Earlier this week, I spent an early morning at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. On my monthly trips to Sleeping Bear, I usually leave home without a plan. When I reach Copemish, two hours into the three hour drive, I check the weather map and decide whether to take County Road 669 to Good Harbor Bay, County Road 677 (the old Benzonia Trail) to Glen Lake, or continue on M115 toward Frankfort to enter the park from the southern end. This week, I knew exactly where I wanted to go and traveled the country roads until I got to Bass Lake and Otter Lake, south of Empire.
Before the dawn on Otter Lake
Sunrise on Otter Lake
Bass Lake and Otter Lake are joined by a small stream. Water flows from Bass Lake into Otter Lake and from there into Otter Creek, which meanders its way to Lake Michigan at the Esch Road Beach. The area is home to a large number of eastern red cedar trees.
I wanted to visit the area to photograph the roots of cedars that had fallen over. Eastern red cedar trees generally have a network of lateral roots not far beneath the surface. As such, the the trees seem to be prone to tipping as the surface soil erodes. I am intrigued by the roots of fallen cedar trees, the way they twist together in the struggle to keep the tree erect. Torn from the ground and bleached in the summer sun, the roots become nature’s sculpture. Here are some of the images I took.
My photo “Exposed” is currently on display at the Glen Arbor Arts Center as part of its “Members Create” exhibit. The exhibit runs until August 8, 2024. The exhibit can be viewed online by following this link.
In the 1920s, photographer Man Ray began processing photographs using a process called solarization “to create a photograph that would not look like a photograph.” Ray created his solarized photos by exposing a photographic print in the wet darkroom to a brief flash of light. Solarization created an unpredictable reversal of tones giving a photograph an otherworldly quality. I attempted to recreate the effect in the digital darkroom by adjusting the tone curve on this photo of a cedar tree whose tap root has been exposed by erosion along the shore of Sleeping Bear Bay.
On Saturday, I was in a woodlands photographing a decaying tree to use as background texture in a blend someday. I awoke yesterday morning with the thought of one of my favorite trees and went out early to take a photo. Here’s the result of the blend.
Winter finally came to Michigan in a big way. This past weekend in Grand Rapids, we received about 17 inches of snow. Prior to that, the snowfall had been minimal. That was the case in the northern lower peninsula, as well. Frankfort, Michigan, in Benzie County, had just 2.5 inches of new snow in December, 21 fewer inches than normal. So far in January, Frankfort has received 21.8 inches.
With this blast on winter, I had to drive north to check it out and do some photography. On Wednesday, I visited the Point Betsie Lighthouse, just north of Frankfort, perhaps one of the most photographed lighthouses in Michigan. I arrived about 8:45 a.m. and had the place to myself. No wonder. The wind was gusting to 30 mph and the windchill was about ten below zero. I was able to stand outside for about 10 minutes before my fingers were so cold, it was hard to operate the camera. I retreated to my car, put on some heavier gloves, put foot warmers in my boots and headed up to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, where I photographed in woodlands, where I was protected by the wind. My 10 minutes in the deep freeze were productive, however. Here are the keepers among the photos I took.
At the end of each year I look back at the images I have taken and select several to highlight in a year-end post. This year I have selected 15 photos to share and discuss. Whether these images are my “best” or not, I am not sure. But, they are all images that gave me a sense of achievement in expressing my vision.
Winter Scenes
I will start with four images I took in the winter. Winter is my favorite time to do photography. I love being outside in the winter. I find the cold and the snow to be invigorating. Snow can be a landscape photographer’s friend helping to reduce the chaos that so often typifies a scene in nature, especially in a woodland. I have photographed this sumac several times over the years, but found it difficult to get it to stand out from the trees behind it. I made this photograph in a snow storm, which helped to reduce the chaos in the scene, creating separation between the twists and turns of the sumac and the forest in the background.
I first came across this lone tree in a farmer’s field in the fall of 2021. I described it then as one of my “U-Turn” photos – a scene that caught my eye as I was driving by and caused me to do a u-turn. It happened again this past winter. I drove by this tree while it was snowing and again did a 180 and pulled off by the side of the road. A lone tree is a frequent subject for landscape photographers. It can evoke a range of emotions, such as isolation, tenacity, or independence. Having captured a photo in the fall and winter, I will have to return to this spot in the spring and summer to document it in all four seasons.
Walking along Shalda Creek where it enters Good Harbor Bay in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, I saw these stones frozen in ice. As I photographed them, a haiku came to mind:
Stones encased in ice
Imprisoned by winter’s cold
The beach in February
A good photograph has something in common with a haiku. A haiku expresses its meaning in three spare lines – no wasted words or syllables. In a photograph, everything has to contribute – no extraneous things to distract from the subject.
On my frequent drives to the Leelanau Peninsula, I pass the Weldon Township Cemetery in a clearing cut from the forest. I have stopped several times to try and capture the emotion of the scene without success. But, the winter’s snow helped to emphasize the simplicity of this hallowed place and to convey a sense of repose and honor.
My Swan Vigil
In March, I went for a walk along Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, and came across a swan sitting on a nest. I continued to visit the nest for two and a half months, hoping to be able to document the hatching of the swan’s nine eggs. The eggs never hatched, but I was able to put together a blog piece on my vigil. Here is the link. The male swan (the cob) was very protective of the nest. In this first photograph, the swan is taking off to confront another pair of swans a couple hundred yards away – apparently too close for the cob.
In the area of the swans’ nest there were many nesting geese. The cob policed the area to let the geese know their place in the order of things. Photographing birds was a challenge for me. I take photos of landscapes with my camera on a tripod, often with a long exposure time. I have the luxury of time to frame a shot and try different apertures and focal lengths. But birds don’t wait for you. You have to react and hope that you snap the photo at the decisive moment. I learned to observe and anticipate.
Iceland
In September, my wife and I visited Iceland. We concentrated our journey in Reykjavík, on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, and along the southern coast. Iceland is an amazingly beautiful country. Berserkjahraun, seen below, is a vast lava field on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula that formed 4,000 years ago. The lava field is covered with moss and lichen and offers a stunning view with mountains in the background.
I had never photographed the northern lights before. I got the opportunity when we rented a cottage on the southern coast, near Kirkjubæjarklaustur. We watched for nearly four hours as the aurora filled the night sky. The naked eye saw only the greenish colors, which danced in the sky. But, a longer exposure – nine seconds or so – captured the magenta.
On the southeast coast of Iceland is Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon dotted with icebergs that break off a glacier and make their way to the sea. My eye was attracted to the layers of tones in this scene.
Iceland has over 10,000 waterfalls. Probably the four most visited falls are Öxarárfoss at Þingvellir, Gullfoss on the Golden Circle, and Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss along the south coast of the country. All have large parking areas to accommodate the tourists who flock to the sites. We ventured off the main highway to a less visited waterfall, Gluggafoss, also known as Merkjárfoss, where we had the site almost to ourselves (other than the one woman in a bright red coat who kept walking into my photo while talking on her cellphone). Gluggafoss falls in two stages and has a total height of 171 feet. The lower falls are captured in the photo below.
Black and White
I continue to try to develop my eye for processing photos in black and white. Gluggafoss rendered well as a black and white photo, with a broad range of tones.
Back home in Michigan, I look for scenes that I think will be effective in black and white. Processing in black and white reduces a scene to its essence. It relies on structure and form, light and shadow to carry the photograph’s meaning. The great Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, who died in November, said of black and white photography, “Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive.”
I am attracted to the roots of trees, so I was excited when I came upon these cedar trees along the shore of Lake Michigan. Waves had eroded the shore exposing the lateral roots and tap root that have supported the trees for tens of years. Another period of high water and waves will likely mean the end for these trees.
I was recently studying the work of Wynn Bullock and came across his solarizations. Solarization is a technique in analog photography perfected by Man Ray. When developing film in the dark room, Man Ray would briefly flick on the lights which would invert some of the tones in the finished photograph. In my digital darkroom, I attempted to emulate this process by adjusting the tone curve in Lightroom, lifting the deep blacks while maintaining the midtones and highlights. I found it difficult to emulate solarization effectively, but I did like the effect my method had on this image of the cedar roots.
A Gift
Sometimes an image is simply a gift. I parked in a parking lot in Glen Haven, Michigan, hoping to take some long exposure photographs of waves coming ashore in Sleeping Bear Bay. As my luck would have it, the bay was virtually still that day. When I walked back to my car, the sun had just crested a row of trees to the east lighting up these empty milkweed pods. Simple and beautiful. The experience brought to mind another quote by Elliott Erwitt: “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. . . I’ve found it has little to do with things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
Thank You
If you have gotten to this point, thank you. Over the course of the past year, I have become less and less interested in posting photos to social media sites like Instagram, where people breeze by the photos, swiping left or right, giving little time to each image. So I appreciate your giving me the gift of your time to look at and consider the photos in this post.
Here are links to my my year-end review of images in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
We are recently returned from a visit to Iceland. While there, we had typical Icelandic weather for September – clouds, wind and rain. But, on the two clear nights, we were able to see the Aurora Borealis in all its glory.
The first evening we saw them, we were staying in a cottage on a farm near the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur on Iceland’s south coast. The show was awesome. To naked eye, we could only see the green, but with the long exposure setting (about 13 seconds), my camera picked up the gorgeous magenta in the sky. (I did not adjust the hue or saturation in these photos. The only adjustments were to settings that affect contrast.)
We also encountered the aurora in the city of Keflavík on our last night in Iceland. At 65 degrees latitude, the aurora had no difficulty piercing the city lights.
Thirty-five miles west of the Boston Common in the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, is a cemetery established by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers. The settlement in Harvard, which was the second Shaker community in the colonies, was established in 1769. At its peak in the 1850s, the community had 200 members. By 1890, that number declined to 40.
The first burial in the cemetery occurred in 1792. By the time the cemetery was closed, over 300 members of the Shaker community were buried there.
The Harvard Shaker community purchased the land for the cemetery for $13.12. The men in the community set about building a stone wall around the cemetery, which was completed in November, 1799.
The cemetery is commonly known today as the “Lollipop Graveyard,” because of the cast-iron grave markers. Initially, graves were marked with stone markers. In 1879, the Harvard Shakers replaced the stone markers with the cast-iron lollipop markers.
The lollipop markers were designed by the brothers in the Mount Lebanon Shaker community at New Lebanon, New York, and cost about $1.50 to produce. The Harvard cemetery was the only Shaker Community to convert entirely to the metal markers and is the only Shaker cemetery where the metal markers remain.
The Harvard Shaker Village Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Additional information about Harvard Shaker Community and its burial grounds can be found here:
Once a year on the Fourth of July, the alley between Calvin Avenue and Giddings Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan, comes to life as Hollyhock Lane, the end point of the Hollyhock Lane Parade. Begun in 1934, the parade is the oldest continuous Independence Day parade in Michigan. It is a neighborhood event begun “to Instill Patriotism” and “to Promote Neighborliness.” Although receiving support from the City of Grand Rapids and the Ottawa Hills Neighborhood Association, the parade is organized by volunteers who go door-to-door for contributions and work to continue the tradition.
The parade winds along three streets in the Ottawa Hills neighborhood. Neighbors bring out their lawn chairs and children wait to catch candy. A neighborhood band organizes itself every year to march in the parade and children volunteer to fill the coveted roles of the Spirit of 76 (the flag-bearer, drummer and fife player), Miss Liberty, and Uncle Sam. Several adults who have been Uncle Sam or Miss Liberty in the past return each year to watch the parade.
This not being an election year, the parade was without the scrum of politicians that shows up in even years. But among the participants in the parade were our Representative in Congress, Hillary Scholten, and the Majority Leader in the Michigan State Senate, Winnie Brinks. But both participated as members of the neighborhood, not as candidates for office. Also among the parade participants was the Grand Rapids Chief of Police, Eric Winstrom.
The Hollyhock Lane Parade doesn’t just peter out when the last police patrol car brings up the rear. As they do every year, neighbors turned off Giddings Avenue into an alley decorated with flags and bunting and gathered behind 847 Giddings Avenue to sing patriotic songs and listen to an honored speaker.
Elgin Vines and Company entertained the gathering crowd.
Once the crowd was assembled, the Master of Ceremonies opened the program, inviting the Spirit of 76 to raise the flag.
The Reverend Rebecca Jordan Heys, of Calvary Christian Reformed Church, led group in prayer.
Then the Master of Ceremonies introduced the keynote speaker, Mary Esther Lee, who for years helped organize the parade. Ms. Lee spoke about the ties that bind the neighborhood together. She recounted the story of having moved into the neighborhood in the 1970s not knowing that her backyard was the focal point of activities on the Fourth of July. “Why do you think there was a flagpole in your backyard by the alley,” her neighbors asked. Ms. Lee embraced the parade, joining the planning committee the next year and leading the ceremony for many years.
The program ended with the singing of The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America and the presentation of awards to children who competed in the float competition. The floats were judged and awards were presented by the family of Congresswoman Scholten, a role her family has filled for a number of years before she was elected to Congress.
The winner of the of the award for the patriotic float was “American Shark.”
The float was created by a young boy from New York City. He was here visiting his grandmother. “My mom grew up in this neighborhood,” he told me after the ceremony. And his mother was in the parade back then. Perhaps that helps to understand what makes the Hollyhock Lane Parade so special. For generations it has brought neighbors together to commemorate our country’s independence, to say the pledge and sing our nation’s anthems, to celebrate community and civic spirit, and to teach our children the importance of it all.
