The next lighthouse stop going north up the Wisconsin coast is in Kewaunee. Wisconsin 42 will certainly get you there, but if you take a right just north of the nuclear power plant (there are two turn offs in case you miss the first one) toward Sandy Bay the route is more senic. Take Cemetary Road north, and keep bearing to the right at junctions and you'll end up on Lakeshore Rd that will eventually reconnect with Wisconsin 42 just south of Kewaunee.

In the town of Kewaunee, a few blocks south of the river turn right onto Ellis St and follow it until it dead ends if you want to walk out on the pier to see or photograph the lighthouse. If you turn right about a block short of the end of the street (I don't remember the street name, sorry) and go about two or three blocks there is a small park on your left. There are good views from the lower parking lot but a much better, elevated view from up on the little hill in the park. There are shots below from several of these locations.

Morning, is not the time to photograph the Kewaunee Lighthouse unless you're shooting silhouettes right around dawn, which I haven't had the chance to do yet. The last time I was there in the morning, it was probably about 10 AM; I had a good breakfast after I photographed at Algoma that morning and drove back south to Kewaunee before going up to Door County later that day. If you're on the pier, shooting the lighthouse from the shore side of it means that you're either shooting into the sun, or will have it just out of the view but still in front of you giving you a very contrasty photo. The shot below was taken looking out the pier toward the lighthouse at around 10 AM and doesn't have much to recommend it.



If you walk out past the light to shoot back at it, you can't get very far away from it (without a boat), which mandates a very short focal length lens. The shot below, also not worth much other than to illustrate the problem in shooting from this point as far as I'm concerned, was taken with a 17-35 mm f2.8 zoom lens at 17 mm.



If you reorient from landscape to portrait, you need 24 mm from the end of the pier to get all of the lighthouse in the viewfinder.

A better vantage point is probably from the shore to the right where you can shoot out and get the lighthouse on the pier. This shot was taken with an aperature of f2.8 to throw the grasses in the foreground out of focus.



Over in the little park that I mentioned above, from up on the little hill under one of the big trees that I used to shield the lens to be certain I didn't get any lens flare at 300 mm you get a nice view of the light in the late morning and both the lighthouse and the north pier light.



Those with a 300 mm lens and a 2X teleconverter to get them to 600 mm gives you a much tighter view of just the lighthouse.



Probably my favorite shot of Kewaunee Lighthouse was taken at the end of my trip to Door County last June on the way back to Manitowoc to catch the night ferry to Ludington. This was shot at dusk with the sun just having set behind the hills to the west of town. There is no warm sunset light to be had on the lighthouse because of the topography. The photo below was taken up on the little hill in the park with a 300 mm lens stopped down to f 32 on Provia 400F with about a 60 sec exposure to be sure I caught the light from the lantern room on the surface of the lake. The seven blades in the iris of this particular lens give you the beautiful star from the light in the lantern room. No star filter was used!



I'll probably put up a Door County Lighthousing Gallery on Web Photos when I get around to it and will put this image in that gallery when I construct it. I'll add the URL to here later so that anyone wanting a bigger version of the above photo to look at can get to it.

Hope this helps to give some of you some ideas on photographing the Kewaunee Lighthouse next June.




[This message has been edited by lighthouse_photo (edited 03-30-2002).]

[This message has been edited by lighthouse_photo (edited 03-30-2002).]