Landscape Photography- Acadia National Park

Each autumn now, for the past three years, I've been traveling up to Maine to spend a week photographing Acadia National Park. This was my fourth trip, and I learned a lot about my equipment, how I approach photography, and myself.

Acadia is a small park, with only about 40 miles of paved roads, and all contained on the relatively small Mount Desert Island. Each morning I woke up at 5am (4am my time), and left my motel at 6:00 to be in place for dawn half an hour later. After the sun rose at 6:50, I'd spend the rest of the day searching for new things to shoot. Here's what I learned:

* landscape photography is better when you don't shoot everything at f16. F2.8 is far more creative and interesting, and f1.8 is even better.

* once the sun peaks out, the best light is done for most of the rest of the day.

* always carry a compass and know where the sun will set and where it will rise. Use it throughout the day to determine where the sun will be when the light is perfect, and what it will light up.

* I need to get a larger rectangular filter holder to cover the 16mm setting on my wide angle lens. Now I have a full frame digital camera (Canon 5DMk2), my widest angle is 16mm instead of 21mm with my 1.3X crop cameras.

* when shooting at the coast, get tide charts to know when the waves will be peaking.

* after a day of rain, streams turn into hundreds of small waterfalls.

* the pre-dawn light is a beautiful blue, twenty minutes before sunrise.

* when I'm thinking of what to shoot next, I don't really want to eat anything, and have small snacks throughout the day instead of any meals. I often don't think of food for several hours. I love to sleep in, but when faced with the prospect of shooting the dawn, I can wake up at any time of the night. Sunrise is almost always better than sunset.

* shooting in a location where tens of thousands of pictures are taken each day, it's a challenge to do something different. Having shot four times there now, it was much harder to see worthy subjects. But I think my images are better for the extra thought that went into them.

I love flying into Bangor Airport; there are only two or three gates and it's much quieter than any other public airport I've flown into. Upon arriving, it was fun to go into the small store there and see one of my pictures on the cover of Bangor Metro magazine. I had a three page spread of my Acadia work inside the magazine. I was going to pick up a few extra copies when I left, but alas, October was gone, replaced by November.