Paintings by Samantha Keely Smith
Title: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto XII, line 87
The first book I read as a college freshman, just for pleasure, was The Inferno. These paintings by Samantah Keely Smith are even more beautiful than what I pictured in my mind.
I knew my dad went “country” when he bought an old John Deere farm tractor and drove it in the Memorial Day parade (and when he started listening to country music, and when he bought two cows for slaughter).
My grandpa had an agricultural museum in his barn filled with mysterious tools and gadgets from his Depression-era farming life. He’d always ask, “Do you know what this used to do?” Of course I didn’t.
So my rural roots don’t run deep, per se, but they’re there. I do like to keep my garden, and I do think old guys in suspenders and unironic trucker hats performing in a tractor pull is pretty fun.
We almost never buy the item we buy because it excels at a certain announced metric. Almost no one drives the fastest car or chooses the most efficient credit card. No, we buy a story.
It’s why I’m an Apple, Canon, and Warby Parker fan. They make things other people make. But the one thing they make that no one else makes is themselves.
Turns out Jordan grew up in the town next to mine growing up, attending a rival high school at about the same time.
But it was his alma mater, his wife’s job, and his own first job in the financial world that brought him up to Harbor Springs, Mich. Now? He’s a barber.
In a tourist town like Harbor Springs, about 10 minutes around the bay from Petoskey, Jordan says his Harbor Barber shop does good business. Fifteen customers a day during the winter, and upwards of 40 during the summer.
He says it’s tiring, being on his feet all day, looking down at customers. But the money is good.
“You can still make a good living doing this,” he said.
Just do the math: $15 for a shave and a haircut. Forty customers a day in the summer.
Jordan says the old straight razors could nick a customer, and then transfer some of the blood onto the leather strap. Cross-contamination. So he uses the disposal razors, but treats them in the old-timey way.
The whole old-timey shave is a novelty, he says. Customers, though, enjoy the ritual: the warm towel, putting your feet up, the patient pace of the job.
Some of the guys felt like they could’ve gone to sleep after The Towel Treatment. Especially after a long night of drinking.
The bench comes from the southern part of the state. The stool comes from Georgia, but the metal was manufactured in St. Louis.
One room. One stool. One sink. One customer after the other.
I have this list of things I want to stop and photograph on my way into work. Concord, Mich. has quite a few little things like this sign that are on my list.
This month-long project is the perfect excuse to pull over, grab the camera, and check one off the list.
I’ve watched these weeds envelop this sign all summer long. Now I got it.
Renting a camera is the perfect way to try before you buy. It’s also the perfect way just to try – and that’s why I rented a Fuji X100 for two weeks. Just to try.
I see other photographers that I admire doing fantastic work with the Fuji system, and speaking its praise as the Next Big Thing. Being a Canon guy, it was tempting to see what all the fuss is about.
I also rented it because I was covering a wedding for two co-workers, and thought it would be fun to take it to their destination ceremony in Petoskey, Mich.
There, it performed very well. I had to make sure to keep it on a setting that worked for whatever situation I was in, but from there I just pointed, framed, and shot.
The things this camera can do with mixed light situations, dynamic lighting, and low light is spectacular. And sharpness? Just perfect.
There were times when I felt lost. That feeling probably comes from knowing my Canons so well. I also like having things like ISO and white balance ready at a button push. Too often, with the X100, I had to dive into the menu system to switch up the settings.
I’ve read that people use the X100 as a slower device. Take your time, adjust your settings, frame your shot, click. So maybe throwing it into a fast-paced wedding situation wasn’t entirely fair.
For those instances where I could take my time, it was perfect. The size, too, made it a handy carry-around camera. It’s a throw-it-in-the-front-seat-of-my-car camera – a walk-around-the-neighborhood camera. And it was light enough to feel like a regular accessory to the day.
The film modes are fun (like the Velvia setting above), but were an extra step in the process. I found taking the RAW files and adjusting them was more my style.
At first, I blanched at the idea of using the Electronic Viewfinder. But the rangefinder-style Optical Viewfinder missed focus points just enough to get pretty annoying, so I switched as time went on fairly easily.
Switching to Macro Mode, however, to get those close shots was not easy. I never quite got the hang of it, and would often forget which mode I was in and shoot in the wrong mode.
The picture files? Glorious to work with. Plenty of flexibility to lift shadows or pull back highlights – again, especially in those mixed lighting situations. Skies, especially, were lovely. For a lot of my shots, using the VSCO Film Fuji profiles worked well.
All in all, using the Fuji X100 really was like shooting with a film camera. The photo files had personality, and flexibility, and were a lot of fun to play around with.
The camera itself was an adjustment. I feel like, with more time, I’d get used to its particular quirks. Maybe not.
But sometimes it was nice to set the setting and not touch them, and just worry about making nice photos.
This time of year is both happy and sad. Happy because, hey, it’s still technically summer.
But it’s sad because it’s the Sunday of summer – the last little bit before fall starts creeping in. Nothing says this more than harvest time, especially this cool summer in Michigan that feels like half-fall anyway.
Fall is a lot of people’s favorite season, but not mine. The crops, though. Man, I’ll take those all autumn long.
Michigan is known mainly for its cherries, apples, and blueberries, but we’re lucky in that a lot of crops grow well here. Peaches, melons, corn.
“You can tell it’s a Michigan [insert crop here],” my family used to say. “They don’t grow these like they do in Michigan.”
I’m not positive that’s true. But I do know that everything tastes pretty darned good this time of year.
Lots of abandoned goodness in Albion, Mich. Took a little drive Friday afternoon during lunch and spotted a row of buildings that looked like they used to be thriving businesses.