove by and was kicking people out. Probably might have had 5-10 more minutes of perfect light left, but still happy with what I shot.

From Mama to Papa in 2.4 seconds.

Back Story

Another image from the park shoot we did last Friday.

The caption might be a little cute, but it’s not that far off. Here’s another shot from just 26 seconds before (according to the EXIF data).

The more photo shoots we do with our son, and the more mobile he gets, the more frequent he’ll break away from whatever he’s doing while I’m shooting and head straight towards me and the camera. The same thing happened again on Saturday when we were shooting downtown, and I’ll share those photos later in the week.

View more photos from this shoot in the Autumn in the Park gallery.

Now that he has four teeth on top, we’re finding Christian’s thumb exploring his mouth more often.

Back Story

The weather here in Chicago has been gorgeous all week. However, we were only just recently able to get out and enjoy it on Friday. We did a photo shoot at a nearby park, and I’ll be sharing more photos and details of the session soon.

As for this photo, the caption kinda sums it up well. Our son just recently sprouted four new upper teeth, so he’s been using his thumb more than before to get in there and explore what’s going on. While most of the other shots from the session were a little wider angle, this one was just too cute not to share.

View more photos from this shoot in the Autumn in the Park gallery.

– Kris

Well, the benefits of being closer and cheaper than Maui have scored Door County another visit booked from us for January.

This was the view down by the water outside of the Westwood Shores Resort that we first stayed in last September. While we’ve yet to stay in the same place twice during our visits to the Door in the past year, we booked our next weekend there with a harbor view at the Stone Harbor Resort right in the heart of Sturgeon Bay.

Sure, it will be the middle of winter and we won’t have warm views like this, but there will still be many a photo to be had, I’m sure.

A pano stitched together with from 7 images I took during the last trip to Door County. If you’ve seen and read notes about that trip, that blue sky will seem rather out of place given the weather conditions I ran into, but it was a welcome sight.

That is, until the rains came and washed out my first scheduled attempt. I managed to get another flight the following day with a small break in the weather, and I’m wrapping up the edits from the photos I took on that little excursion.

My First Aerial Shoot By Plane
Although this was my third serious attempt at a shoot from high above the ground, it was my first from an airplane. The previous shoots were with Blue Hawaiian Helicopters over Maui, once with the doors on and most recently with the doors off arranged by the great folks at the Maui Photo Festival. That reminds me, I need to write up a similar post about what it’s like shooting out the side of a moving helicopter looking straight down with nothing but a seatbelt. What a rush!

Anyway, back to the recent flight. I went up with Dave from Grizzly Scenic Air Tours, based out of Ephraim. The Grizzly folks were a great couple of guys and did everything they could to make sure I was able to get a flight in that weekend with the weather being what it was.

It was a small two-seater airplane, which was the first difference I noticed from the helicopters I went up in previously. At first glance, it looked pretty cramped, but I actually had more room to move around and switch cameras than I did sharing the back bench of a helicopter with 3-4 other passengers.

The other benefit of such a small aircraft was the one-on-one communication with the pilot and being able to customize the 70-minute flight to my needs. Dave was great at making sure I knew what there was to see throughout the entire peninsula and taking me to the better views.

The Downsides
Now, to the things I struggled with during this flight, through no fault of the pilot or the plane, have you.

• Shooting through the window – the option to fly door-less with these guys is available, however, with the weather what it was and the time of the year, the temps were too low. I’m hoping to go up again around the May timeframe, so it’s something I’m looking into again.  The window on the door wasn’t that big, at least compared to a door-less helicopter, so that was a limiting factor, too.
• Plane Stability – I’m probably not the first to observe that, as far as taking aerial photos go, helicopters tend to be a lot more stable than a small airplane. Combined with the weather and the high winds in the area, we were bobbing up and down a little more than I had anticipated. That, and shooting a lot through my telephoto lens even made me a little airsick near the end. Just more experience for me to take with on the next flight.
• Move Along, No Hovering Here – Along the same lines of stability, I certainly missed the flexibility to hover over a subject to better compose and capture a shot like we did during the helicopter tour in September. That added more pressure on me along with the clouds (mentioned below), but I took it in stride and did the best I could. In addition to not hovering, I also felt that the speed was a little faster in the plane then the helicopter, which makes quite a bit of sense considering even basic aviation principles.
• The Clouds – As you can see from one of the shots below, the clouds had let up enough for us to fly, but they were playing havoc with my exposures. While I’ve come a long way with adjusting on the fly for changing lighting conditions, it still was tricky with light that was changing so often, working with fast shutter speeds and not a lot of time to get the shot I wanted. I ended up bumping up the ISO in a few places and working with the exposure compensation, but having a more professional camera like the Canon 5D Mark II would have been a big help in some of the noise and blur I was getting. Someday.
• A Focal Gap – I ran into another unforeseen problem on my part, leading to more knowledge for next time. I shot with two camera bodies like last time, my 20D with a 70-300mm telephoto and a my Rebel XSi with my newest lens, a 24mm f/2.8 wide angle. What I soon realized after starting to shoot was that I had a fairly large gap between my wide angle and telephoto selection that proved detrimental to some of my composition efforts. I shot with the same pair of gear on Maui, but we were able to get closer to the ground below in the helicopter to where my 24mm frame was full of all the wonderful Aloha goodness done below us. Time to rethink the gear selection for the next trip.

On to the Goodies
That list of downsides is more educational for me, and maybe others, to learn from in future attempts. As it’s been said before, we learn more from our mistakes and failures than our successes, so calling them out and having them to revisit later is helpful for me.

Moving on to the good parts of the flight, it was a great scenic tour and something I’d recommend to anyone who frequents Door County and wants to see it from a whole new vantage point. The guys at Grizzly Tours have a few flight options to fit just about every need, and as they did for me, they’re happy to customize to any special requests you might have.

A few of my hopes coming into this flight and photo shoot were to see the full autumn colors from high above and to see some of the lighthouses, towns, etc. that we’ve visited on our previous visits. Photography aside, those goals were more than accomplished.

I also learned there was even more to see than I knew coming in. For starters, there were more bays, lakes, and harbors than I had thought, and bluffs like the one below were quite a sight from the air after standing near the edge of a few of them.

On top of that, Dave mentioned there were 27 islands that surround the peninsula, and they even have tours for visiting those and even shipwrecks, too. Needless to say that has my interest piqued for another flight in May, and I’m fascinated that there’s so much to shoot that one or two 70-minute flights couldn’t even cover everything.

A More Photos Left to Go
I tried to go through my best shots from the flight for this post, but the truth is I still haven’t gotten through all of them.

All of these photos, plus some that I didn’t show here, can be found in my Above Door County photoset on Flickr. As I get to the last few photos that need some TLC in Photoshop, I’ll be adding them there as well.

Enjoy, and if some of these notes helped you out or you have aerial shots of your own, please let me know. I’m also trying to carve out time for writing a similar post about the doors-off helicopter tour, which of my three aerial shoots has been my most successful, by far.