365 Days in Michigan

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The blog is about to take on a new continental flavor… I don’t know when the first update post will arrive, but you’ll find out soon enough. ;-)

In the meantime, some thoughts about Michigan. I’ll have been here exactly one year (to the day, incredibly) when I move out of my apartment in Farmington Hills. I had a pretty decent to-do list: visit a Michigan lighthouse (didn’t happen), join a community band (yes!), visit the Upper Peninsula (mmm… nope), go to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (uh-uh), go visit Detroit’s ruins (nope), go mountain biking (got the info, but… nope), go skiing (yeah, once — if falling on my face repeatedly counts), go drive in the snow (yes, but it wasn’t as epic as I thought it would be), and try not to get shot (I didn’t, but I did get to shoot a gun for the first time in my life). It sounds like life has been pretty sedate — that’s a pretty long list of did-not-happens — but the past four months in particular have been insane. Between a personal vacation, where I was able to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-visit Mt. Rainier National Park, I also got to get a taste of what life in eastern Michigan is and is not like.

Winter isn’t as brutal as my friends from South Carolina make it seem. This one, in their defense, was particularly long… we had a nice little ice/snow day in April that was quite unpleasant. Early on in the winter, I learned that snow build-up around steel wheels makes for a very vibrationy ride — it makes sense, but at first it caught me by surprise that snowpack could have an even more pronounced effect than unbalanced tires.

Snowpack really ruins ride quality. Shaking steering wheel? Check.

It also led to a wet camera, but my XSi and 17-55 held their own. Even without weather sealing of any sort, snow didn’t lead to any problems. The Detroit River, however, did (keep reading). At first.

Also in winter, I visited the North American International Auto Show (aka Detroit Auto Show). It was pretty neat — a bit smaller than Chicago’s but very well attended — even if I had to book it home to watch the Chicago Bears beat the Seattle Seahawks. It was my first time seeing the Ferrari 458 in person… and it is mesmerizing in person. (Even more so on the road — I’ve seen one in the Detroit area.) As was its model. Not sure which one attracted more attention (okay, yes I am). I spoke to her for a few minutes — nice woman. She had her guard way up, though — probably has to fight off flirts for a living.

    

Chevrolet also had an exhibit thing where they took a series of images around a car… talk about a lot of Canon Rebels! If I had dropped and broken mine, a replacement would have been in easy reach.

Later on in the year, I drove around Hell, MI (I can’t believe I forgot to take a picture of the sign… but I was there). Apparently there are some good driving roads in that area (I only found one), but I did see yet another sign with my name on it. I’m thrilled I’m so popular here.

When I got home, my car — via the stitching on my steering wheel —  told me only to make right turns. It has racked up over 14,600 miles in less than a year — and that’s with four months of 6 mile round-trip commuting! The majority of the rest have piled on in 2011.

Being naturally defiant, I didn’t heed my car’s desires and went left instead to hit up Seattle, where I met up with many old friends (and couldn’t meet up with others due to a lack of time :-( ) and also the reliable Christine Falls. Overall, a solid trip… the first good-weather weekend of 2011. 70 or 75 and sunny… simply gorgeous.

Starting just before the Seattle weekend (when I visited the U of I campus), well, this is when weekends got hectic. Between dogsitting, traveling, band concerts, volunteering, golfing, and other random activities, every weekend but one in the course of twelve weeks was booked. Makes for a very difficult time planning the next rotation, this… but up to now, I hadn’t “explored” Detroit. Like any big city, there are pockets of bad news; being from Chicago, this was nothing surprising. The alarm, however, of my co-workers and friends when they found out that I’d be going to Belle Isle for a sunrise photo shoot, was. Apparently, it’s not a good idea. The homeless sometimes sleep on Belle Isle, and there has been at least one murder on the island. Even so, I wanted my picture of the skyline at sunrise, and on a second attempt, I got it. Nothing spectacular, but I hope there’s at least still some love left for the city. It’s sad (pathetic, really, in its compassionate sense — not the #4 connotation so commonly attached to the word) to see the ruins of what was once a magnificent empire. Some day, I’d like to go back and see how it has changed in the interim years. At sunrise, there is no evil, no 2008 collapse of the Big Three… the glow of the sun makes downtown gleam like the bastion of success it once was.

Facing east, the early glow also paints the Douglas MacArthur Bridge in a reddish pink.

Coincidentally, this was the last picture I took before my tripod, its head, my camera, and its attached lens fell into the Detroit River. The rock I was standing on was sloped and I had neglected to pay attention to that as I took my hand off the camera. Quickly fishing it out, I pulled the battery and memory card and hoped that it’d still work. I drove the rest of the way around the one-way island — seeing an incredible shot but not having a working camera for it — and left. (I will admit that the skyline picture was actually from the second time I chose insanity; I went back on a work morning to try to get the shot I missed, but the sun’s position in the sky had changed since then and the fog from the first morning wasn’t present on the second. The city itself, however, was actually clearly visible this time — the skyline was partially obscured by fog the first time out.) Thankfully, the camera healed itself, and the lens though unable to autofocus at first also has made [what appears thus far] to be a full recovery.

Finally, on the last available weekend to me before I leave, the Farmington Community Band played at Windemere Point on Mackinac Island. Unlike the rest of the Lower Peninsula, Mackinac Island is a huge tourist destination… I don’t think more than 1% of the people on that island are natives. Just about everything west of the ferry docks seemed gimmicky, but it is a very pretty area, especially when the lilacs are in bloom (as they were for the concert). Where we played our concert, one lone tree stood out from the Lake Huron shore.

On the ferry ride back from the Island to the mainland, the Mackinaw Bridge stood out defiantly in the distance. Like Detroit, it was once among the great technical achievements of Michigan; a symbol of the wealth and beauty that was prevalent in GM’s and Ford’s and Chrysler’s heyday.

After a year of living on the fringes of the City, after 12 months of getting to know the weather and the locals, I have to say that I’m genuinely happy my job placed me here. The end of summer was peaceful, the fall was restful and quiet, and while winter offered her challenges and chilled my bones, overall there really isn’t the sense of impending doom that I had heard whispers of prior to arriving. The Upper Peninsula is still a remote sanctuary for thousands of Detroiters, the weather is no worse than Chicago’s, and the scenery — when you take a moment to look for it — can be incredible. It’s not the Cascades, but nothing really is. ;-) I really hope that collectively, the inhabitants of the area can restore the city to the glory it once had… that twinkle in some kid’s eyes when he or she says he wants to work in Detroit or visit the Ford Museum or go to the Fox Theatre. Culturally, the city currently isn’t on the likes of a Chicago or a New York, but the potential, at least in this viewer’s eyes, is still there. It’s just a matter of putting our heads truly together and rebuilding it — brick by brick, foreclosure by foreclosure, block by block, city by city.

365 Days in Michigan

Home sweet… memories.

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Of all the places I’ve visited, Puget Sound has been the one that continues to give me goosebumps each time I look at friends’ pictures. Since 2007, when I interned in Renton, WA for three months, I’ve taken three trips to the area to visit friends and pay homage to an emotional sink (and source, actually) — Mt. Rainier. A winter visit had always been on my bucket list for that mountain, and with Bosch taking Good Friday off, I jetted out to Sea-Tac on the eve of a misty, mild April Thursday and planned an itinerary to MRNP, the Columbia River Highway, and to meet with a “few” friends still incarcerated in the Seattle area.

Arguably the single most identifiable object — when visible — in the Seattle skyline is Mt. Rainier. It towers above the city (roughly 14,000 feet above the city and surrounding areas), and on a clear day dominates the skyline from any place that offers a view to the southeast. Kerry Park is always a pleasant spot, but I wanted to try something new and so went with Danny Seidman (http://www.danseidmanphoto.com/) to Magnolia Park on a cloudless Saturday morning. I hadn’t expected two April days to be so sunny, but suffice to say the weather absolutely cooperated with me while I was there. The colors in the sky aren’t as vivid as they’d be with some cloud cover, but I finally got a shot with both Rainier and a WSDOT ferry. I don’t think I could ask for a more representative picture of Seattle!

After taking a nap, I met up with two friends — Joshua Lee (http://jyl4032.blogspot.com/) and Trevor Blanarik — to head toward the Columbia River Gorge to shoot waterfalls. We settled on Punch Bowl Falls, a 2 mile trek on a maintained trail into the heart of waterfall country. After water flowed over the top of my boots, I decided that it wouldn’t get any worse and waded in. 50 °F water is quite cold to say the least, and I’d conclude that it’s not necessary to wade in to get a picture of the falls. ;-)

With that 4 mile round-trip hike completed and my boots soaking, the whirlwind weekend was mostly finished. We headed back to Seattle for some awesome pizza at the Big Time Brewery, and afterwards I slept soundly (a whopping six hours; two more than the previous two nights) until my 9:30 flight out of the city. By then, clouds had set in.

Since I posted a shot of Mt. Rainier [from what I erroneously called Elbe] in a previous post, I’ll wrap this up with a shot from the same location but at a different time of day and year.

It’s not easy going back. Many of my friends have moved out there, and it’s tough to get everyone’s schedules to match and spend time with all of them; trying to take in the natural beauty of the area is a trial of patience not typically helped by weather like what I had this particular weekend. I’ve never been quite so enamored with a place before, and I still can’t quite place my finger on what specifically about the Puget Sound that draws me back with such magnetism. Nonetheless — the pull is there, and it’s always an absolutely electrifying experience to be out among the mountains and their ancient history and to catch up with old friends who have grown accustomed to the bounty there. Until next time.

Home sweet… memories.

The creative “vision”

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There are widely publicized notions of what photographers are like at various stages during their careers. Some liken the transition to how they look at light; others, at how they think of their equipment. I’d argue that another analogy is that some of the most interesting photographers are always able to find subjects — whether they’re on vacation, on location, or just wandering about, they’re able to find things to shoot. By this definition, I’m on the very beginning end of this continuum. When it comes to finding shots, I can do it if I know what and where it is that I’m shooting. Planning the sunrise shots around Grand Teton National Park, for instance, is natural to me, as is thinking about what to shoot when doing a flyover of Champaign-Urbana. And don’t get me started on Mt. Rainier; that’s natural, too.

When it comes to a new location, however, I don’t always find the urge to discover completely new locations. Michigan actually has really beautiful spots, but some of the ones I really want to see are in the Upper Peninsula (I’m by Detroit, currently). There are, without doubt, things to photograph here, but I simply haven’t been on the lookout for them — and, importantly, nor have I made the effort to really seek them out. Maybe this is an indication of something larger than photography, but regardless, I haven’t made an emotional connection to subjects around here for the most part.

This one day, though, I was watching TV and decided randomly to walk outside because it had been nice all day. What greeted me astounded me — the sky was simply incredible. I didn’t have the time to go find a vista with a grand overview of the sunset, unfortunately, but still, the colors were unreal and the texture in the clouds even more otherworldly. I tried a few weeks later to make it to the coast to grab shots of lighthouses, but I ran out of time and headed home instead. Soon, though, I’ll start venturing out more often — the foliage is already starting to pique my interest — but suffice to say, I have a long way to go before I get anything of merit here in Michigan!

The creative “vision”

Above the stalks of corn

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In the midst of writing my Master’s thesis, I read an article in the Daily Illini about a new program called “Fun Flights.” Consisting of either a half-hour or hour long flight, this program gave residents of and visitors to the Central Illinois area — and particularly the U of I campus community — a view of the plains from above. The flights were offered in the fall 2009 semester (I missed the memo), but because of time constraints in the spring, I couldn’t make it either of the two Saturdays the flights were offered. I asked if it’d still be possible to do a flight in the summer sometime, and three days after I got back from the National Parks tour, I got the opportunity to experience my final taste of my pending bittersweet departure from the community that has proven to be a worthy chapter in my life. I was fortunate to get Mike Stein to ride along with me.

I’ve always been a big fan of airplanes, but suffice to say I like big planes; I’m not quite as comfortable in small ones. That the air was heavy that day and that there were some mild gusts of wind didn’t help ease my nerves, but soon, we were heading over Assembly Hall and Memorial Stadium. On a side note: I was watching a Nissan commercial on TV recently and noticed that the song they used as the background was one of the football team’s warmup songs. Cue college gameday nostalgia!

It wasn’t long before we flew over the Bardeen Quad. From the air, it looks more like “Engineering Row.”

Requisite shot with annoying foreground objects.

Of great surprise (sarcasm), thirty minutes is a decent amount of time to view the campus from the air, and we began to loop back around. (It was a smooth flight; kudos to Luke Karcher for doing a great job of keeping my mild motion sickness at bay. I even enjoyed the “floatie” he performed for us, even though once was quite enough for me.) Anyhow. Demolition had apparently started on the Six Pack — I hadn’t noticed this when I was on the ground!

And that was it. Six years in one of the world’s preeminent institutions flashed before my eyes in a half hour. At one of the four high school awards ceremonies for which I was in pit band, one of the songs sung in commemoration of the seniors was “There’s a Kid Inside” — and this flight, along with other various and seemingly random flashbacks since then — showcased exactly what Barry Manilow (yeah, I know, but the song itself reminds me of high school, so back off, okay? :p) meant by

“Something rings the bell, \
Any thing at all, \
All it takes is a slam of a locker. \
Or the switch from summer or fall, \
A change of season seems barely reason, \
But there he goes, he’s there again.”

Above the stalks of corn

The trip “west”

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Two of my friends wanted to a National Parks trip out west and invited me; later, a third friend joined our party. We started in Illinois, went through the Badlands and Black Hills; stayed in Yellowstone; and visited Grand Teton National Park (GRTE). We ended up leaving a day early from GRTE and hit Zion; the temperature difference between the 40 degree nights of GRTE (30s in Yellowstone!) and the 90s of Zion was insane. Our bodies had just gotten used to frigid temperatures and were now subject to intense heat. Yuck.

In Yellowstone, we saw bison — lots and lots of bison. At one point, as we were driving toward Old Faithful in the morning two large herds were walking on the road. They were close enough to touch, but photographing them with big cameras (i.e. open windows and doors) may have been a bit menacing. Either way, I think the most interesting bison picture was one where a lone bison was munching on grass against the serene backdrop of Yellowstone Lake and the mountains behind it.

Yellowstone is known mostly for wildlife and its foul-smelling, hot-water spewing fountains (all sorts of them), but I found the colors and other life around its Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon of Yellowstone) most interesting. Not only was it isolated from the smell of sulfur, the way sunlight plays on the walls of the canyon and brings out colors is awesome to watch. We got one night where the canyon really came alive, but even without that sort of light, the power of the water to carve away at rock and leave such a deep valley is incredible. (Remember, everything else in Yellowstone is pretty much flat!)

We left Yellowstone for Grand Teton National Park. The first day we were there, we awoke at 4 AM to take sunrise pictures… I haven’t decided which one sunrise picture I like best, but this one comes close. The entire location (Schwabacher’s Landing) is just perfect for that type of photography, and I consider it to be the highlight of my trip.


Of course we did, however, have to find the barn that’s the foreground in so many Grand Teton pictures. :)

It was a great trip — really enjoyed the two weeks away from life (even though Verizon gave me service just about everywhere except for in the deepest reaches of Yellowstone), and I’m glad I was able to take it all in. If only it didn’t take four weeks to process all the photos!

The trip “west”

A [first] transition?

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It seems that more and more often, my photographer friends are turning to blogs to display their work rather than sites like flickr, Picasa, or other similar photo-hosting sites. I’m not sure my photos are of the caliber — or my work “important” enough — for that to be the case, but I am running out of flickr space, and I’ll also be going on a two-week camping trip soon. I suppose that’s decent-enough reason to give this a whirl and see how it goes. Forgive me — this post may be a little rough as I get used to WordPress!

To symbolize a “new beginning” of sorts, I chose two pictures — one is a typical sunrise picture of Mt. Rainier, ever my vacation and de-mystifying spot, and the other is of the Alma Mater of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, decorated in graduation regalia. Nothing particularly flabbergasting, but they’re appropriate for the whole “new things” idea — new photo displays, new life (graduated, finally!), and, well, that’s about it. :)

A [first] transition?