Photo Walk: Gordie Howe Bridge
Another cloudy day downriver.
The weather this past winter was absolutely disgusting. I've never been a fan of winter, but climate change is somehow making it even worse. When I was younger, I hated cold weather, but over the years I've kinda of made peace with it. With good enough warm outerwear it can be pretty bearable, if the wind isn't bad. The one thing I used to be able to count on was that there seemed to be more sunny days in the winter than in the summer. (If you didn't know, Michigan is one of the cloudiest states in the US. Yay.) But we haven't had anything approximating a true winter here in years.
Instead this "blah" is our new reality. But staying indoors for 6 months is even more unbearable, so I've been trying to just force myself to go out and shoot regardless. I literally took a photo the other day of a tree and I glanced at the back of the camera and thought I had a black and white film recipe selected because the image appeared to be in B&W. No, that's just literally the way it looks outside. It's stark. And the lack of directional light is really soul-destroying as a photographer.
One thing I have learned is that under these conditions, it's often better to just give up on shooting during the day entirely, and to use this constantly wet weather for shooting at night. Plus it gets dark so early that it's basically night all the time. But on this particular day, I had a film camera I wanted to use, so we ventured out. Being me, I can't leave the house with one camera, and I didn't particularly like the film shots from this location, so I'm posting some x100v shots today.
We drove aimlessly for an hour and ended up somewhere south of Zug Island and in an industrial area near the water. Every place we went by looked interesting in a post-apocalyptic dystopian way, but also like we would surely get arrested if we stepped foot out of the car. I ascribe to the school of thought of "the photo will be taken and I'll be back in the car WAY before the police show up" but Andy is always nervous about these things.
But I spied a sign for a public park, and we drove down this long weird industrial drive that really felt like we were trespassing and ended up in this tiny crappy waterfront park that most definitely had some terrible air quality and overlooked a similar industrial wasteland on the Canadian shore. But it did give us this vantage point to photograph the progress on the Gordie Howe Bridge. Some factory near by obligingly farted out giant plumes of smoke on a regular schedule which added some drama to an otherwise really drab landscape.
When i took this photo, I was really excited by this yellow handrail and that yellow thing the seagull was perched on which fell smack dab in the middle of the opening of the bridge. And then I got home and faced the reality that this was shot with a 23mm lens and that bird is freaking teeny tiny. Such is life as a photographer in the bleakest of midwestern states in the middle of January.
Afterwards we wandered around some more and I eventually found these really cool tugboats that I was very excited about, but the light was miserable and I only had wide lenses. We also walked over one of those old bridges where the platform is made of corrugated metal you can see through, which to me is terrifying. These yellow trucks were the most colorful thing I encountered on this excursion. Don't ask yourself why the grass is green in January, the planet is on fire. The piles of gravel in the background are the closest we get in these parts to hills, and thus were a novelty.
I'm appalled to admit I took this photo out of moving car, but I kinda like it. I realize the toning is absurd in these photos but there's only so many photos you can edit of a completely white featureless sky before you try to do something to "spice it up". I wish I hadn't cut off the bottom of those spindle things. I find industrial sites like this fascinating, I always want to know what they do, and wish I could properly explore them. I'm a sucker for grungy textures.
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