While I don’t use Instagram as much as I did years ago, every once in a while I find a photographer whose work says, “yeah, that’s the good stuff.”
Kristopher Shinn is one of those, sharing scenes from Pudget Sound ferries. It made me think of my recent summer vacation trip to Mackinac Island aboard Shepler’s Ferry.
The light is everything. We rode along at the perfect time of day, zipping along Lake Huron.
Swimming and hiking and bonfiring.
Drinking and s’more’ing and eating some more’ing.
Finding the nature therapy you’ve long needed. Spending time with family. Introducing places like Mackinac Island to the kids, and bringing back memories with you on the ferry ride across Lake Michigan.
Climbing to the top of a 10-story lighthouse along Lake Huron. Braving the pouring rain or the biting mosquitos.
Grabbing your camera and capturing the last remaining light of a busy day.
It’s more than a checklist. These are all the elements of a great summer vacation.
Lately, I’ve had the itch to get out and shoot more. Sometimes, hobbies can come and go in waves – often depending on what else is going on in life. Right now feels like a crest, where I want go make more photos.
Saturday evening at Sandhill Crane Vineyards was a good chance to shoot. It was a lovely summer evening, with off and on clouds, and the sun was popping in and out of the clouds. As soon as it popped out during sunset, I took a walk around their mini festival to see what I could see.
And something different: I strapped a EF 28mm f/1.8 to my Canon EOS M, using the EF-to-M adapter, for a ~42mm field of view. 40mm tends to be my comfort zone. Even though the camera felt a little front-heavy, the FOV was perfect.
So was the light, and the setting, and the music and drinks all around.
This weekend, I lost a brother and a best friend. Rest in Peace, John Neff.
John seemed to be everyone’s big brother, really. He took care of people, was considerate, and tried to help whenever he could. He led our fraternity during difficult times. He provided invaluable counsel and wisdom. We always joked he was an old man, even in his early 20s – maybe “old soul” is more appropriate.
But for me, Neff really was my big brother. In our fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega, he helped induct me. He taught me so much and got me out of more than one scrape. One time he even had to drive me to the hospital after a diabetic episode. Many other times, he rescued me from my own bad decisions. And with big life decisions, during and after college, he was there to lend an ear and some wisdom. He was the brother I never had.
Neff was a rabble-rouser, a lover of education, a trivia nut, and a music appreciator. A fellow Mac and photography enthusiast, it was Neff who sparked my joy of “fancy cameras.” We had so many adventures together taking photos – whether in freezing cold downtown Chicago, boiling hot downtown Toledo, or in and around the Cleveland area.
Neff was the best man at my wedding. He was there a few days before Jaime and I got married, and sure enough, we took our cameras and explored a bit of Jackson County together. I was proud to have him by my side, acknowledging my special day, and joking around with the rest of the fraternity family we rarely saw. I was proud to be in his and Laura’s wedding too – long before I was ready for something as mature as marriage.
A few of us were lucky enough to take in one more ball game in Cleveland with Neff last summer. I’m so thankful we did. One last night at John and Laura’s house, one last big breakfast at a local diner together. And while we only saw each other every year or so, Neff and I talked constantly: fun, inappropriate text conversations, or a call to catch up. He was kind enough to check in, and each time we talked it was like we had never been apart.
It feels like he’s still there, just waiting to reply, “Oh, Dave” with that chuckle of his. An in-joke here, an Adrian College memory there. Now suddenly, he’s gone.
With Laura and his girls, Neff had a beautiful family. I feel so much for them, and I can’t imagine how much it hurts to lose a husband and a father. I love the entire Neff family. I loved John in the way that two people who share a bond as strong as right itself do.
It’s too soon, brother. There were still so many more memories to make.
Love and respect, Neff. Always and forever.
“Go touch grass” is such a meme these days. And for good reason – after almost three years of pandemic isolation, we could all use some fresh air. We probably spend too much time online, especially on social media, and it can affect our wellbeing.
This year, I’m trying my best to get outside more. During the pandemic, I made taking a walk at lunchtime a new habit to help my mental and physical health. But “outside” can also mean away from the internet, or away from your everyday. Now is always the best time to see or do something new.
And while you’re at it, grab your camera and capture what you experience.
April is our time to wake up and get outside. The birds are chirping, the leaves are sprouting, and the sun comes out to visit again.
For my last two big portrait projects, Artists In Jackson and Musicians In Jackson, my goal was to interview and photograph local creatives and assemble those stories into a book. Prep, execute, deliver – all in one big thing.
I had the thought: what if, instead of treating them as projects, I treat them as platforms.
Instead of disappearing for a few months and coming out with a deliverable – like Moses carrying down a photo book carved in stone and delivered by divine inspiration – those projects become a channel that has regularly updated photos and stories. Instead of releasing a set of stories as a book, I keep releasing stories and never really finish.
Now, I could collect those stories and photos – say, every 20 – into something like a book. But the book isn’t the point. The doing is the point. It keeps building, more like a seasonal Netflix show than a daily newspaper.
This would relieve some of the pressure of feeling like I had to make a collection of something. As an alternative, I keep writing and making pictures and posting something when I have time. These projects become more like living, breathing websites than printed, finished books. The stories then become material for social media, newsletters, and website updates, rather than the reverse.
I’ve been collecting lists of creatives that I missed out on the first time around. By building and adding to that list, I can keep the stories coming – as long as I’m alive to tell them, potentially.
Not projects. Platforms.
We had a record ice storm hit Michigan last week. It swept across the U.S., but on Wednesday night, it struck the Great Lakes with particular fury.
That night, we listened anxiously while tree branches cracked and fell, breaking power lines all around us. We had an oak tree snap in half and block our street because of the weight of the ice. I braved falling branches the next morning to go around the yard and document everything sheathed in a clear coat. By the afternoon, all the ice had melted. The storm swept in and swept out quickly.
For two nights, we huddled in the basement as a family, wrapped in blankets while the temperature inside the house dipped to 47° F. We only got the power back on Saturday, and what a relief. But driving around town and seeing all the wreckage, we were lucky.
That’s life in a northern town.
I’m not Catholic, but I do love the idea of giving stuff up for a limited time from now through Easter. I’m in the Ben Franklin school of self-experimentation, and I’ve been giving up things I love for years. Potatoes, coffee (ugh! that was a rough one), alcohol – limitations are good, and knowing you can survive without these things builds character.
This video by HealthyGamerGG kick-started my flirtations with Lent deprivation this year. I was initially attracted to the title (“Why Finding Purpose Is SO HARD Today”), but after watching, Dr. Alok Kanojia’s points made a lot of sense about life in general.
I do tend to stuff my brain with external stimuli. I don’t let myself get bored anymore. And while I’ve taken up meditation again this year, it is a bummer to read social media all the time and not have time to just sit and think.
So for Lent, I gave up Twitter.
Twitter is a trashbin on fire these days, with all the behind-the-scenes ownership and business fumbles it’s made. I choose not to follow that stuff closely, but I have noticed that Twitter mostly brings me negative news. It’s a bummer to scroll through tweets every day. Giving it up means not allowing that negativity into my brain. It also means more quiet time to do something else.
Like edit photos! Or take photos! Or anything else that actually brings me joy.
While this blog post will appear on Twitter, thanks to a WordPress plugin, I won’t see it or the reaction. Instead, I can devote more time to being bored, thinking about my purpose, and reducing my overall anxiety.
Here’s a harsh truth: I’ve taken fewer photos each passing year since 2015.
It’s not for lack of trying or interest. No, it’s mostly because the rest of life got busier – three kids, a demanding job, a new house, chores, spending time with family, etc.
(Another consequence of moving home and work is that I don’t have an interesting commute anymore. It’s mostly city and highway driving instead of the beautiful back country roads that used to fuel my hobby.)
That means, besides family vacations and a rare sunbeam coming into the home office, I have fewer and fewer photos to take, edit, and post for public consumption. And I miss doing that! I miss the process of capturing pictures and making them my own.
Lately, my solution has been to go back and rediscover some of my past work. I can look at it with fresh eyes, and tinker a bit. I have a good selection of photos that I’ve taken but never touched or shared in the years since.
Take my film portraits from the Musicians In Jackson project. I was initially so dissatisfied with how they turned out that I shelved them in favor of the digital versions. Now, looking back at them, they were actually pretty fun, and using a bit of Lightroom magic, I can make them look how I prefer.
There’s a ton of abandoned pictures and others that are stuck in a Lightroom folder somewhere. All I have to do is look for them, play with the sliders, and boom – something to share.
Now, that also means I’ll eventually run out. And I can’t fix the not-enough-time-for-picture-making problem – not easily. But this scratches the creative itch well enough to keep me busy for a while.
It’s been a while since I purchased a new lens. The truth is, I really have all I need, even though the Canon R system keeps tempting me.
For my mirrorless system, I’m sticking with my trusty Canon M. Forever, I’ve had the EOS M 22mm attached to that camera. I see in cropped 35mm on that camera.
So when Canon had a fire sale on refurbished 32mm f/1.4 prime lenses for Black Friday, I thought, “Now’s the time to get something new.”
(My other plan is to upgrade the camera itself, since my faithful M is almost 10 years old now. But we’ll see what next year brings.)
The 32mm is a 51mm equivalent on the M system. My comfort zone is in that 35-50mm range, but the extra F stop adds the opportunity for some shallow depth of field on a near-portrait fixed lens. All these years, I’ve been limited to a 35mm view on the M. This new lens was my chance to put another option in a camera I use 75% of the time.
And what a lens. It took some time to get used to this new field of view, but after fiddling with the unique focus system, I got the hang of it. When we went Christmas tree shopping this weekend, I saw it as a perfect chance to take the lens for a spin on a chilly, sunny midwestern December day.
As with the other M lenses, the 32mm is tack sharp. It’s stunning what these little, lightweight lenses can do. It does stick out from the front of the camera more than the pancake-style 22mm does, so getting the grip and balance just right took some time. It was also weird not to look through a viewfinder and see that 50mm field of view – the M has a touchscreen and touch-focus system.
These are minor getting-adjusted points. It’s a great lens, and I can see building a truly lightweight, mirrorless system out of this, the 22mm, and maybe a wide-angle M lens paired with a new M camera.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to decide if you’re a content creator, or an artist.”
– Gozer Goodspeed
Gozer’s tweet thread (via Jeffery Saddoris) is great to think about if you Make Things – either as a content creator or artist.
I wonder all the time, watching my kids view YouTube video after YouTube video: is all this content artistic? Or is it entertainment? Is there anything wrong with either approach?
A few thoughts in reaction to Gozer’s thread:
I consider myself someone who makes and shares the things I make, at my own pace, for a very small audience. But I do it for me, not them, and I certainly don’t do it to feed a social media platform.
And then there’s the language that gets thrown around in business and entertainment and just about everywhere: do you make “content?” Or do you make photographs?
Our new neighborhood is filled with trees – trees of all kinds. This fall, we’re watching them turn magical. Even the oaks, normally a drab brown, are a brilliant orange around here.
Luckily, we had a few nice days this week after a dreary, wet, chilly week last week. So I went exploring to see what I could see.
This weekend we did fall things.
In October, it’s like this all over the midwest: pumpkins, apples, cider, and donuts. Some of our local cider mills are now so busy that we have to go looking for quieter, more intimate places. We found that at Red Egg Farm, just outside of Jackson. It had all the traditional autumn stuff we wanted – cider slushies, hay rides, petting zoo – without the busy crowd of some other places.
We also visited Adams Farm to pick up actual apples (for cider) and pumpkins (for carving) to bring home.
We did fall things, because it’s that time of year.
My wife and I hit up mid-state New York to catch a Brandi Carlile concert in Bethel, the site of Woodstock.
We glamped and hit up some hiking in the Catskills while we were there. Pretty great to unzip the tent and see all this. Above shot on my Canon M, below on iPhone 13.
More to come from my film camera.
About two years ago, I fell out of using Instagram – something about the way it had become a photo-centric Facebook, and how it shows ads every third or fourth post, turned me off.
Thing is, I have an incredible backlog of iPhone photos waiting to be shared. There was something about that daily rhythm of posting to Instagram that kept things moving.
So now, two years later, I have a ton of stuff to share, and I jumped back on Instagram to clear out those old photos and put them somewhere. Flickr is an obvious choice, too, but Flickr isn’t nearly as simple and (I hate to say it) mindless as scrolling through a series of photos from people you follow.
Time to clear out that backlog.
A continuation of my Door County, Wisconsin, series from this year’s summer holiday. This time, a few scenes from around the cabin in Idlewild.
And to finish up, a few random scenes. I always see something worth holding on to (besides cheese and cider) when we head north.
Until next time.
Kicking off a series of photos from our summer vacation spot: Door County, Wisconsin.
Yes, we’d been there in 2018 and 2020. We love the area so much that we went back this year for our family holiday.
Different cabin (the big one), different month (August instead of June/July), and different crowd (we brought the in-laws), but other than that, it was as spectacular as it always is.
I take a memory card’s worth of photos wherever we go. Above is a series of windows I saw along the way. Here are some natural spots:
More to come next week.
The county fair, just before sunset.
Turned down the exposure compensation and was pleasantly surprised at the image quality.
Needs more neon.
