Adventures of a Wanderer

Last fall, unhindered for the first time in my life, I made the most of my days. I tried to get out at least once a week for an adventure, and at long last did an overnight solo adventure. I revisited all my favorite places; how had a year gone by since I had last seen them. I also discovered some hidden gems.

Then last November happened. My mom collapsed from an aortic dissection, had emergency surgery and spent a month in the hospital and rehab. When I was in the midst of it, I was sure that I would never be able return to my adventurous life.

Eventually though, the fog cleared and everything returned to a new normal.

One good thing that came out of that time was the conversations I had with my dad as I drove him back and forth to the hospital to visit mom. After the initial recounting of details of how it all happened, we settled into conversations about his growing up years, and about his parents and grandparents. I had always known that my great-grandparents had lived a lot of places, but I didn't know that it was all my great-grandpa's idea. He would start a business, run it for a few years and then sell it, move someplace else, and start a new business, repeating the cycle over and over again. He even earned the nickname "the German gypsy". This was a glimpse into my soul.

Spring is here. I am still mostly unhindered, except for the cell phone that is always tucked into a pocket. Let's go explore some of my favorite places...




I hope that everyone has a joy-filled Easter next week. I will see you in a couple of weeks.

Washed Ashore

I am a great collector of photography challenge lists on Pinterest, and every time I discover a new writing prompt book I have to buy it and add it to my ever growing collection. What I have yet to find is a book or list that combines both a prompt for words to write and photographs to compose in one neat package.

Last week I bought this book after looking through a few pages and liking the prompts that were listed in it. I can tell that I haven't been writing much lately, because I am overusing words like beautiful, wonderful, fabulous, and joyful. As a creative who enjoys writing, I can do better than that. So I bought the book with the intention of getting back to a daily practice of fifteen minutes of wild writing. If you are wondering what wild writing is, you can read my post about it here. I am not good at too many long term sustained practices, but I am good at returning to practices such as wild writing, photograph class lessons and such.

The prompt I chose to write about on Tuesday was this one: Washed Ashore - Write down five objects that might be found washed up on the seashore lakeshore. I have spent enough time photographing at my local state park where a plethora of items wash up on the shore in any given season, to have a pretty good idea of five things I could write about. But...I am someone who would rather be out adventuring than sitting at my wintertime desk and thinking up found items to write about. I wanted to go out and find those five objects.

Since the tile guy was coming on Wednesday to put up my new kitchen backsplash, I figured that Wednesday would be a good morning to go to the beach and photograph washed ashore treasures. Once a level of trust has been established with your tradespeople, being in the house while they work is about as uncomfortable as sitting in your underwear watching paint dry. You don't want to talk to them, and they don't want to talk to you. That level of trust has been reached with my kitchen people, so I left Dave to cut and apply tile, while I went to the beach.

Tuesday, after I had written for fifteen minutes on Washed Ashore, and decided that I wanted to go to the beach and photograph the five items, I remembered David duChemin's photography class The Compelling Frame. The last time I worked on a lesson was December 10, 2017. This knowledge is easily obtained when you date your homework.

I had left off on Lesson Six - Perspective and Exploring POV. It wasn't that I didn't want to do the lesson. What I wanted to do was the lesson outside. In December, January and February it has been too snowy and cold to be outside for any period of time long enough to photograph objects from at least six different angles. Wednesday's forecast was partly cloudy and mid-40's. With the proper clothing and gear, I could easily spend an hour or more at the beach laying on the ground, shooting from above, from a distance and up close.

I have also learned to throw my expectations to the wind. What I want to find and what wants to find me are often two very different things. I am always blessed when I let things find me.

With some clever creative thinking I have been able to make my own exercise combining words and photographs in a refreshing new way.

Scene & Story - February 2017

Deep breath and release.

That's how I feel now that February is over. What is usually the longest short month of the year due to Michigan winters has passed in one quick blink.

The weather in February was unnaturally warm, many 40 and 50 degree days, the average is usually around 20 degrees. We have had very little snow. I don't think I got the snowblower out once. We also saw more sunshine than all four winter months put together.

Big changes also occurred in our house. Our daughter moved into her own apartment with her dog. It is very weird to be living in a house with no dog, we have had a dog or dogs for the past thirty years, I am still getting use to the emptiness. I spent a couple of weeks helping her find furniture for her place and painting the dark brown walls light and airy shades of gray. All of this left me with very little time for exploring.

This photograph was taken on the second to last day of the month. My husband took the afternoon off for a date day. For Christmas we tend to do experiences instead of big gifts. I gave him 12 date days for 2017, one per month, vacation days were required. He always ends the year with too many vacation days unused, I plan to change that this year.

For our date afternoon we went to a Bar & Grill we had never been to for lunch, after that I made us climb 300+ stairs to the top of a small mountain with great views of a resort town and Lake Michigan. The day wouldn't have been complete without a trip to the beach. In summer you have to pay $8 to park at this beach, but off-season equals free. My husband and I explored a natural area at the end of the beach, and then wandered down to the lake. As my husband lingered on this path I captured the moment with my iPhone.

An InLinkz Link-up

Altered

It has been an unusual January here in Michigan. We have had a couple of cold blasts and enough measurable snow to break out the snowblower a time or two. But for the most part the days been a dull gray with temperatures hovering in the 30's and 40's Fahrenheit. There was even a day that it reached into the 50's.

Photo Credit: Glen Huizenga

I have a gym membership for the rainy days, the snowy days and the bitter cold days, but given a choice I prefer to be outside. The need for fresh air, natural light and wide open space is irrepressible. Most of the year I am happy to walk along the beaches near my house, but in the winter, when I am craving creative visual stimulation, I hop in my car and drive to our thriving downtown.

I begin my walk in near darkness, the sidewalks illuminated by street lamps, car headlights and the lights of store window displays. It is the window displays that draw me downtown, so much creativity and imagination goes into each store's presentation of who they are. Following the holidays, my mind seems to be empty of creativity. I walk, I look, I dream, I am inspired.

Photo Credit: Glen Huizenga

There are also office buildings at the east end of our downtown, many of the offices have windows looking out onto the main street. As I walk past and the lights begin to come on, I see the photographs that adorn the desks and walls of these spaces. The smiles of children and spouses often shine bright from the desk or the shelves behind the desk, my favorites are when the family pets have their own framed portraits, this office belongs to someone I would like to know.

The walls though are the most interesting, family photographs tell a part of their story, but what about the artwork on the walls. Did they get to chose their own pieces? Or did the interior designer chose what should adorn their walls? I like to think if you have to look at it all day, you get some say in it. Judging by the variety I have seen, it seems most people get to pick their own, to me that tells another part of their story.

Some have large, matted realistic photographs of the big red lighthouse near our local beach, a much photographed icon in our town. But the pieces that catch my eye are the painted canvases; open fields with rustic barns in the distance, painterly lake shores with iconic lighthouses. I always wanted to learn to paint, lacking the patience for that, I became a photographer instead.

I have many empty walls in my own house. I have talked for years of printing and hanging my own work, and I have done some over the years. What I mostly print is realistic photographs and then frame those 8 X 10's in 11 X 14 matted frames. They have never stirred me. The few canvases I have had printed of creatively altered photographs are the ones that move me, and the bigger the better.

You can guess and assume what your preferences are, but until you actually take action you don't really know. By seeing my small 8 X 10's printed I found out I prefer bigger prints. Realistic photographs don't thrill me, creating painterly images from my photographs in Photoshop and Topaz Labs programs, that makes me happy. Taking that knowledge and the inspiration from those downtown offices, I ordered a 24 X 36 canvas of a digitally altered portion of snow fence I shot in December. For the first time in almost fourteen years in our house, we finally have something on the wall above our bed. I kept waiting to find the right thing, little did I know I just had to create it myself.

Conquering Fear

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do"

 ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Last Saturday I did the thing that I was certain I could not do - a family portrait session.

My friend Jill has been asking me for a few years to do some photos of her family. One of her sons lives in North Carolina so the window of opportunity is not open often. I always declined, stating that I don't shoot people. I like landscapes - things that don't move and aren't concerned with how they look in a photograph. But Jill never gave up, having more faith in me than I had in myself. This year when she asked, I finally said yes, which probably surprised her as much as it surprised me. I knew it was time to conquer one of the last big things that scared me in photography.

I told her though, if we were going to do this, I was going treat this like a professional portrait session. I had Jill over to my house a couple weeks before the session so we could view poses from the board I had been pinning to on Pinterest. Once we picked poses, I did a screen shot of them and put them in a folder that I then emailed to her so she could continue to review and share with her family. I have no idea if this is how a professional portrait session begins, but I know this is what I would want if I was the client.

The day of the session dawned overcast, cooler, and windy. Two out of three isn't bad. The wind was the problem since we were taking these photos at the beach. I kept praying for the overcast sky to stay, we weren't taking these until later in the day, and if the sun came out I would be shooting into the sun. Of course, shortly after lunch here comes the sun, and it was still windy. Because of the wind and the high water level of Lake Michigan there is very little beach to stand on. In the shot above, they formed their line and then backed into the water. I am perched on the side of a ten foot dune drop off to get the shot. You learn the most when you have challenges, and I definitely learned. I still have a lot more to learn before I begin to feel comfortable in this arena.

We all had a great time, and I am hopeful that as many memories were created in the process of doing, as were created in the actual photographs. I know that they will remember me standing in knee-deep water with waves reaching upper thigh to get this shot of all of them sitting on a wooden deck that had been buried under the sand until this year. Next year the deck could be gone again, and the little ones will be even bigger. Time keeps moving forward so it is good to capture the memories and the moments now. 

Unsettled

I have been feeling a bit unsettled in my photography lately. Not unsettled in the way that I want to stop doing it, but unsettled in the fact that I want to do more, I want to do different things, I want to learn and get better.

I am also finding myself turning more inward - growing tired of social media, and in particular Instagram. The constant sharing and "liking", double tapping without taking the time to really see a photograph or read the words written has worn me out.

I am finding myself drawn to my Canon 70D, the quality and abilities of different lenses can not be matched by the iPhone. I have been reading the book Canon Lens From Snapshots to Great Shots. It has made me think about what I love to shoot, what I would love to learn to shoot, what is currently in my camera bag, what I would like to add to my camera bag and what I could purge out of my camera bag.

On that note, I recently rented the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 lens for a project that I was doing for a dear friend. I can see now why they say the "glass" makes the difference. LOVED the lens!

My husband and I happened to be away for a couple days at the beginning of the rental period, so I was able to wander by myself for a whole day with my camera while he was at a work conference. It is a heavier lens and not something I would take on an all day hike, but great for an all day wander around a lakeside town.

It is hard to put into words all that is churning inside me right now, as you can probably tell from this post, but I know when I feel like this something is usually looming on the horizon.

Obsessions

Writers need obsessions. Photographers need obsessions. Obsessions help us to develop the gifts and talents we have been given.

Last year was my year of obsessions, although this year seems to be shaping up the same way. Some obsessions are the same as last year, some old obsessions have been replaced by new ones.

The first few months of last year I was obsessed with my water project, I am reliving that obsession now as I reread my Morning Pages journal entries from last year. I was constantly obsessing over the weather, getting blog posts done, and taking photographs for those blog posts. I hope to not be as obsessed with one particular thing this year, I don't think I can stomach reading about it day after day next year.

I think the turning point to ending that singular obsession came one morning last April. It was a day for shirt sleeves, I was out exploring a county park I hadn't been to before. As I hiked along the soggy grass paths, I realized that life is too short to focus so much on one thing. I was missing out on all the other things I enjoy. Once I got back to the parking lot, I sat down at a picnic table next to the historic barn I had spent the morning photographing, I took my notebook and pen out of my backpack and began to make a list of all things that interest me, an obsession list. The list was long.

Finished with the list, I repacked my notebook and pen, gathered up my water bottle and backpack and returned to my car. I drove home with a new perspective, determined to not waste any more time ignoring all my other obsessions. Wouldn't life be more fun if I dabbled a little in all of them. When I got home, I transferred the list I had made in the notebook to the notes app. on my phone. I wanted to be able to see that list at any moment, and maybe even add to it.

This morning I went to the notes app. to see if the list was still there, it was. I haven't look at in a while or added to it, but the list did what it was suppose to do, it got me out of that single obsession rut.

Here is my list from April 2015, in no particular order:

• travel
• coffee shops
• people watching
• water
• barns
• iPhoneography
• leading lines
• self-portraiture
• food
• vintage items
• color
• walking
• parks
• Mallory
• Great Aunt Viola
• Grandma
• old buildings
• history
• reading
• small town life
• typography
• old signs
• decay

I thought I would make a new list for this year, here is my list as of March 2016:

• reading
• people watching
• writing
• storytelling photography
• walking
• learning
• handmade pottery mugs
• old buildings
• painterly landscape photo processing
• neutral colors - white, gray and black
• beaches
• audio books
• podcasts
• fog
• natural light
• wide open space with horizon lines

My list is smaller this year, but I feel it is more focused than ever, there is still plenty of room within many of these to develop sub-obsessions.

Don't be surprised if you see some of these obsessions being turned into future blog posts.

What about you? What are your obsessions this year? I would love to hear.

Monday Beach Shots

Last summer I made weekly trips to the beach with my camera. It was delightful walking along the shore of Lake Michigan in June, July and August.

But what about in the barrenness of winter? Not quite as delightful. But still the beach, the water/ice and the shore were calling me. Thankfully this winter has had much less snow than in recent years, so  getting there hasn't been as problematic as it normally would be.

December 14, 2015

On Monday, December 14 I made the first of my weekly Monday trips to the beach. I decided I wanted to document the changing landscape of the beach over the winter months, plus it was a good excuse for me to get out photographing at least once a week.

December 21, 2015

I don't plan on taking the same shot every week. I want to be open to whatever moves me each week. By the second week I thought it would be fun to document the weather conditions, and temperatures.  Even though the weather looks ominous in this shot, it was 46 degrees.

December 28, 2015

December weather was good to us. I did forget to record the temperature this day, but my note says there was a howling wind.

January 4, 2016

All good things must come to an end...the snow came. We had gotten a couple of inches over night and the temperature was 25 degrees, but the sun was shining brightly, giving me a nice long shadow.

January 11, 2016

Intersting changes from one week to the next. Much colder at 18 degrees and windy, and the nasty ice.

January 18, 2016. I decided to mix things up a bit and take a video. A chilly 14 degrees with a wind chill of -4. I was the only crazy person out there that day. 

January 25, 2016

A beautiful winter day, 36 degrees and sunny. Those are ice chunks and ice rings floating in the channel.

February 1, 2016

February arrived and it was time to take my first of the month self-portrait. Totally unprepared but yet determined, I propped my iPhone up in the crevice in this log and set the timer. I think it only took 10 tries or so. A beautiful 34 degree day, I got lost for an hour out there. 

February 1, 2016

Some weeks offer a bonus shot. I knew as soon as I saw this shot that it was the shot of the day. Edited in Stackables and iColorama, two of my favorite editing apps.

February 8, 2016

That brings us to this week's shots. While cloudy with some threatening winter clouds, it wasn't snowing and the temp was a warm 34 degrees. I decided to climb to the top of Mt. Pisgah for a shot down the dune to the beach.

February 8, 2016

My favorite shot thus far, and an example of the stairs on the dune. Edited in Stackables.

Once a week seems a very manageable project for me. I will miss a Monday here or there due to travel, but for the most part I am always getting groceries and going to the gym on Mondays. The beach is my reward.

The Year of the Project

At the start of 2015, I had great aspirations and high hopes for a year long photography/writing project. I spent the final months of 2014 plotting and planning it.

My project, A Year Beside the Water, was going to be a documentation of photographs and stories gained from a year of weekly explorations to various bodies of water around my area. I had a notebook filled with thoughts and ideas about the project. I even started a new blog on Squarespace to house this life changing project.

On January 1st it started, and it started out with great enthusiasm, as most new projects do. I wrote stories about my youth, and about growing up on a dead-end, gravel county road that ended at a peaceful, winding river. I spent many childhood days exploring along the edge of that river, this is probably where my love of water and exploring began.

Shortly into the month of January the snow began to fall, which was not a surprise since I live in Michigan. I used my project to propel me out of the house to photograph landscapes of white, and ice instead of water.  My project kept me from becoming housebound during the winter months.

Spring came, I documented the melting of the snow and ice, and the return of color to the landscape.

The project was going smoothly until the middle of April, roughly 100 days into it. I was preparing for a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to celebrate our daughter's graduation from college, and then we were packing her up and moving her back home. I continued to take pictures of water, but the ability to pen words to go with those pictures seemed to have gotten lost in the hustle and bustle of life.

Following closely on the heels of graduation, and the move home, was our first family vacation in a few years, a week long trip to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The only water there was waterfalls with tourists crawling all over them, not very inspiring to write about and impossible to photograph.

In June, home and settled for the summer, I picked the project back up again. I decided to make weekly visits to our local state park which is on the shores of Lake Michigan, and about a five minute drive from my house. I spent early mornings watching the sun rise, and wandering the pier where the fishermen set up camp for the morning (I am not convinced they came to catch fish, I think most of them came for the fellowship of other fisher people). I strolled along the sandy edge of the beach, empty of sun-worshippers at that time of the morning.

The project continued for a short while once these weekly visits began. Eventually though the words dried up all together, but my love for photography grew by leaps and bounds. I was soon making multiple trips to the beach each week, just to wander with my camera. By the end of June I had stopped documenting on the Squarespace blog altogether, I never returned to it.

I thought I had started the project because I wanted to document a year's worth of change to the landscape and to myself. But looking back now, I started the project because I needed a reason to get out shooting again, I needed to fall in love with photography again. And it worked.

Ladder Love and a Lesson

I have been delaying doing this week's lesson for our Flickr group - The Visual Workbench - for a couple of reasons.

1. I was impatiently waiting for the summer people to have their last hurrah on Labor Day. Labor Day is over and they have gone home. Yay!
2. The instructions for the lesson were a little long, and I was having a hard time remembering them every time I was out shooting. I solved that problem by printing out the instructions and carrying them with me in my coat pocket.

Here is the first part of the instructions, the part I was planning on tackling first:

• Concentrate on one element. The simpler the scene, the better. Now make six to eight different photographs, changing only the position of the camera relative to your subject. Get higher. Get lower. Move left. Move right. Walk around it. The element might not move in a hundred years, but you have astonishing control over its shape relative to the frame.
• Study those six to eight frames. How does the energy and balance change? How does the shape of that primary element change as your position changes?

 Here is my primary element and my simple scene...

I am in love with these orange ladders that are on the edge of the pier at our State Park.

This is shooting from the left to the right of my element, the sun, if it was out, would be behind me.

Shooting from above. It makes me a little nervous to be so close to the edge.

Changing energy and direction, shooting from right to left of my element. I would never shoot this direction normally, because the sun, if it was shining, would be shining directly into my face. It also feels more chaotic shooting this direction, even without people, compared to the peaceful scene shot from the opposite direction.

If I hadn't done this exercise, and studied this one element, I might not have noticed the thin piece of rope tied to the ladder. This additional element became my favorite part of the photographs.

It is still the surprise discoveries and the little details that delight me the most.