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I took my daughter, Kasey Mae, along with me shooting tonight. She enjoyed playing in the water while I went to work. It was an amazing night with just the two of us!

Father and Son Time

My dad found this photograph for me. He called and said he had the perfect shot for our 366 Project, we just needed magic light. I drove straight to his location on M-116 inside of the Ludington State Park. Just as I was grabbing my tripod and camera, the sunlight broke through the clouds. Thanks for the tip, Dad!

Feb-08

Over the last few years, my dad and I have made some many great memories with Team Reed and other workshop students on the beach at the Lake Michigan Campground in the Manistee National Forest. Tonight, we had our Heaven on Hamlin students out there shooting the sunset. It was a gorgeous night.

Feeling the Heat

Snow-covered dunes are one of Michigan’s best kept secrets. Once more people discover this, I believe Ludington and all of West Michigan will be busy with tourists all year long.

The Sable River Outlet is one of the most beautiful and popular spots at Ludington State Park. Hundreds of people flock to the river mouth on a hot summer day. But it is during quieter times, like this early May evening that it calls to me the most.

I wish you could see the photograph I took of this scene five seconds earlier, before the sun broke through the clouds; that image is very flat, boring, and ordinary. However, when the magic light appeared, the view of this dune at Ludington State Park with Hamlin Lake in the background became extraordinary.

The sand along the Lake Michigan shoreline looks like liquid gold tonight. It is incredible how a late September sunset can transform the appearance of the waterfront.

Glow Time

I will forever be grateful that I was born and raised in Ludington and that I can live, work, and play as an adult in my beautiful hometown. Listening to the sound of Lake Michigan waves slowly brushing the sand along the shoreline at the Ludington State Park tonight, I was also grateful that my kids are now getting to experience the magic of Ludington as their hometown.

As I made my personal journey of photographing the Ludington State Park, I relished the opportunity to explore areas of the park that I had never seen before. It seemed that over every dune and behind every pine row there was a whole new world to discover and photograph. I knew when I found this section of dead trees that there was a great picture waiting to be made. I sat on the small sand mound for 10 minutes waiting for the light to hit the trees and give them life again.

Keeping On

This view from high atop Big Point Sable Lighthouse shows the layers of dunes and forest between Lake Michigan and Hamlin Lake and reveals the vastness and beauty of the remote northern area of Ludington State Park. Brad and I climbed to the top of the lighthouse on an early November morning and sat in the dark, anxiously awaiting sunrise. The light and atmosphere that appeared was well worth the chilly wait.

Workshop at Ludington State Park

Anyone lucky enough to be standing on the storm-flooded Lake Michigan beach near the Second Curve on October 18, 2007, at 6:49:21 p.m., would have been overwhelmed by the scene before his or her eyes. This was an incredible moment in time, obviously a beautiful, powerful view. But there was something more: an unreal, out-of-this world quality, a feeling that comes to me only when I witness some of the most rare natural phenomenons. A meteotsunami (meteorological tsunami) had flooded the beach.

The Lake Michigan shoreline can change in a blink of an eye. Tonight, at the Lake Michigan Campground in the Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness Area between Manistee and Ludington, I was amazed at how quickly the sand on the left of this image was being undercut and caving in. The small outlet was growing in width before my eyes.

Workshop at Ludington State Park