Tag: Richard Mack Photography

Lake Superior Night Sky

This past March I spent a week travelling around Lake Superior. It happened to be the exact same week I had been up there in 2013, in fact this shot of the night sky was done on the same night 3 years after I had done a similar shot. This time though I was doing a series of time-lapse images of the night sky as part of my project for The Sweetwater Seas – A Documentary About North America’s Great Lakes. In 2013 there was snow and ice with temperatures below 0°F and the lake frozen over with ice. This year it was between 20-35°F and the ice was almost none existent. However, knowing the ice wouldn’t be there, I still wanted to travel around the lake and was hoping to get a few nice time-lapse of the night sky along with time-lapse of clouds and any other subject which drew me in. On a trip like this you hope to come back with at least one good set of images. I was lucky enough to exceed my expectations even though some things didn’t go the way I had hoped. I had only one clear night. I spent hours on the beach at Split Rock State Park in Minnesota shooting the night sky with wolves howling in the distance. It was a beautiful night and morning. For those who don’t know much about time-lapse, first you need to know your frame rate, how long you want the clip to be and then do the computations to figure out how many shots you need over what time period. In the case of these I did a 15 second exposure with 3 seconds in between. So to get 13 seconds of video it took almost 2 hours of shooting. Not a bad way to spend your night…


Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays from Richard Mack Photography!

Happy Holidays from Richard Mack Photography!


Friday Afternoons at Big Thoughts Pond – May 9, 2014

Big Thoughts Pond

This is the first edition of what I hope becomes a Friday afternoon tradition – a few thoughts about the past week. I guess we shall see how faithful I am to this particular mission!

This past week we worked with Publicis Life Brands in NYC for a client of theirs. Always fun to work with folks from a distance! I also did a lot more research on the Great Lakes Project, The Sweetwater Seas, and planned to go to Sleeping Bear Dunes in June to shoot the Piping Plover who are down to 59 breeding pairs in the Midwest, with only 5000 birds worldwide. The nest at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore in the spring/summer months and are being protected by the National Park Service and US Fish & Wildlife arm of the DNR. A great story about how we can make a difference in protecting our lakes and the species who live along them. I learned though that there are no campground spots available until late August 2014! And I thought I could just run up there and find a place to camp…working on an alternative!

And in my small environment the pond, known as Big Thoughts Pond is back up and running this year and stocked with new goldfish! All were lost over the winter, some 20 years old. Start of a new time…

Cheers,

Richard