Mary Bedy Photography

I’m not a hoarder. Really, I’m not. Except for books. Oh, and maybe yarn. But that’s it. I don’t have a lot of shoes, I don’t shop for clothing except maybe once every year and a half, I don’t “collect” anything. I have a very small collection of tea pots (and I don’t even drink tea), but I stopped when I ran out of room. Well, I do have marbles - few jars sitting around the house on my bookcases. But not so that it’s ridiculous. And I have a few rocks in boxes and jars, but still not so much as you would notice it. I AM, however, a dedicated hoarder of images. I LOVE images. Good art, paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, photos of sculpture (I love Louise Nevelson). These are images I hoard in the form of books and in a small way, actual prints. I can’t visit a museum without buying the guide book and the book of any special exhibit, if applicable. I have a couple of bookcase shelves dedicated to guide books from museums my husband and I have visited around the US and around

I live in a small town in Michigan called Saint Clair, population about 5,000. It’s located about 18 miles south of the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron which links Sarnia Canada with the US mainland. Most of you know from your geography classes that in this part of Michigan, Canada is directly East of the US instead of north. When I go downtown, I’m looking at Courtright, Canada across the river from Saint Clair. The river at this point is a little over a mile wide, so I can clearly see the houses and the traffic on the road along the river there unless it’s really foggy or there’s a heavy snowstorm. The Saint Clair river runs between Lake Huron and Lake Saint Clair, with the current running south from Lake Huron at about eight or nine knots. Some days the river is angry with white caps, but most days she’s relatively calm and just goes about her business of flowing south. Along the river here in town, we have the supposedly longest fresh water boardwalk in the world. That is a b

There is s small hiking trail in the middle of town where I live and I frequent it often with my camera. There is, being a hiking trail, always a carpet of dead and dying leaves everywhere along the trail and in the wetland ponds. I feel a kinship with these leaves. They are all different, yet all the same. All alive for a season, then they change, they fall, they dry out, curl up and crumble. They are all different colors, different sizes and different shapes. Some are hardier than others and are able to hang on to their branches in a stubborn death grip. Some hold their color on the forest floor until they are eaten by their fellow forest creatures and become a ragged version of their former selves. I love every one of them. Even the ones that are almost dust, with only delicate skeletal remains left behind. There is dignity in death in the forest. Nobody blames a leaf for a life wasted. Nobody criticizes the last leaf on the tree for refusing to give up because they are doomed

I’m fascinated by lamps, lanterns, light bulbs, any man-made light source, and especially if it’s old. I have been known to take photos of light fixtures on restaurant walls and ceilings while waiting for a meal. When I tour a historic building, one of the first things I notice is the light fixtures. Over the centuries, we have moved from whale oil lamps to kerosene, to arc lighting, tungsten bulbs and LED lights with a few others in between. Kerosene lanterns are still widely used overseas in rural areas where electricity is too expensive or scarce. In about 1806, an Englishman named Humphry Davy invented arc lighting, which created a glowing electric arc through a gas. Tungsten incandescent light bulbs became pretty common around the 1880s. The bulb photo you see here is a reproduction of an Edison light bulb that you would see in a house or business when electricity first became common in the urban areas. Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan virtually invented a working tungsten light

There are two kinds of photographs I love — very complex photos and very minimal photos. I also like everything in between, but I love very complex and very simple. Looking at a tangle of branches, vines, plants, or enjoying the complex moving patterns of sun on water are two examples of complex. You will notice with my photograph of snowy branches, your eyes move around and take in the entire image as a cohesive whole. The point here is the pattern, not necessarily the subject itself. There is no one element fighting for dominance. The spaces not occupied by a branch or a tree trunk are pretty uniform in size and evenly spaced throughout the entire image. On the complete opposite end of the scale, we have the image where, indeed, the main subject is immediately very obvious and it’s the unused blank areas (the negative space), that lend emphasis to the subject itself because the subject is what you immediately see. As in my image of thorns in snow, your eyes follow the subject f

Flowers and plants, we take them for granted. However, those of us who live in climates where there are cold, snowy winters, we may enjoy them a bit more than those who get to enjoy them outdoors year-round. Selling botanical images, especially flowers, is very difficult these days, with almost everyone owning a smart phone with a camera and the massive flood of floral photos online in the last several years. Getting your work seen is virtually impossible unless you are shoving it in people’s faces and even then, it had better be unique or stunningly beautiful or they are not going to be impressed. I admit, though, that I keep trying because, after all, who doesn’t like flowers and plants in general? My advice is try to take your photo from a different angle - such as my sunflower here,  which was starting to wilt, but from a profile view was still a marvel of soft natural forms. If you are photographing outdoors in sunlight, try getting down low with the sun behind the flowers, sh

I have noticed an odd occurrence with black and white photography. On some websites, it gets a lot of attention and on others, not much attention at all. Either people really like it, or they dismiss it out of hand. I have not been able to pinpoint the personality type that gravitates toward monochrome photography because it seems to be a totally random thing, however I suspect there may be more of an appreciation for, and like of black and white photography among those who have studied the history of photography, which may have given them more of an appreciation for it simply from higher exposure to it. Black and white photography can very much alter your perception of an image. Your brain is forced to shift its attention from the colors of a scene to the shapes, lines and tonal values. Sometimes a photo with muddy, ugly or glaring colors that is blatantly unpleasant can be magically transformed into a beautiful study of lines, geometric shapes and negative space created by the bla

When I was in junior high and at the beginning of high school and someone asked me what I wanted to do for a living, I would say “I want to be an architect”. That lasted for a short time, though, when I realized that career probably involved a lot of math, and math and I don’t get along. I’m eternally grateful there is a calculator on my phone and Microsoft Excel is my friend. My focus shifted when I got entranced with foreign languages and found out I had a knack for memorizing grammar rules, so I went in another direction. In any case, interesting architecture still holds a fascination for me. The Gothic structures in Europe, the cathedrals and castles, the beautiful old row houses in Amsterdam, the counterpoint between the Louvre’s classic architecture and Pei’s glass pyramid, the curving chedis and the beautiful Wats in Thailand, and the astonishing pyramids in Mexico I have seen in person. The Alhambra and the Mosque of Cordoba in Spain, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and of c

In this strange time we are experiencing right now, where it’s really not a good idea to engage with a lot of strangers outside your family, there are not that many places you can go to relax. Restaurants, libraries, bookstores and other locations that are frequented by a lot of people are generally not a good idea for a while longer as of this writing on July 1, 2020. But there are a few places one can go and at least have a change of scenery from the walls of your home, where most of us have spent the bulk of the last few months. For me, this is either down at the boardwalk along the Saint Clair river, where it’s easy to practice social distancing, or it’s the local hiking trail where you might encounter two or three people out for a walk or the occasional cyclist. I always take my camera with me even if I’m just mostly going to walk or relax on one of the benches along the trail. It’s a small hiking trail, but it’s well maintained and there are several trees along the path that I