Tag Archives: Photostock 2013

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Photostock 2013 – Lake Oneal and The Birchwood Inn

July 9, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I don’t recall if I regaled you all with the saga of my stuck rental car. I had heard from some other folks at Photostock about Lake Oneal, which they said was absolutely beautiful, but really needed to be photographed in foggy conditions. Something was mentioned about the road to it being challenging, but that kinda got lost in my memory at the time. On my last day at Photostock, I decided to drive around on my own and take some photos. I had stopped in the general store in Good Hart and the owner gave me a map of Emmett County and marked a number of photogenic sights on it. I headed out, map in hand, stopping at the boat launch in Cross Village to get my shots of Lake Michigan. Carrying on, I saw the road to Lake Oneal marked on the map. At the end of the road there was a symbol for a boat launch. I thought, “how bad can the road be if there’s a boat launching ramp at the end?”. So, naive as I was, I drove back there. The road had some sandy spots in it, but nothing I couldn’t navigate around in my Ford Fusion. Then, at the very end of the road, there was a tall uphill, and on the downslope to the parking/unloading area, a VERY sandy stretch. I managed to get down the slope fine, so I figured I could follow the same track back up. NOT. I tried, several times, and ended up getting the car stuck on the side of the road. Long story short, two and a half hours and $300 later, my car was back on a hard surface road.

While I was stuck there, in the bright beautiful sunlight of a fog-less afternoon, I decided I would take on the challenge thrown down by the other photographers of getting a good shot of the lake with no fog. Here are the results:

The bridge is over a sluice/runoff drain for the lake. Judging from the stands of dead trees sticking out of the lake waters, the lake was an artificial lake. Why it was created I’m not sure, but I’m not about to complain.

Here you can better see the snags of dead trees reflected in the waters. Other than the leaden white sky (there was a little overcast, but still bright sun), I’d say challenge met.

These next two photos are of/at the Birchwood Inn, our headquarters for Photostock. The first one is of some magnificent clouds we had one evening. The roof of the annex to the inn is just visible at the bottom.

The last photo of this post is the Birchwood Inn’s patio illuminated by the full moon. This was I believe the night of the “super-moon”, but late enough it no longer appeared larger than normal. But it sure was bright and beautiful.

All the black and white images were taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E, on Ilford Delta 400 film. The color shot was from my iPhone. Which was my lifeline to getting un-stuck, but barely – signal at Lake Oneal was so bad, I kept dropping my calls to AAA. So two words of caution should you ever want to visit Lake Oneal yourself – ONE: bring your own 4-wheel drive/offroad vehicle, preferably with a bumper-mounted winch, and TWO: a satellite phone would not be a bad investment. I watched two different 4wd vehicles go up that hill, and both had trouble, although one fared better than the other. The first one was only technically 4wd, because his front transfer case was acting up and so the power was only going to the rear wheels. His knobby tires and high clearance were what enabled him to get out. The other one spun and sputtered and wallowed through the sand but made it out in one pass.

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Travel

Yet More Faces of Photostock 2013

July 8, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Here are some more (the last batch, actually) of my “Faces of Photostock”. In no particular order:

Well, no particular order other than I bracketed the series with folks not looking directly at the camera. I’m including these shots for sentimental reasons more than for the quality of the portraits.

All shots taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E, on Ilford Delta 400 developed in Pyrocat HD. That Rollei is a fantastic portrait camera, considering it has a fixed “normal” lens on it, isn’t it?

Black and White, Cameras, Events, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Photostock 2013 – St. Ignatius Church, Good Hart

July 8, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Here are the promised photos of St. Ignatius Church and the cemetery next door. St. Ignatius Church as it currently stands is the third structure to have been erected on the site, the oldest of which was the French Catholic mission to convert the natives in the 1700s.

Today, the churchyard contains mostly 19th and early 20th century burials of Polish and Scandinavian immigrants. The churchyard is famous for the white wooden crosses for grave markers.

Here is a close up to show the tin markers with the names and biographical data on the crosses.

The church no longer has an active congregation, but is maintained by a local organization for its preservation.

Black and White, Cameras, Events, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Photostock 2013 – abandoned buildings

July 7, 2013 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

Although these houses are familiar to Photostock participants from years past, I figure most of my readers have never seen them. The first building is across the intersection from Moose Jaw Junction, a roadside restaurant and bar near Larks Lake. The property is for sale, should anyone want a total tear-down.

The Slumping House, End View, Moose Jaw Junction

A different view of the building:

This house is/was a little cabin across the street from the St. Ignatius church in Good Hart, Michigan. Pictures of the church and its cemetery will be forthcoming in another post. From what I hear tell from past Photostockers, the cabin used to be far more intact than it is now and they have watched it deteriorate into this condition over the last half-dozen years.

One wall of the house is essentially gone, and you can look inside the structure through it. I would NOT attempt to enter, as there is a considerable debris field on the floor of the lower level, making for a prime residential facility for wildlife of the four-legged and no-legged varieties. You can see the remnant of the staircase through the opening in the wall, though. The texture of the wood and the coloring of it reminded me a bit of Bodie, the California gold-mining ghost town in the Eastern Sierra.

This is a view of the debris field and the remaining structural walls of the house. Amazing how the light level balanced between inside and outside- no HDR or even burning/dodging required to preserve interior and exterior detail alike through the window frame.

Here is a view of the end of the house, showing the whole of the structure.

All shots taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E on Ilford Delta 400, developed in Pyrocat HD developer at 1:1:100 dilution.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Photostock 2013 – the color photos

June 30, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Here are a few shots from downtown Harbor Springs, Michigan.

Under the heading of “but is it ART?”

I couldn’t tell if it was out of business, not yet opened for the season, or in the process of opening for the first time, but it’s some kind of statement to have an art gallery with bare walls.

I loved the vintage feel of the gold leaf sign in the pharmacy window, and the riot of colors and designs on all the July 4th themed stuff in the window:

It also says something about a small town when the library is upstairs from a fudge shop:

I’ll leave it to you to decide what exactly it says.

Here is the famous “Legs Inn”. The Inn serves Polish cuisine in a highly rustic, pseudo-native-american decor setting. It gets its name from the fringe of old stove legs fringing the facade.

Commemorating the Native American presence in the area, the Legs Inn has this tipi construction outside in the parking lot.

Across the street is this very knotty door, with fake bear paw tracks in the concrete sidewalk.

I looked at the sidewalk and my first thought was “how cute – I want to keep the paw prints in the photo”. My second thought was, “what a pain in the ass that must be to shovel come wintertime – those are natural snow and ice traps!”.

Across the parking lot from the Legs Inn is this old cinderblock garage building, all closed up, but with this gigantic mural of a Muskie leaping for a fishing lure.

I just liked the texture of the garage wall, and wanted to do something with the geometric qualities of the door, window, and cinderblocks. I don’t normally like perspective-less flat planes, but this composition called out to me. I also liked the near-monochromatic nature of the scene – there are few hints other than the window shade that this is in fact a color photograph. Feedback on it welcomed.

On a bright and sunny day, I went down to the boat ramp in Cross Village, Michigan, to get the sunny day version of something I had previously attempted in heavy fog – a photo of just the lake and sky. I went out on the boat ramp to take the photo, so I could be sure to not have any land in the foreground. Coming back from the decking over the water, I looked down and saw this:

The waters of Lake Michigan. Yes, it really is that blue and clear. I tried this shot also on a foggy day, but the fog was so intense I ended up with detail-less gray over sorta-textured gray, which was very uninteresting. I’m thinking of doing a Sugimoto-esque re-working of this to blur out the details in both sky and water so it becomes a study in color fields.

I know, heresy- I converted this shot to black-and-white from a color negative. Had it been a sunny day, I think the color would have worked, because I would have had the contrast in the scene to bring out the abstract nature of the composition. But I had profound fog as my lighting, so the b/w conversion gets me closer to what I was seeing in my mind’s eye for this shot.

All shots taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E, with the films being a mish-mash of Kodak Portra 160, Kodak Portra 400 (the really foggy day stuff) and Kodak Ektar 100.

Black and White, Cameras, Color, Events, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits

Faces of Photostock 2013

June 29, 2013 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Last week (June 19-23) I was in the upper upper corner of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (troll land – why? because it’s under the (Mackinac) Bridge!). The event was Photostock 2013, a very loose, casual gathering of photographers to hang out, shoot, share work, talk photo, and just relax. The event was held at the Birchwood Inn in Harbor Springs, Michigan, which is on Lake Michigan, not far south of the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge spans the strait that separates Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. It’s the second longest suspension bridge in North America, and the fourth longest in the world.

Here’s a photo of the bridge in the morning fog:

To clarify some confusion, Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw (why I don’t know, but it is). If it’s a transliteration from a Native American word, then you’d think Pontiac should have been pronounced Pontiaw. But it’s not. Go figure. Anyway, you’ll sometimes see Mackinac written Mackinac and others Mackinaw. And same with the resort island of the same name.

Back to Photostock- it’s an environment where you don’t feel like the odd man out for being a total photo geek for bringing TWO Rolleiflexes with you (that was me, and in comparison to some folks, I was highly under-geared!). Here I am having fun with my Rolleiflexes- they’re wearing my Ray-Ban Wayfarers:

The coolest thing about it for me was getting to meet a whole bunch of folks in the flesh I only knew virtually, from participating on APUG (http://www.apug.org), Large Format Photography (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum), and Rangefinder Forum (http://www.rangefinderforum.com). Some of them I’ve known as virtual beings for nearly a decade. Everyone attending was just terrific, and I can’t think of a single conversation that was anything other than interesting or a person who was anything other than energizing to talk to. We had some really fantastic photographers give demonstrations of their work, like Judy Sherrod showing off her homemade 20×24 wet plate pinhole cameras and the accompanying alumitypes she made with it – WOW. Talk about inspirational – here was someone who was told “no, it can’t be done”, decided that no was not an acceptable answer, and proved the naysayers wrong. She shot wet plate pinhole photos of the beach and ocean at Pass Christian, Mississippi, coating her giant plates at home, driving to the beach, setting up, exposing, driving back and processing the plates all within a half hour span – pretty amazing considering that her exposures were 7-10 minutes each!

Judy Sherrod's Pinhole Camera — Judy Sherrod’s Pinhole Camera

EDIT:

I received the following note from Judy Sherrod clarifying the information about the wet plate pinhole work:

The 20×20 pinhole cameras are made to shoot wet-plate collodion plates in a collaboration with S.Gayle Stevens. Gayle is the collodion artist. I am not. I make the boxes.
I live in Texas, she lives outside of Chicago, and we work from a darkroom in Pass Christian, Mississippi. It’s a long commute for each of us!
We coat the plate in the darkroom, put the plate in the camera, put the camera in the car, jump in and drive to the beach, where the exposures are made. Most exposures are about three minutes. Then we put the camera back in the car and return to the darkroom for processing.
Thank you for writing about this project. It has turned into a dream come true for me. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

looks like I got a couple facts turned around in my head! Thanks, Judy for the clarification!

This is a preliminary set of photos of the people attending Photostock – there were nearly 70 people participating throughout the week, and I’m sure there were some I barely saw let alone got to meet and talk with.