Category: Michigan
This picture was taken a couple of years ago at the Gilmore Car Museum near Kalamazoo, Michigan. The museum is a great place to see cars throughout the ages. The museum sits on a large piece of farmland and has several barns which house the cars. They have been adding to the museum over the years. Last year they opened a new building dedicated to Franklin automobiles. The Classic Car Club of America has a barn as well. The museum continues to expand it’s collection and is a great place to visit if you like automobiles and automobile history.
A couple of weeks ago Mike Olbinski, a photographer I follow, posted this shot of a grain elevator that he found while driving through Kansas. This got me in the mood to find some interesting elevators in Michigan, since Kansas is quite a ways away for me. I did some scouting on Flickr and managed to find a couple of good possibilities. One was a local elevator in Ypsilanti, Michigan which I posted last week. The other one was this old elevator in Henderson, Michigan. What I liked about this one was the decay and faded paint job. If you look carefully, you can see old signage for ‘Purina Chows’ and other products that were available at this location.
ontinuing my quest to find interesting grain elevators to shoot, I present this image taken of a feed and grain store located in Webberville, Michigan. I was actually passing through Webberville on my way to find an old grain elevator that I had seen during a Flickr search. I hadn’t really planned on stopping in Webberville, but I figured, what the heck maybe there would be something interesting to shoot. The first thing you see when you approach Webberville from the highway is the large Archer Daniels Midland elevator and complex. I took some shots of it, but the picture I really wanted to get would have been difficult since it would have involved shooting from just outside of the security gate. I really didn’t feel like dealing with security so I passed on that shot. However, I had noticed just down the tracks a bit, there was another, smaller elevator. I managed to find the road which led to this feed and grain store. It wasn’t quite as rustic as I would have liked, but parts of the building had an interesting character. I took a few different shots from different angles and I liked this one the best.
Recently I’ve been in a bit of a shooting slump and I’m trying to come up with little projects which might help me out. I’ve always had a fascination with old grain elevators and seeing some shots from other people got me inspired to do some hunting to find structures which might be interesting to shoot. I decided to search Flickr to see what others have found to help focus my effort instead of driving aimlessly about in search of something I may never find. I happened to run across an image of the elevator taken in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I live nearby and I knew approximately where this elevator was located, so I decided to check it out this past weekend and ended up with the shot you see above. I particularly like the sign for the Frog Island Brewery.
We had some nice weather last week and all around I saw trees flowering and leafing out. I decided to take a quick drive around the campus of the University of Michigan to see where there might be a good combination of architecture and flowering landscape. The shot above shows the Intramural Building with a nice line of flowering trees. Not sure what kind of trees they are, but they looked nice.
One of the coolest and most depressing buildings in Detroit has to be the old Michigan Central Station (Depot). The station was used by Amtrak until 1988 when it was abandoned and left to basically rot. The station consists of the main railway facilities as well as an 18 story office tower. The interesting thing about the office tower is that the top floors were never finished. Anyway, the building has been decaying for years and has been threatened with demolition many times.
his image start life as an 8 shot HDR. The subject is one that I’ve visited many times, an old schoolhouse west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve worked on a couple variations of this shot. One was a straight color HDR, a second was a simpler black and white conversion of the color HDR and finally this version. In all cases the thing I liked the most was the clouds in the sky. My original black and white conversion created a reasonably dark sky which looked pretty nice but I decided to go for a more antique look with this version. To me it looks like the sort of image that appeared on old stereoscope cards. I used to love to use my grandparents viewer to look at their cards in wonderful 3D and perhaps that’s why I like the way this image came out.
After posting yesterday’s image, I took another look at the raw shot and thought that there were some things that I could do with the original orientation that would also make for a more interesting shot. The horizontal shot I posted yesterday is more focused on the person, whereas the taller shot I think does a better job of showing the person in the context of the surrounding architecture. I used Silver Efex Pro2 to convert to black and white and to add a vignette and sepia tone. I think the vignette helps draw the eye to the person, while still being able to see a larger context.
ometimes a crop can make all the difference in an image. The image you see above was taken in the new wing of the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). I was trying to capture the classic ‘musuem’ shot which shows someone contemplating some piece of art. As I walked through the gallery, I noticed this gentleman standing and looking at something and I liked the way he was framed by the walls of the museum. For some reason I decided to shoot this vertically. I think I was captivated by all the angles and lines which were captured by the wide angle lens. However, the vertical nature of the shot was more about architecture than the person. As I looked at the image, I wondered what it might look like if I had shot it horizontal, so I tried a relatively severe crop to convert from vertical to horizontal. I liked what I saw so I did a fairly simple conversion to black and white and the result is what you see above.