After a weekend of photographing the North Shore of Lake Superior, we decided to end a great weekend with a photograph of Split Rock Lighthouse on our way back to Minneapolis. We left the hotel far enough before dawn that we could catch the sunrise.

I was just getting serious about landscape photography and was pretty green. I happened to stop with the foreground outcrop to the right. It turned out to be a rather good composition—good enough, at least, to win a ribbon at the Orange County Fair in Southern California.