Category: Michigan
Over the 4th of July weekend, I spent a couple of days in Marquette, Michigan. We were in Marquette to check out the campus of Northern Michigan University as a possible university for our youngest son. The town is quite interesting and has a number of interesting older buildings with some terrific architecture. When we got there, I took a short walk around the town. As I was wandering around town I saw this cool sign for Ringside Fitness, a local fitness facility and thought it would make a nice image. For processing I started with one of the darker presets from Silver Efex Pro 2 and gave the image a rough border. I wanted to give the image a bit of an old time grungy feeling.
This past weekend my wife and youngest son took a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit the campus of Northern Michigan University. NMU is located in Marquette, Michigan, which is a terrific little town. The town is located on the shores of Lake Superior and has a wonderful collection of historic buildings and interesting sights. This shot was taken down in what is known as the lower harbor. The lower harbor has an old ‘ore dock’ which is a large structure used to load taconite pellets on to large ships. Marquette has two of these docks, one is still in use. The image shows a tug boat parked in front of the dock.
At the Gilmore Car Museum they’ve built a replica of an early 30’s vintage Shell gas station. Many of the items inside and outside of the museum came from a Shell station which was located in Hickory Corners, just a couple miles away from the museum. More information about the building itself can be found here
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.