driftwood – I dream of sumac and milkweed (and other wild things)

rising waters

October 20, 2019 sumacandmilkweed2 Comments

Both literally and figuratively. I’m paddling hard here.

Lake Michigan is high. I mean, all the Great Lakes are high. Polar ice caps are melting, oceans are rising, we’re toasting up this blue ball we live on here and the news isn’t good. But I’m not tackling all that. I’m just one person in one little cottage atop a bluff on Lake Michigan, and that lake is getting closer.

That’s the literal bit.

The figurative bit is that it’s been a rough summer. It was different, sharing close quarters with my dad. I think we did ok but there were bumps for sure. And, I lost my sweet old dog in early September. It was for the best, but I’m still bruised and missing her. Things are going on with my kids and my husband, too, but those aren’t my stories to tell. It’s interesting, parenting grown people. The things I worried about when they were little make me laugh a bit now. If I’d known the challenges of parenting adults I might have softened up a bit back then.

Hindsight is 20/20 though, right? Or so they say.

Anyway, I sent seven rolls of a variety of films off to the lab a bit more than a week ago. Here are images from one of those rolls, Ilford FP4+ shot on my Mamiya C220.

Silver Lake State Park is just a few miles from me. Most people think of the park as a place to go dune buggy riding, and that’s probably what it’s most known for. But I like it for the landscape. And I like it best off season when I can hike all of it, not just the areas relegated for foot traffic. Plus, I feel like I’m the only one out there off-season–just me and 3,000 acres of dunes and woods. The dune buggy season ends at the end of this month, so I’m really looking forward to visiting again soon.

I love shooting here. I can shoot the same piece of driftwood a hundred times or year after year–I swear it’s different every time. The sands shift, the wind covers one piece and unearths another. These skeletons of old trees are gorgeous sculptural elements on this vast, shifting landscape. I can never get enough and so I will keep going back.

new old things and it’s getting dark

October 31, 2017 sumacandmilkweedLeave a comment

I’ve been driving my new (but not new new) car for about a week and a half and it’s just so great. I’m attached. We’ve bonded. We’re pals. I haven’t come up with a suitable name yet, though.

The car was a necessity. But I also bought the Bronica SQ-A I’ve been testing, which was definitely not a necessity.

So, I am committing to no more cameras for the rest of this year and for all of 2018. I pledge this. I mean it. I really mean it. To clarify, I mean I won’t buy any cameras for this period of time. Well, unless something happens, like if a critical camera breaks. Then I’d replace it. But that would be the only reason.

I really hope I stick to this. Maybe I will need reminders.

It’s also getting dark. And cold. Last weekend was supposed to be another collaboration with my friend Margi, who was going to meet me at the cottage and we were going to take more photos exploring movement in nature, but the weather didn’t cooperate and I had a shortage of ideas for indoor locations, so I cancelled. I went to the cottage on my own but Saturday was a bust, weather-wise. I wanted to give the Bronica a fair chance and I finally sorted out an issue with one of the film backs, so I ran a roll of film through on Saturday in a bit of rain.

LDC_20171031_19290003 — cornfield, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19290004 — cornfield, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19290005 — cornfield, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19290002 — corn and dried stalk, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19300005 — Little Sable Point, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19300006 — Little Sable Point, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

Sunday started gray and cold but the sky was dramatic and it wasn’t too windy and the blue even poked through the clouds every now and then, so I ran a second roll through the Bronica and finished up the roll I started in California on the Minolta.

Napa vineyard, Kodak ColorPlus, Minolta SRT 102

redwoods, Kodak ColorPlus, Minolta SRT 102

LDC_20171031_19310004 — DANGER, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19310003 — the farmhouse, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19310001 — a little fall color, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

I’m forever inspired and amazed by these ghosts of old trees. The wind and sand buries and unburies them, topples and rights them, year after year. The landscape changes so dramatically. I love documenting this.

LDC_20171031_19320005 — driftwood on dune, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19320003 — driftwood on dune, Bronica SQ-A, Lomo 100 ISO

LDC_20171031_19130025 — growth, Minolta SRT 102, Kodak ColorPlus 200 ISO

LDC_20171031_19130024 — driftwood, Minolta SRT 102, Kodak ColorPlus 200 ISO

LDC_20171031_19130020 — toppled, Minolta SRT 102, Kodak ColorPlus 200 ISO

LDC_20171031_19130037 — trunk, Minolta SRT 102, Kodak ColorPlus 200 ISO

LDC_20171031_19130035 — relics, Minolta SRT 102, Kodak ColorPlus 200 ISO

Anyway. I’m excited to explore more with this camera and happy to be driving my new car, and not so happy about the impending shorter days and cold. But that’s life.

Frantic limbo

April 17, 2017April 17, 2017 sumacandmilkweedLeave a comment

I’m right in between things.

barn and field, Kodak Tri-X, Mamiya 645 1000s

leaning shed, Fuji Acros, Mamiya 645 1000s

In between a work trip. My film photography class is ending. Then a vacation to an unknown and, to me, exotic place. Then a move from town to the beach for the summer. And in the meantime I feel the unease of my kids as they finish their college terms. Does that part ever end, I wonder–the part where you feel the pain of whatever stress or difficulty your (albeit adult) children are going through? Somehow I don’t think I was totally prepared for that part of parenting.

Oh but who am I kidding? All the parts of parenting have surprised me. Why would I think that now, because they are grown, it should be any different?

White River Light, Kodak Tri-X, Mamiya 645 1000s

In any case I feel such a sense of limbo right now. I’m trying to roll with it.

And speaking of rolls… I have been frantically shooting film like I have the budget of someone who has, well, a big budget for film. I’m a copy editor, after all, and last I checked no one ever said they wanted to go into copy editing to make the big bucks. But here I am buying and blowing through rolls of film like they’re free or something.

LDC_20170416_img198 — creeping juniper, Ilford FP4, Minolta SRT 102

LDC_20170416_img195 — new shoots on the forest floor, Ilford FP4, Minolta SRT 102

I have developed 22 rolls of black and white film for my class and will develop three more this week before the lab will be off limits. I had four rolls of color film developed in February; I’ve got five rolls of color film at a lab right now, and had two rolls of color film developed a few weeks ago. That’s 36 rolls of film shot and developed since January. Of nothing special, even. I could have far worse vices, right?

LDC_20170415_img193 — orchard road, Fuji Acros, Holga

For my last class assignment I wanted to photograph a thing I love. The sand dunes at Silver Lake offer a shifting landscape that at times buries and other times unearths the ghostly treasures of its past. I’ll never tire of hiking these dunes and coming across these alien, sculptural roots and trunks of the trees that once forested this landscape. The light cooperated, but I found the resulting photos an interesting juxtaposition–these images look serene, but the wind was so fierce it nearly knocked me off the tops of some dune ridges and sand came out of my scalp for two days after I got home.

I still have so many more to scan, and a few might show how windy it really was.