Mary Bedy Photography

The Keys to Happiness 011625 I played with the camera on my newer phone yesterday while sitting on my porch reading photography magazines. I have to say, even though the lenses still don't give the quality of high end camera equipment, and keeping in mind I only have the two-lens version of an iPhone, not the pricier models that actually have three lenses, and I have not tried it at night, I'm kind of blown away. Taking macro (closeup) images is always a chore with a regular camera. Depending on how much you want the background to blur and how much of the actual subject you want in focus, it takes a lot of fiddling.  Beach Party 011425  With this phone, I can lock the focus on one particular spot after choosing the actual aperture setting without a lot of jumping through hoops. I just moved up from an iPhone SE 2020 to an iPhone 16 and the improvements they've made are astounding. I know the Samsung phones (my daughter has one of those) make really high quality images as we...

Boardwalk Companions 4 102120 It’s hard to put into words what the isolation of the pandemic has done to us. I’m sure it’s different for everyone. Obviously it’s harder on those who have been impacted financially and hardest of all on those who have lost loved ones or who have long-term health issues after contracting the virus themselves. My heart goes out to every one of them. Leaves on Ice 121618   That said, I don’t want to write a downer blog post when people are already not feeling like themselves and just want to get back to normal. So this post is about my attempt to make art or shoot photographs specifically to relieve the urge to make art when mostly in isolation. One of my favorite art subjects is the still life. Some of my favorite artists are the Dutch and Flemish still-life painters of the 1600s-1800s. Fruit, flowers, tables set with pottery and meats and vegetables, old books and lanterns, I enjoy all of it. I have drawn a few still lifes in graphite or colored penci...

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...