Mary Bedy Photography

In 2015, my daughter was living in Flagstaff, Arizona and we went there to celebrate Christmas with her. Flagstaff is a beautiful town surrounded by the San Francisco mountain range, and while we were there, we experienced more snow than they had in the Port Huron area of Michigan where we live. Of course the city itself is at about 7,000 feet elevation. During our visit, our daughter took us to a restaurant called Josephine’s in Flagstaff, where for Christmas Eve they had a buffet dinner with no menu service, but five years later we are still talking about that meal. It was easily one of my 10 best meals ever while traveling, or really just ever in general. They had salmon, ham, other meats, about ten difference salads and sides and three or four deserts, including chocolate mousse, that I ate verrryyy slowly to enjoy it as long as possible. I’m not a huge fan of ham, but the ham they had at this buffet was to die for, and I kept going back for more. Anyway, during this visit we

Arches National Park in Utah has a catalog of over 2,000 arches ranging in size from three feet wide to Landscape Arch, which measures 306 feet wide at the base. The park lies on top of a salt bed that came from ocean cover that came and went 300 million years ago, the top layer of which solidified and the weight of the top layer forced the unstable salt layer below to buckle, and arches, trenches, fins and other structures were formed when layers under pressure fell into the shifting base. Arches National Park is part of the Colorado Plateau and is considered high desert. It lies at about 5,500 feet on average above sea level. It’s hot and dry in the summer and there are signs all over the park warning people to watch out for altitude sickness. I visited the park several years ago with my husband and daughter, and we stopped along the road at the very popular and impressive spot called Double Arch with two massive stone arches that you can sit under or walk back through to explo

Three instances of “Suffering for your Art” - well not really, I wasn’t in danger of falling off a cliff or being eaten by a wild animal, but these are some of my small adventures trying to photograph ships. Enjoy… As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, I take a lot of freighter photos because I'm in a town where they regularly pass by. I've never really had an issue photographing them because there's nothing in the way, really, except the occasional boater close to shore. Well, one Friday night I went down there to grab a new one, and instead I got three going through one after the other and two that actually passed each other. In the meantime, there is a park by the boardwalk where they hold concerts with a portable stage on Friday nights, so there was a crowd for the concert, and there were boaters out on the river listening to the music. I already had to take off my shoes and leave them on a park bench because of the wash and the high water level, then I wa

How many times did you go to the carnival as a child? Or perhaps you called it “the fair”. I’m not talking about permanent amusement parks like Six Flags or Cedar Point. I’m talking about the sidewalk or parking lot fair, set up quickly for a few days, then broken down, stored and moved to another town. I really only remember going to a very small amusement park on the north west edge of Detroit when I was growing up called Edgewater that was a fun hangout for two or three hours on a summer day, and my mother would drop me and a friend off at the park and pick us up later. That’s the first place I remember tasting cotton candy. I think I won a teddy bear at the ring toss there as well. The fair is a fantasy location which is purely a world of play. A place where we are entertained without having to turn on a tv or a computer or a tablet. Where we can throw darts at balloons that appear to magically avoid the dart by moving aside, or the ring toss where that ring just will not lan

I like looking down when I’m hiking - finding small little surprises on the side of the trail. Tiny flower buds, dying leaves and dried up pond beds are interesting studies in shapes and colors. But I also like to look up, and I think a lot of us have forgotten how to do that recently. We’re always looking down at a screen of some sort, either a tablet or a phone, or looking straight ahead at a computer screen. That’s become more the norm in the last few months as well, since most of us are not driving around too many places right now in the middle of 2020. I do, however, still get down to the boardwalk in town and the hiking trail while maintaining social distancing, and I try to look up and notice what the heavens are doing at any particular time. Sometimes mother nature gives me some spectacular views. There is a photo at the top I call “Lake Huron Colors”, and I was in love with the muted blues in the sky that were matched by the lake. It was, indeed, a “blue” day since it wa

I have lived next to the Saint Clair River in Michigan for the last 27 years and I have been fascinated by the recent changes in water levels. This year, the water level here in town is only about a foot below the boardwalk. I have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but this level has alarmed me since for the previous 25 years, and until last year, the water level of the river was several feet lower. Not just inches lower, several feet lower. I started wondering what causes this fluctuation (aside from the larger concern of global warming) and being a “slightly informed” geology junkie, I jumped on a couple of websites to explore this phenomenon. One large factor that affects the water level in the lakes is apparently how much ice forms on the lakes in the winter, which cuts down on natural evaporation. This, along with precipitation and run-off from land, is one of the major contributing factors to the water level. I decided to peruse the NOAA website (National Oceanic

I have a love of clocks and watches. I have a couple of inexpensive watches in a drawer with lovely beaded bands that I bought at the local art fair for which I should buy batteries because I would still enjoy wearing them if they were working. Looking around my bedroom, I have five clocks in various locations. One old wind-up alarm clock from my parent’s house, two tiny square battery operated clocks, also from my parent’s house a small battery-operated travel alarm on my night stand that we bought for travel before the advent of cell phones, and one digital clock radio on the dresser. I also have a round battery wall clock in my living room. The other two clocks in the house are just the digital clock on my stove, and the microwave. The neon clock shown here was photographed at a small restaurant in Manistique, Michigan. I remember the restaurant for a decent Greek salad that they promptly ruined by drowning it in about two cups of dressing, and this clock. The waitresses l