My visit to Grand Marais, Michigan almost three months ago feels like ancient history to me now. But I have one more set of snapshots to post before the trip fades from my mind forever.

Here are a few shots of the pictured rock national lakeshore. This first one was taken from the top of the cliff, looking down on Miners Point:

Here are a couple more shots, taken from the pictured rocks boat tour. The boat tour offers a great opportunity to get photos of the rocks, and we took the tour on our last night up north. It was a beautiful, sunny late afternoon with warm temps.

I packed a the Pentax K-7 and 17 – 48 mm lens. I also brought a polarizer and plenty of memory cards. Well, I got most of that right – the polarizer cut the glare of water on the rocks and I wound up shooting tons of images – 20 gigabytes worth – so the memory cards came in handy.

However, I wish I had brought a longer lens – something in the 100 – 200 mm range would have been ideal at times. I thought that the rocks were big and we’d be close to them in the boat, and they were and we were. But there were plenty of times when the light just looked better on a distant feature of the rocks, or the boat was just a bit too far off for the long end of my general purpose zoom. So my advice would be to bring a longer lens.

I was also shooting with the Pentax K-7 with in body shake reduction. That probably helped a lot – I didn’t do any tests – but when you consider that you are in a boat that is bobbing or bouncing on the waves and the whole boat is vibrating with the pulse of the engines, you realize that you need either a fast shutter speed or some form of shake reduction to minimize motion blur. In my case I had both and sharp images were the norm.

Here is a final snap shot of pictured rocks – a several image composite taken as the boat was head back to port. The images were run through Photoshop’s photo merge utility. Click on it for a larger view.