Iceberg

Iceberg, originally uploaded by SpringChick.

A photo of icebergs in Lake Michigan at Muskgeon taken early this morning. Have to love the immediacy of the internet…

Lake Trout

photo by Christopher Morey

Christopher Morey writes:

This is a Lake Trout. The picture was taken October 3rd, 2005 while freediving along the outside breakwall of Clinch Marina in Grand Traverse Bay at about 25-30 feet depth. I’d been seeing these fish for about a two weeks when I finally figured out how to approach them.

The trick is to first know when they are hunting in a particular area. The breakwall provided good cover so I would wait back in the rocks on the surface until I saw the school swim by. If all the fish were more or less together then I would wait until well after they passed, breath up and head for the bottom to await their return. If the school was more diffuse I’d make my dive after the lead individuals passed and wait for the rest of the school. If they saw me dive, make abrupt movements of any kind or if I appeared to be heading toward them at all they would spook and avoid the immediate area for long periods of time.

Sometimes, as I waited on the bottom, the Trout would swim around behind me in the rocks and, if I was able to turn with them but remain very still, I could get some fairly close shots. Most were taken toward the end of a very long breathhold.

You can read a great feature on Christopher and his daughter in the Traverse City Record-Eagle and see a whole bunch more pictures of taken while freediving along the Clinch Marina in Grand Traverse Bay and in Lake Michigan south of Pyramid Point in the Sleeping Bear National Park in his Great Lakes Freediving photo gallery.

History Through the Eyes of a Bumper

Michigan’s History, originally uploaded by sgsteffens_83.

This photo by Sarah Steffens is just the thing to look at over a steaming cup of coffee on a windy, wintry Michigan morning.

According to the Michigan Historical Center’s MI License Plates pages, Michigan cities started issuing license plates in 1903. Two years later (no doubt with visions of DMV lines stretching to infinity) the Legislature passed Public Act 196 requiring statewide vehicle registration. A sample of the trivia contained in the MHC’s pages:

After June 28, 1907 (P.A. 304), two (2) homemade license plates were required (1 front and 1 rear). “Homemade” license plates went commercial as Sears Roebuck and other mail order companies produced license plate kits. “Billy, did you make the licence plates??”

Of course now the license plate process has pages and pages dedicated to it and your plate can support Michigan Universities and special causes. And of course, you can use your license plate as a roving mini-blog.

Also be sure to check out G. William Whitworth’s Michigan License Plate page.

Michigan Photographers: Pinhole: Huron River by Matt Callow

Pinhole: Huron River, originally uploaded by Matt Blackcustard.

I made this photograph in December 2004, just a few months after I’d moved here to Ypsilanti. It’s a pinhole image of the Huron River running through Riverside Park in Ypsi, taken from the Tridge, the pedestrian walkway that runs under the Cross Street bridge.

I’d been working for science toy company in Ann Arbor, and one of the things we had kicking around in an old store cupboard was a pinhole camera made from a quart-sized paint can, a sample that had never been used. I ended up buying it and taking it home, and then promptly forgot all about it. It sat in my office for months, collecting dust, waiting quietly.

Winter in Michigan is a bittersweet season for photography. On the one hand, there’s some of the most beautiful light, spectacular weather and incredible skies, and those bleak, spare landscapes that I like so much. On the other hand, it’s cold and wet, you can go weeks without seeing the sun, and the simple act of taking a photo becomes an enormous challenge. One particularly miserable Michigan morning, with frozen rain lashing and the icy wind sweeping up the river, I was feeling the itch to go out and photograph. I didn’t want to risk taking a nice camera out into the weather, and one of my cheap plastic jobbies wouldn’t have been up to the low light levels. At that time, I didn’t really know anything about pinhole photography, but for some reason remembered the paint can camera and decided this would be a good time to try it out. I figured that it’s waterproof, and that the long exposure times would mean I could capture what little light there was. So I loaded it up with some expired Kodak paper I’d picked up cheap from the bargain bucket at the photo store, and set out for the park behind my house.

I had no real idea about pinhole exposure times, I just knew they were long. The instructions that came with the camera suggested three or four minutes for a cloudy day, and as it was so dark and gloomy I decided to add an extra minute for luck. I got the bridge, put the camera down on the rail, pointed it at the river, removed the “shutter”, and then stood around freezing in the stinging rain while the camera did its thing. Then I traipsed back home and cracked open the developer.

Nothing came out. Just a blank piece of underexposed paper. But instead of doing the sensible thing and giving up, I headed back out into the elements and had another go, this time with a longer exposure. A whole extra minute of standing there on a bridge, in the sleet, babysitting a paint can. But this time, sure enough, when I got back home and developed the paper, I came out with this image.

I was amazed. I wasn’t really expecting to get anything at all, never mind anything that looked so soft and beautiful and strange. Check out that glassy water! I loved it. And of course I was hooked. Since then I’ve taken many hundreds of pinhole photographs, with all sorts of cameras, some that I’ve made myself or hacked from other cameras, and many more with my trusty paint can. In fact I’ve become rather obsessed with pinhole photography, it can do that to you, you know. And even though I’ve made pinhole photographs that are far superior to this one – better technically and more interesting aesthetically – I’m still extremely fond of this photo, a little bit of unexpected magic that I managed to conjure up on a freezing December morning in Ypsilanti.

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Also see…Michigan Photographers: Michpics Talks with Matt Callow (part I)Michigan Photographers: Matt Callow answers Reader Questions (part II)

And thanks to Matt for doing such a wonderful job as Michigan in Pictures’ first featured Michigan photographer!

Michigan Photographers: Matt Callow answers Reader Questions

Holga: Twin Towers, Irish Hills, MI, originally uploaded by Matt Blackcustard.

Van Waffle asks: How has moving to another continent affected the way you see things?

Matt Callow: The short answer, I suppose, is that I don’t think it really affected the way I see things all that much. I think that if I’d moved to North America and found myself in the Great Plains, or the Rockies, or in a huge sprawling city like LA, I might have found the change so dizzying I couldn’t help but see the world in a different way. But as it turns out, Michigan and the UK have more in common than they do differences, so I had no great culture shock when I moved here.

Beginning with when I left home at 18 and went away to another city, I’ve always moved some distance to a new place every few years. Moving on and starting afresh became second nature to me. Granted, this latest move was slightly more of a leap than relocating, say, from London to Brighton, but I still tend to take these things in my stride. I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to get to know his new environment very well, very quickly. When I arrive at a new place I always spend a lot of time just wandering around getting to know the neighbourhood, or driving around discovering what’s out there further afield. Even now, many of my weekend mornings are spent exploring the back roads in the local townships, and I’ll bet I know my way around this county better than most people who’ve lived here all their lives. Nowadays I do all this exploration for photographic reasons as well as for my urge to get to know a place, but the two are intertwined.

I think perhaps photographers “see” the world differently to other people, at least I think I do. It’s a banal point, but you can always count on me to know exactly where the sun is at any given time, or to give you a decent estimate of the day’s Exposure Value. And then I’m always thinking about how something I see might be photographed, regardless of whether I’m holding a camera. I think this way of seeing has been ingrained in me for a long time, perhaps even from before I took up photography seriously. And it can be a little wearing. I think sometimes there’s a danger of not always interacting fully with the world, and instead seeing it from a distance, as a little more than a potential subject. But then perhaps that’s why I’m a photographer, not a politician?

Now, did that way of seeing change when I moved here? I don’t think it did, really. Moving here just opened up a whole new set of subjects. I suppose for a while I was pretty obsessed with documenting America and Americana, casting my cynical immigrant’s eye over my new surroundings, but that seemed to wear off after I’d been here while and everything started to feel more everyday and less startling. This is my home now, the novelty has worn off, and I think now I see the place less as an outsider and more as a local.

Scott wonders: What kinds of post-production, if any, do you favor?

Matt: I’m primarily an analogue kind of guy, so I try to digitally manipulate my images as little as possible. I do as much as I can ‘in camera’, which means I like to get to know what my cameras can do, and then use film, technique, and processing methods as appropriate, always with the final image in mind. That way there’s usually little to do in post-production. When I’m posting images to the web, I usually scan from the negative (or alt-process print), and then use Photoshop only for minor adjustments such as dust removal, curve correction, and so on. I try not to take the image too far away from what was originally conceived and captured. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but I’m always happier with my work when I get the results I’m looking for away from the computer.

Dorothy wants to know: Do you feel that digital is cheating? Why?

Matt: I’ve garnered something of a reputation for being anti-digital, and to some extent it’s true, but mostly it’s just me being contrary and mischievous. I love technology, and I like digital cameras. If it wasn’t for digital cameras I’d not be a photographer, simple as that. But these days, ever since my last digital camera broke a year ago while I was taking a picture of a hipster at SXSW in Austin, TX, I’ve been almost entirely an analogue photographer. And that’s become very important to me, it’s part of my identity now as an artist, an essential part of my creative process, and I’m not sure I could ever go back to using digital cameras.

To me photography is a process. An organic process, in which every stage of the process feeds every other stage, and the final result – the photograph – is just one of the equal stages. Creatively I get just as excited about standing on a cold, windy lakeshore waiting for a long exposure to elapse, as I do splashing fixer around in the kitchen, or trying a new printing technique, or digging through a box of expired film at a flea market, or experimenting with arcane processing methods, or being surprised at the serendipitous results of a light leak, or willing a Van Dyke print dry, or being annoyed when only one of my sixteen exposures came out, or reading about how someone hacked the shutter on their toy camera, or watching through a viewfinder waiting for my wife to smile in just the right way so that I can click the shutter.

When I’m making an image, all of those kinds of activities mix together to become essential parts of my doing photography. The end product – the print or the jpeg file – may be what the viewer thinks of as my photography, but for me, that’s just a small part of it. Now, with modern digital cameras, where the technology does most of the work, I think the joy, the excitement, the soul of that process is lost. And I think that’s sad. I think people who work that way are missing out, and I think photography in general will suffer because of it.

Also, because of the huge popularity of digital photography, the traditional film industry is dying. Kodak are no longer making black and white paper, Agfa have already gone under, Ilford have had all sorts of problems. Nikon and Canon are reducing their film camera range and Konica Minolta have pulled out of photography altogether. It’s looking bleak. I’m not worried that film manufacturing will disappear altogether, there’ll always be a market for the stuff, however small it might end up being. And anyway, because of the peculiarities of my kind of photography, it wouldn’t really affect me all that much. But as digital cameras take over, and film photography becomes a niche, hobbyist activity performed by crackpot old fogeys like me, the next generation of photographers may never get to stand in the dark and see the magic of an image appearing out of nowhere in front of them, and that makes me sad.

Fivecats wants to know: What photographers have influenced you and what photographers do you currently keep up with, photography-wise?

Matt: As I never went to college to study photography formally, the selection of photographers that I’ve collected as influences over the years is rather ad hoc. Also I have rather a short term memory for such things, and tend to get into a certain photographer or artist in a big way for a short time and then move onto someone else.

That said, William Eggleston was my first photographic love, and he still is, even though the work I do now is very different to his. In terms of the greats there’s Alfred Stieglitz, Bill Brandt, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and a whole myriad of others. In terms of modern photographers, recently I’ve been very much into Ken Rosenthal, and last week I saw an exhibit of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes that just blew me away.

It might be an obvious point, but I think that’s important to remember that when it comes influences, it’s much more than liking someone’s work and then trying to recreate the technique or copy the style. My photography is influenced subtly by all sorts of work that at first glance might appear to have nothing in common with what I do. So, outside of photography I’m hugely influenced by certain painters, especially JMW Turner (who’s work I love), Picasso, and Edward Hopper. Then there’s comic book illustrators like Dave McKean or Frank Miller, film makers such as Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-Wai, and Martin Scorsese. It’s difficult to describe (and perhaps a little pretentious) but I think music is a huge influence on my work too, and the work of people like Arvo Part, John Coltrane and Tom Waits share an intangible quality that I’m drawn to, and in some respects try to incorporate into my work. But maybe that’s just me, I don’t really expect people to buy or understand that.

And then photography that I currently keep up with? Well, over the last couple of years the rise of social networking tools on the web – sites such as Flickr and Livejournal and Del.icio.us – has transformed the way photographers interact and share their work and ideas and inspirations with each other. Flickr in particular has brought together a huge number of photographers, many of whom work in similar ways to myself, using toy cameras or pinholes, and all sorts of analogue experimentation. I could point to loads of people who’s work I like, but to keep it short I’ll namecheck just three: CK, Nicolai_g and Heyoka all do amazing experimental work, but with a consistent level of quality that’s inspirational to me.

Bill S asks: I was wondering what the biggest difference from a photographer’s perspective is between Michigan and England. (feel free to add similarities as well)

Matt: Actually the similarities are the most interesting thing, I think. Wolverhampton, where I grew up, is a large industrial city in the English Midlands, dominated for years by steel working and the car industry. But by the end of the twentieth century the city’s manufacturing core and related economy had largely collapsed, and the city suffered tremendously. This is a very similar story to the one here in Ypsilanti and south east Michigan, and I think it’s one of the key reasons I feel at home here. And of course it means that many of the photographic subjects – urban decay, city life, railways, factories – are the same.

Another similarity between here and home is the proximity of all this urban sprawl to the countryside. Back in Wolverhampton I never had to drive far in order to find myself in the beautiful Shropshire countryside, or the Welsh hills, or even Lake District in the north. That countryside, however idyllic it might seem on the surface, always showed signs of past human activity, be it mining, or forestry, or whatever. It’s the same here. In the wake of Michigan’s highly profitable nineteenth century lumber industry, the landscape left behind might seem wild and natural, but really it’s a very human, artificial landscape, and very reminiscent of home. The way humanity interacts and leaves its mark on the natural world has always been one of the things I’m interested in exploring with my photography.

Andrew wants to know: What’s your favorite photographic subject in Michigan?

Matt: Well, it changes of course, but at the moment I’m rather taken by the old farmland up on the high ground in the townships north of Ypsi and Ann Arbor. I spend a lot of time exploring the dirt roads and farm tracks out there, taking photos of the ancient trees in the middle of fields, the creeks, the frozen lakes, the old cemeteries and run down farm buildings. Unusually for this area, it feels as though the landscape has been standing unchanged for decades, which in some cases maybe it has, though sadly it’s now being swallowed up all too rapidly by the seemingly unstoppable suburban sprawl. But strangely even that appeals to me, photographically at least, and it feels important to me to be documenting this most recent human imposition on the world, even though I find it distasteful.

And then with Michigan being home to the Great Lakes, the great photographic subject is, of course, water. It’s hard to go far without coming across a lake, or river, or creek; even my house backs onto the Huron River. And then there’s all the rain and snow we have to live with, for what seems like most of the year. So consequently water has become one of my favourite subjects, almost by default. I feel I’ve barely got a grip on how to photograph the stuff, but I’m in no hurry. By far my favourite mass of water in the state is Lake Superior. Photographically I haven’t explored it nearly enough yet, and I certainly haven’t spent enough time up there, but I’m sure I will. Just standing at Whitefish Point during a winter gale was such an awe-inspiring experience, that I know I’ll be going back there time and time again. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do it photographic justice, but I’ll try.

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Also see…

Michigan Photographers: Michpics Talks with Matt Callow (part I)

Michigan Photographers: Pinhole: Huron River by Matt Callow (part III)

Michigan Photographers: Michpics Talks with Matt Callow

Barton Dam, originally uploaded by Matt Blackcustard.

Today Michigan in Pictures welcomes Matt Callow, a photographer living in Ypsilanti, Michigan. As a reminder, Matt will be back tomorrow and Friday, so please check back!

Michigan in Pictures: Tell us a little bit about yourself, Matt.

Matt Callow: I’m British born and bred, though I’ve lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan for the last couple of years with two cats and my wife Allison, the reason I find myself here in the US in the first place.

In past lives I’ve been a research technician for Kodak, a careers information officer, a bass player in a rather mediocre band, and a customer service manager for a toy company. With the support of my wife and one or two generous patrons I’ve been lucky enough to be able to devote myself to photography full time for a while, and so I’ve had plenty of time and energy to devote to exploring my particular brand of photography.

Over the last couple of years I’ve had a number of individual shows here in Ypsilanti and in nearby Ann Arbor, and I’m currently showing an exhibition of my pinhole work at Bombadill’s Coffee Shop in downtown Ypsilanti. (click for Google Local map)

MP: What got you started as a photographer?

Matt: Well, the answer’s quite mundane. In 2000 I was moving away from Brighton, a city on England’s south coast where I’d lived in for over a decade. I borrowed a friend’s new digital camera to take a few photos of places I was going to miss (mostly pubs, I believe) and was instantly hooked. I bought a digital camera of my own, a cheap and cheerful Fuji point-and-shoot, and started using it to document my life and surroundings, and posting photos in my Livejournal. That little camera did me proud, and I learnt an awful lot about what makes a good photograph, working on making even the most pedestrian of subjects interesting, and trying to squeeze as much quality as I could out of its basic capabilities. Of course before long I outgrew it, moved on up to a far flashier digital camera, and started dabbling with film. I had my first exhibition in early 2003, a series of urban textures taken around my hometown of Wolverhampton. But by then I was already finding digital photography to be increasingly bland and unchallenging, so I started playing with toy cameras, vintage cameras and eventually pinholes, developing my own film and experimenting with alternative printing processes. And here I am now. I still have that old Fuji camera kicking around somewhere though.

MP: What cameras do you use and what is your favorite camera?

Matt: People like to give me cameras. Once they realise that I prefer to use old and unusual cameras, people dig through their basements and attics and see what they’ve got hidden away. I’ve been very lucky, and people have been very generous. I think I currently own about fifty cameras, ranging from a couple of century-old Kodak Autographics, right up to a late model Nikon SLR, and all sorts of things in between. I’ve got cheap plastic toys that came free with magazines, pinhole cameras made out of cookie tins, and a bunch of cool rangefinders and SLRs from the sixties and seventies. I’ve used most of them (I don’t like having them just taking up space on the shelf) and nearly all have them have something to interest or challenge me.

Currently the cameras I use most are the two classic toy cameras (the Holga and the Diana), along with a pinhole camera of some sort (either my paint can pinhole or one made from an old 1930s Voigtlander), and perhaps a vintage SLR of some kind. Most recently I’ve been using a dollar store toy camera given to me as part of the Free Camera group on Flickr.

I’d struggle to choose a favourite camera but I think I can narrow it down to two: my Nikon F and my Diana. The Nikon is perhaps the quintessential SLR camera from the late sixties, beautifully built, and its 50mm/1.4 lens is remarkably sharp and fast even by current standards. It belonged to my father-in-law who bought it new and used it to take pictures of his kids when they were little. He passed it on to me soon after I moved here and married his daughter. So as well as being a beautiful camera it’s got sentimental value too. The Diana is the absolute opposite end of the quality scale. Also made in the sixties, in Hong Kong, it’s to all intents and purposes a piece of plastic rubbish, but I love it. It’s usually the first camera into my bag when I go out shooting.

MP: What is the attraction of toy camera?

Matt: I think there are two main attractions: I like the way the pictures look, and I like the way the cameras force me to work harder as a photographer.

I love the flawed results I get from cheap plastic lenses: the soft focus, the blur, the vignetting, etc. The images they produce are often reminiscent of early photography, and conjure up some of that initial photographic magic for me. Toy camera photographs are soiled, imperfect reproductions of the world, rather than the cleaned up, perfect facsimiles we’re used to receiving via other more sophisticated modern media, and that appeals to me.

And then using a camera that has next to no exposure or focus control, I’m forced to think hard about the things that are in my control: composition and how to use available light. It’s photography at its most basic, with all the bells and whistles stripped away. And I find that refreshing and challenging.

Also, toy cameras are fun! They free you up to experiment and play with the rules, to rely a little on serendipity and the whim of the camera. You never quite know what you’re going to see when you hang the film out to dry.

MP: Can you tell us a bit about the photo above?

Matt: That was taken with my Holga using 35mm film. The Holga is really a medium format camera but it’s easy to adapt it to take 35mm film, and that has the neat effect of exposing the film around the sprocket holes but I thought this one looked better cropped down to the regular 35mm ratio. It was taken at Barton Dam on the Huron River just west of Ann Arbor, one of my favourite places to shoot. Throughout the summer there’re always lots of people fishing there. This kid was moving around a lot, so I only got one quickly taken shot, but I struck lucky.

Some Links from Matt…

Matt’s LiveJournal Site

Matt’s Photos on Flickr

Matt Callow – Urban Textures with more pics and information on past & upcoming exhibitions

Matt’s favorite toy camera site

Good starting points for pinhole photography are Pinhole.com and the f295 forums at tompersinger.com.

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Also see…

Michigan Photographers: Matt Callow answers Reader Questions (part II)

Michigan Photographers: Pinhole: Huron River by Matt Callow (part III)

Then Again He Could Have Called It Walking Together Across the Sunset of Generations

A Time For Family Reflection, originally uploaded by Rhino and Bird.

The photographer called this “A Time For Family Reflection” and then wrote: just kidding, that’s a terrible title for this picture.

Today’s mission (should you choose to accept it) is to come up with a better one! Post below…

The Pistons’ Fantastic Four

Fantastic Four Wallpaper, originally uploaded by Natalie.

Detroit Pistons fans know that there’s one place to go for all your Piston visuals: Need4Sheed.

Natalie, the site’s developer, makes great Piston wallpaper, screensavers and icons and also digs up cool videos pretty much daily like this All Star pregame bit. One of my favorites is this clip of Piston rookie Amir Johnson’s monster “hello NBA” windmill jam.

artdaddy wonders why Chauncey Billups rates a banner. 15 points, 7 dimes, helped lead comeback in 122-120 victory maybe??

Michigan in Pictures

A couple administrative notes for you on a Monday morning.

One is that Michigan in Pictures is one of the 7 fastest growing blogs on WordPress.com. Just goes to show what a photogenic state Michigan is!

The other a big thank you to Best Blog on WordPress for pointing a bunch of people this way!

Pinhole: Law Quad in the Snow

Pinhole: Law Quad in the Snow, originally uploaded by Matt Blackcustard.

I’ve waited far too long to blog one of Matt’s photos.

Next Thursday we’ll be starting what I hope will become a regular feature of multi-day encounters with Michigan photographers. Our first featured artist will be Mr. Matt Callow aka Matt Blackcustard, and we’ll be asking Matt some questions about his remarkable work. We hope that you will give us some questions to ask of him as well. Just post a comment below or e-mail your question to us.

Click for more about our Michigan Photographers feature.