Little objects in big spaces ... and more from 2014 shoot at Indiana Dunes

While looking through photos on my iPhone's camera roll doing research for a personal project Friday, I stopped when I came upon the shots you see in today's post.

I took these along Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes State Park in Long Beach, Ind., on Aug. 29, 2014, the night before the wedding of Lee Ann's daughter Mindy. I did a post at his blog on the wedding shoot -- still the only wedding I've shot as the hired photographer -- and incorporated three photos from the Friday night shoot into the assemblage of pictures in that post.

But there were others from Friday night that I didn't post, and those are the ones I stopped on while going through my phone camera roll ... and prompted me to pull together this post.

A couple of the shots made me think immediately of Jason M. Peterson, a Chicago photographer I recently started to follow on Instagram. Fortunately, I just found his website on the Internet and included the link to it in the previous sentence.

Jason specializes in black and white imagery, and the compositions of his that stick out in my mind -- because I've seen them on Instagram, not on his website -- juxtapose tiny silhouettes of people or objects in big spaces. An example is one of my shots leading off the post; I used a color version of this in the 2014 post, and the individual is Lee Ann's grandson, Justin.

But another example that I haven't presented before appears below, and in this case, I'll give you both the original color and a monochrome conversion. I like both, but I kind of lean toward the monochrome ... possibly because it's not something you'd be able to view live ... unless it were almost dark out. These were taken near dusk, but obviously, the sun was still high enough in the sky to provide the sundown amber hues you'd expect at the time of the day.

I did play a little bit with the above images in Photoshop Elements. Mostly I tried to minimize the burning highlight of the sunspot at the top. I succeeded a little, but the iPhone does not give you a lot of options to address things like at at the point of shot. But I was otherwise very impressed with the quality of images the iPhone gave me otherwise that night, and I'll get into that more a little lower in this post.

Next up below are two compositions of the sun hiding behind clouds. Again, I used Photoshop Elements to address the sun highlights, but otherwise, I did very little else to these.

Next up below are two shots I was very happy in getting with the iPhone to show the raindrops that began to fall as we started to make our way back to the house.

I finish with two pictures of the main reason we were on the beach that night. Mindy and her then-fiancee were hoping to integrate the elevation of flame-powered lanterns into the air as part of their ceremony the next day. The trip to the beach Friday night was to test the idea to see if it would work. Each of us was given a lantern to try and launch, and Justin's was the only one that made it into the air. Of course, the rainfall didn't help (if you see spots on the black lantern below, those are raindrops).

I used the first shot below in my 2014 post on the wedding, but Justin's successfully launched lantern in the second photo below is new to Photo Potpourri.