Mary Bedy Photography

    What do you do with those old photos that you took on vacation if you lived most of your life before the digital age and took film photos that you had processed at the local mini-labs? Sometimes the developing was excellent, but more often than not, it was so-so and the color was slightly off, etc. There was a period of time where my husband and I used a commercial lab in California that would also develop for the general public, but the vast majority of our older photos were done at the local K-Mart or CVS pharmacy. For those of us who have enjoyed photography for the last 50 or more years (in my case more), but we never got into our own developing, most of us have some marginal photos that were actually well composed and the lighting was good, but they still needed some help, that wasn’t available until the advent of editing software. I use Photoshop, but for those out there that are not into shooting for sale, or for printing large images, but would like to fix some of their old

Not only the National Parks are interesting. There are a lot of beautiful and interesting state and county parks scattered throughout the country. Fayette State Park in Michigan's upper peninsula along the shores of Lake Michigan was one of the largest iron smelting locations during the 1870s and 1880s. The population at its highest point was about 500 people. The salary for the Iron workers was about one dollar a day. They would attempt to save some of that for the harsh winter months, or in case there was a shutdown in production. The old, stately hotel has been under renovation for some time, and the giant brick smelting furnaces, the building of which you can walk through, are impressive. When the smelting operation shut down in 1891, some people stayed in the town, including commercial fishermen. The town catered to the tourist industry in the summer. The hotel operated well into the 20th century and in 1959, the state acquired the land and turned it into a state park. The bla