I couldn’t begin to estimate just how many pictures I have made of Wind Point Lighthouse.  The first Wind Point Light was built along the shores Lake Michigan north of Racine, Wisconsin in 1840.  That lighthouse, then called North Point Light was wooden and eventually burned to the ground.  The building you see in the photos below was built in 1870.

I have added and subtracted no colors.  By subtracted I mean I did not use any color correction filters or make any color corrections in Photoshop.   The crisp but warm colors you see were caused by the setting sun.  The cool blue colors you see were provided by the Earth’s shadow at dawn or dusk, and the greens and other color biases were created by manmade tungsten and other light sources.

Pictures that I have shown before of Wind Point were all either silhouettes from sunrise, or made on blue sky days.  Those sunny days provided the pure white colors that most people would say belong to Wind Point.

Whenever you have a subject that you photograph many times, utilizing different light is one of the keys.  I think with changing seasons, changing lenses and changing your physical position, you can stay invigorated with a good subject.  How many ways can you look at one building?

A while back I wrote a piece on photographic clichés.  That article was about bees with flowers, but it certainly applies to lighthouses as well.  My view is always to create images of what I find intriguing whether it is a common subject, or one that has never been tackled before.

All of the pictures below began as 35mm slides.

Nearing sunset

Dawn, dusk and night

A light in the fog

Merry Christmas from Wind Point Light

Misery loves company.

While I admit to reminiscing about my past when it comes to friends, photography, experiences in nature etc., I am not one to spend much time or energy reflecting on day jobs from days gone by.  I pretty much just walked away from those experiences and moved on.  Still there are some people who just don’t leave your conscious or subconscious mind.

I had just moved back to Wisconsin and found myself a job.  One that turned out to be pretty long-term, but it was those first two years that still keep coming back to me.  Bill was the state sales manager and while I had met others like him in my life, he was the worst.

Bill was an angry man.  A miserable man. Everything about life was bitter to Bill and he would not tolerate happiness around him.  At least not while he was basking in his misery. He had to infect you too.  Every displeasure with life, every resentment he felt, and everyone he ever hated, were vocalized every day.  His biggest calling in life was to make sure you were as miserable as he was.  How dare you feel joy when he felt none.  Of course he had occasional good days. If something happened to make him happy, well you damn sure better be happy too.  If he actually found something funny, you had better be ready to laugh. Otherwise he would become miserable again and then you had better become just as miserable.  He always needed to fulfill a whim, or satisfy an urge to be happy. When he did it would last a day, or an hour, or a minute.  Time to wait for the next thing that would make him happy.  If even for a minute. When you first met Bill, you wished him much happiness so you would be allowed to be happy.  Eventually you wished him total misery forever so you could live your work life with some consistency.   At least you knew what your day would be like.

Thankfully my boss retired after my second year with the company. It is amazing when you stop living your life at the call of someone else’s whims, when there is stability in your life, how happy your life can be.  Even when it is only your work life that we are talking about.  My best days were never accomplished with Bill. In later times I won my share of sales contests and “did all right” at my job.  Those who were better than I, did all right even when Bill was there.

Waiting for others to be happy will actually add one form of consistency to your life.  Failure.  The best do their best regardless of who surrounds them, and how much misery those people seek to spread.   They deal with them the best they can, but they have a positive  mission in front of them, and the Bills of the world will never deter them from that mission.

We live in a world full of both positive and negative influences.  Learn from both.  There are lessons all around us.  It’s what you do with them that counts.

P.S. His name really was Bill, but if there are any Bills reading this, you can fill in your own blank….Wayne, Ethel, Herman….whatever.