Not that I need another one, but I started a new hobby: cider making.
Luckily, our neighbors and the in-laws have apple trees weighed down with apples this year. That meant plenty of fruit for the juicing and fermenting I had in mind.
I’ve long been a cider fan – an apple fan in general – and consider owning an orchard one of my retirement goals. Somewhere along the line, I got the bug to try my hand and making my own hard cider, taking advantage of all the modern brew making equipment and methods. Right here in town, we have a home brewery store with all the supplies I need. That, with some online advice, and I could easily give a batch a try.
There’s a lot to do: wash the apples, juice the apples, sterilize the equipment, add the yeast, feed the yeast, etc.
But first, I had to grab six little hands to help me pick and wash apples from the neighborhood.
Sony and its brethren have taken a page from the Sun playbook. They keep pushing cameras that have features, like higher megapixels, that most people don’t use or don’t care about. And the executives don’t seem to get a key fact about the market reality: what we do with cameras and photos has changed
After peaking in 2012, camera and lens sales have slid downward. Not as many people need fancy cameras when a smartphone camera will do just fine.
Cameras may not disappear entirely, but they might be sold to fewer and fewer professionals and hobbyists.
As with Om, my 2005-era Canon 5D is all I’ll probably ever require in a camera (and I’m not alone). Why upgrade when I have all that I need?
Some final pictures from our Upper Peninsula vacation.
The trip has me thinking about growing older and the kind of life I’d like to live, even though retirement is a ways off. I have all kinds of thoughts about owning an orchard and living quietly by a lake. Up here, both may be possible.
During our holiday, we spent time inside and outside the park, exploring the wooded paths down sandstone bluffs as well as cruising past the cliffs along Lake Superior. Both were scenic and humbling.
It’s a long drive, and a long boat ride, from one end of the park to the other. Along the way, we tried to take in as much as we could.
On the cruise, we sat next to a German couple, the guy had one of those big Nikon rigs with a couple of the big zoom lenses. I did the best I could with my aging (but still handy) Canon EOS M with a 22mm (35mm equiv.) lens.
Cross the bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and you come into a different world.
Vast stretches of nothing. Straight, empty highways for as far as you can see. Water and forests and wetlands surrounded by three Great Lakes. Quiet and old and wild.
After our trip to Door County, Wisconsin, last year, we wanted a similar upper Midwest experience. We picked Munising as our home base, with a little cabin out in the middle of the Hiawatha National Forest, and ventured out into God’s Country to see all of that different world stuff.
We started the trip halfway there, in St. Ignace, right across the Mackinac Bridge from Mackinaw City. Like its neighbor across Lake Michigan, St. Ignace is a tourist town, but much quieter, and much less gaudy. After one night, the sun came up over Lake Michigan and we made the long trek through the U.P. to see Whitefish Point, sticking out into Lake Superior, and then on to our cabin in the woods.
Each day was an adventure – and a drive, since nothing was close by up here. That meant a lot of time in the car, and a lot of entertaining little kids, but once we got out and into the fresh air, we did our best to tire them out.
It’s hot here in the Glass City. My pal Neff and I get here right at high noon, when the pavement is radiating late June, and walk around downtown grabbing photos of this very quiet midwestern city.
Quiet, except for the speed boat races out on the Maumee River. That was a new one, and it drew a decent crowd.
By sundown, the heat had subsided enough for us to take in a Mud Hens game – a rare summer treat, with our combined kids and jobs and lives, that we haven’t been able to enjoy since our college days.
Here’s another quick project: Grab the kids, find a trail, and start shooting.
I used to do more of this type of work, coming up with a simple idea and grabbing the family to execute it. Now, with a busy life, it’s harder to think this way.
Thank goodness for my wife, who saw a sunny evening and a trail full of spring flowers and got us out of the house.
Projects don’t need to be fancy, or long, or all that involved.
Sometimes, all you need is an idea and a bit of time to see it through. In this case, it was playing in the backyard with the kids and wondering, how many corners can I find?
This has been my way out of a recent photography slump: simply shooting what’s around me, and finding something creative to say with my everyday surroundings.
Spring and summer means more time outside, more birthday parties and events, more walking and ice cream shop visits and hiking. All creative fuel for making photos. All slump busters.
So many pictures that, when it comes round to the end of the year and I work on our annual photo book, I can never fit all the photos I take.
It makes me wonder: what will the kids remember? Which photos will the kids treasure? Will they care at all? Or will they see dad as a fussy ol’ snapshot artist?
Hard to say! But I keep snapping away, regardless.
Here’s what I do know: when my mom passed away, I didn’t care about getting anything else but our photo albums from when we were kids. I poured over those albums growing up, and in a lot of ways those pictures helped anchor my memories. As a kid, the past is fuzzy. But with photos, it can come to life.
Lately, I’ve been pining for the past – those productive photography days when I had a glut of photos to take, process, and share.
These days, photography is harder to do. I don’t have a picturesque commute, or much time to dedicate to making the types of photos I did a few years ago. I look back through my Flickr feed and remember those productive days, and it makes my heart ache a little bit.
A lot has changed. I got married, had kids, switched jobs, moved our household. It wasn’t one thing that made me shoot less, but a combination of things. There’s also a mental component, where I find it hard to feel like making photos.
The tough part is being okay with this new period in my life. Here’s how I’m trying to cope:
Picking up Instagram has helped a bit – trying to keep to a semi-daily photo sharing practice
Wrapping up my photo project and staying in touch with my portrait subjects
Making more family photos of the kids playing around the house, or going on walks
Revisiting some old photos and processing them in my current style, for a change of pace
Feeling grateful that I had a period in my life where I was super productive, and made some fun photos
Those are not a cure-all, as a lot of my guilt comes from my life situation changing, and I can’t do anything about where I live or the free time I have. What I can do is build some new routines around my current schedule and lifestyle.
One of my favorite artists, Joan Miró, went through similar ups and downs during his career. Art can be bi-polar, filled with peaks and dips. My hope is that a few little things will be satisfying enough to last me until my next upswing.
That’s it. After almost two years, I finished my musicians project.
And what a relief. So many ups and downs with this project, from a failed Kickstarter to wondering whether I could complete the project at all, that it feels pretty good to have the thing finished.
There in the last few months, during February and March, I tried to schedule a photo session with a well-known musician here in town. After a few reschedules, I finally gave up trying, and finished up the last week of March with my final musician: my wife.
I saved her for last as a sort of friendly torture. She hinted at me plenty these past two years – “You know, I’m a local musician, too” – but I gave her vague answers, or avoided the question all together. But I knew all along she’d be in there. She’s a performer, a teacher, a music therapist, a multi-instrumentalist. She’s a natural.
Now the second part of the hard work begins: writing up all those interviews, getting the last of the film developed, selecting the final photos, and assembling all of that into a book that makes sense. There’s also keeping all the musicians who participated up to date and informed. The secret to that is, it keeps me honest. I’m now accountable to that audience. They want to see the finished product!
After getting called out by my photo/tech comrade, Ken Fager, I’m back posting to Instagram for the first time in six months.
We’ll see how long it lasts. I will say it’s nice having a semi-daily posting routine again. The practice is good practice. I also have a treasure trove of photos saved up over those six months.
No, I still don’t like what Instagram’s become, but then again I don’t go after followers or likes or anything like that. I post what I post, and if people enjoy it, great.
I have been thinking lately about how much I have missed the sense of community and open conversation found in the “good old days” of Flickr before modern social media platforms took off and changed everything. Instagram snuck in as more and more cameras attached to mobile phones started to muddy the photography waters and eventually even those shooting on DSLRs and film cameras started to jump ship to “where the audience was”.
Jumping ship to “where the audience is” always comes with a trade-off in our modern social media world. There’s always a “next thing” to jump to, every few years.
Instagram was a lot of fun for a few years. I felt dedicated to it, and the audience there. It was an every-day kind of sharing site, right there with Flickr, but I kept it strictly mobile-photos-only. Flickr was for everything, Instagram just for mobile – but both were a daily habit.
Now? Instagram is Facebook, through and through. As John writes, it’s all about hype and personality. I used it to follow photography that I liked, not to see baby photos and life streaming. That’s what Facebook was for, but more and more it’s what Instagram became.
John mentions using Flickr as the anti-Instagram:
I am, perhaps, also hopeful that as Instagram gets weirder as Facebook continues to subtly manipulate it, those wanting to engage, share, and collaborate with other photographers will give Flickr a try either again or for the fist time.
What’s nice about Flickr is that it’s kind of always been there, chugging along. It had its early growth period, and its Yahoo! period, and now its SmugMug period. But I’ve always felt like I’ve gotten what I’ve paid for: a site for and about photography, by photographers.
Maybe it’s that “paying for” part that makes the difference. Maybe by paying for a yearly subscription, us Flickr users keep the site free of ads, posers, and junk. Free is open to everyone, but paid keeps the user base dedicated and smaller.
Flickr not changing all that much is probably the best part about it.
