Grand Haven Waves

One day, several years ago (2009), someone at work noted that there were reportedly 18ft waves on Lake Michigan.  A number of us decided to take a little lunch time road trip over to the lake to check it out.  I absconded with the camera from work and this was one of the more impressive shots I was able to get of the waves smashing into the Grand Haven channel.  They were regularly coming up over the break wall as you can kind of figure by the peaks in the channel visible over the break wall.  Clearly they weren’t 18 footers near shore, but still impressive.

This is one of few, photos I have prints of because Janet made me a refrigerator magnet out of it.

Photo taken with Nikon D80 (not mine), Nikor 18-135mm lens @ 100mm, f/5.6, 1/400 sec shutter, ISO 100.

Camera note – back then, I suspect that Canon still* won the sensor noise battle, which I’m reminded of because I did a decent amount of noise reduction on this picture which really shouldn’t have been necessary, in my opinion, with a 1/400 shutter at ISO 100.  From what I’ve read, this no longer holds since Nikon started putting Sony sensors in their high end cameras.

* phrased this way because I know for sure this was the case when I bought the 300D / 350D cameras.