We at Iowa Landscape Photography love road trips. Getting out, seeing places, just moving off the couch, if you know what I mean. Well, last weekend we took a two-day road trip. Up into the northeast portion of Iowa, did the river road from Guttenberg to Lansing. Then over the bridge into Wisconsin. Some back highways and down to Prairie du Chien where we stayed the night.
Day Two included a little quicker schedule, as we wanted to get to St Donatus in Iowa for a particular shot… St Donatus is an interesting area, we’re going to have to go back… then I wanted to check out the caves… the natural bridge specifically… at Maquoketa Caves State Park.
The park was more of a scouting trip for a later road trip, but I did hope to get a couple shots of the natural bridge and fall colors. The trip had been planned for almost a month, and we had limited weekends available due to other commitments, so we were stuck with the dates because as you can see in this shot there were no fall colors. There really weren’t that much farther north either, not to mention the day before was rainy and windy. I had to display a lot of patience and select my shots carefully, and I will show some of them in future posts.
This particular shots came out amazingly well, in my opinion. It’s not overwhelming, and I like how it draws your eye in so quickly and completely. The lighting of the forest in the background is amazing, and the rock, while identifiable, is subtle enough to not detract from the ficus of the shot.
A side note to this trip is we took our two new dogs, Roscoe and Farley. Wesley stayed with his buddy Matt, which was a treat for him. This was our first trip with Roscoe and Farley and they were great the whole time. That’s good information for future trips. It does restrict us on where we can eat, of course, but it’s fun nonetheless. They were uncouth farm dogs when we got them about six months ago, and while they still lack couthness at times, they’ve grown tremendously in their time with Missy and I.
If I had to pick a “moral of the story”, I guess it’s even when it’s raining, windy, and lack of fall color, you can still keep your eyes open and get some worthy shots.
What a great trip it was! So glad we did it even with the weather as it was.