Adventures in Photographic Irritation


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 was trying to shoot the new freighter coming north, at the same time as another one was coming south.

So here I'm running along the boardwalk trying to get clean shots with no blurry boats right in my way, I'm trying to shoot two freighters at once, and a guy starts talking to me "You getting anything good?". I'm trying to be polite so I said "I collect these" trying to keep it short. Meanwhile I'm swinging my camera from north to south to get my usual angles on both ships all while trying to avoid the pleasure craft up next to the boardwalk. I will say one guy saw me struggling and moved his boat for me.

Anyway, this other guy keeps talking and asking me questions, while I'm desperately trying to catch these things and get my detail shots and a shot of them passing each other, and I'm still answering him, and I don't remember what I said, but I was trying to concentrate at the same time. My daughter was watching all this and she was laughing when I sat back down on the bench afterwards, because she could tell I was frazzled. I felt like yelling "I'M WORKING HERE, WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT UP?"

Long story short, I had to ditch a few shots because — talk about a crooked horizon line — several shots looked like these ships were climbing a mountain or rappelling down the other side….

It’s always an adventure. Especially down by the river in Saint Clair where I live.

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You know they say in Michigan "if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes"? Well, May 8, 2020 measured up to that for sure. I was trying to talk myself into my semi-daily walk but it was cold and there actually had been snow flurries off and on that day, which is very unusual for May in lower Michigan. Since there was a freighter coming south that I didn’t have images of yet, I talked myself into walking down to the boardwalk and then walking ON the boardwalk while I waited for the ship. Well, I got down there to greet a tug barge combo coming north which I already have in my collection but I always shoot what's there because maybe the subsequent photos will be better than the previous ones.

So I started shooting the northbound ship and as I turn to look north after it passed me, there's some "HOLY MOLY” (to keep it polite) coming at me in the form of a dense snow squall which hit me horizontally, the wash from the barge came over the boardwalk and completely soaked my shoes, and I had to take refuge behind the south side of a large tree. It was snowing horizontally like crazy, I couldn’t see Canada at all (which is just about a mile away on the other side of the river) and the wind was ridiculous.

Finally it slowed down a bit, so I took my walk (camera UNDER the winter coat), then came back to wait for the southbound freighter. In five minutes it went from horizontal snow with frigid 30 mph winds, to bright and sunny, with fluffy clouds. I got some nice photos of this lovely bright red and yellow freighter in the sunlight, and prepared to walk home, when the wind hit me again, it got cloudy and in order to put my camera back into my backpack, I had to duck into the bus shelter on the sidewalk. I had to dry my shoes on the heat vent in the kitchen, and I looked through my schizophrenic photos that looked like they were not only taken on different days but like they had been taken in different seasons.
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In late spring toward dusk I photographed three new freighters and two that I had previously photographed. The problem was, there were random swarms of small moth-like bugs down by the river (about the size of a mosquito but with small powdered wings like a cabbage moth), and in about four or five of the photos I took, they were swarming in front of my camera lens. While editing, and for the images where they decided they wanted their portrait taken, It took me a good half hour just to get rid of them. I could tell which ones were closer to the camera because they were nice black out-of-focus blobs. Oh well, such is life. Sometimes you just can't let things BUG you, so to speak.
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For more of my freighter images, please visit my gallery here:

https://mary-bedy.pixels.com/collections/freighters+ships+and+boats

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