Mary Bedy Photography

American Spirit Detail 050818 In the past approximately seven years, I have collected images of 321 freighters, tankers, tugs, coast guard cutters and three cruise ships that go through my home town of Saint Clair, Michigan. This has become a minor obsession to collect every large ship I can when they go by. Blacky 2 051520 There was a time four or five years ago when I could get up to nine new ships in a weekend. I do have a freighter tracker on my phone so I’m able to see what’s going through town at any given time. The new ships (new to me) have, of course, diminished in frequency because a lot of these freighters go through here on a regular basis.       It has become apparent that there is an interest in these massive vessels because I have sold more freighter images than any other category of image including architecture, nature, national parks images (which I love, but the image market is saturated with national park photos) and all but images specific to Michigan such as Mackin

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

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