I’m back again with another photo of the month blog post. I missed last month due to me injuring my ankle which stopped me from getting out to do any shooting in September. Luckily, I was able to recover enough to get out on a 3-day backpacking trip to the far North of Michigan in early October. It was a wonderful trip of great views, awesome hiking, and amazing company. We were fortunate enough to hit the fall colors just perfectly on this trip. I took many different photos on this hike but only walked away with a few I think are gallery-worthy photos. At the end of the day this doesn’t matter to me much, what’s important is I had a wonderful experience hiking the large sandstone cliffs of Northern Michigan.

On this particular morning, I awoke to the sounds of wind and thunder rushing through my tent. What sounded like a raging thunderstorm was really just the noise of the large waves crashing along the shore. These sounds go me excited about the conditions so, I quickly got out of my tent and hiked down to the water’s edge. The air was cold and the wind was howling, which froze me to the bone, but I didn’t care one bit. I couldn’t keep a smile off my face while watching the massive waves come off the lake and crash on the sandy beach.

I walked up and down the shore searching for a composition of the beach, the waves, and the distant sandstone cliffs. After a bit of looking, I landed on a composition I felt incorporated all the elements I wanted to include, so now all I had to do is was wait. Over the course of an hour, I stood on the shores of the lake exposing many different images and taking in the beautiful scenery.

While I took these frames, I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky I was to be experiencing such amazing conditions, in such a stunning location. I also thought about how trivial many of the problems in my life are, and how I have lost my perspective on the world around me. The force of the wind and the roar of the waves made me feel as small as a single grain of sand on the beach on which I stood. This is a feeling I have been lacking recently in my life and am glad I got to experience it on that morning.

I know it won’t take long for my perspective to shift back to what it was before, but I hope to use this photo as a reminder to continue to question my perspective of the world.