Mary Bedy Photography

One national park I have visited four times which has an interesting geologic history is Acadia National Park in Maine. At only 65 square miles, it’s a small park compared to others, but it’s a beautiful area of the eastern seaboard. Most of the park is in an area called Mount Desert Island. The topography is comprised of ridges and valleys running north and south that were excavated by massive ice sheets up to a mile thick. Protrusions of these immense ice sheets carved out lakes such as Eagle Lake and Jordon Pond on the west side of the park. The results of centuries of rocky seacoast being battered by waves has resulted in large, jutting granite formations with linear cracks and sea caves along the coast. As these ice sheets thickened 21,000 year ago and moved over the area, they sheared off mountain tops giving them a flatter, rounded appearance like Cadillac Mountain which rises to 1530 feet - the tallest area on the eastern seaboard. At the top of Cadillac Mountain, wher

Who doesn’t like marbles? Most people have memories of playing with or collecting marbles when they were kids. Some people were really into formal marble games and some people just like marbles for nostalgic reasons or they enjoy them as a form of glass art. I still occasionally buy an assortment of marbles from companies that will sell small quantities to the regular consumer. My husband was into collecting old postcards at one time, and since he knew I liked marbles, he bought me a couple of vintage bumble bees (a particular style of black and yellow marble), and I was tempted to start collecting, but I decided since I have no experience with or in-depth knowledge about collecting vintage marbles, I was more likely to buy pretty glass with no way to know if I was getting a good deal. I do have some older marbles (1950s era) and I have tried to keep them separate from the newer ones, but I’m afraid some of them have ended up mixed in with some of the more modern marbles in my coll

I live in Michigan in an area where most freighters and tankers and a few cruise ships sailing on the Great Lakes regularly pass by. A few years ago, I was sitting on a park bench along the boardwalk watching one of these mammoth ships silently glide by not more than 200 feet from where I was sitting, and I said to myself, “Self, you’re a photographer. Why are you not photographing these graceful and majestic vessels?” My self didn’t have an answer. So I started photographing them if I happened to have my camera with me while at the boardwalk, but I didn’t really make a concerted effort to shoot as many as possible. After about a year of this haphazard approach, and generally concentrating on other subject matter such as the local hiking trail, architecture and the National Parks, somehow a switch was flipped in my brain, and I found myself obsessed with collecting images of as many of these giants as I could, as well as looking up the basic information about each ship, learning what t