Irish Hollow Cemetery, Rockland, MI
Up at 0400 on Father’s Day. No worry of offending kids by being gone for the morning, as all three adult children live many miles away from the Upper Peninsula. Antoinette and her husband live in San Diego and Eric and his wife live near Sacramento. Madeline, the youngest, is currently living in New York City and working remotely from her research assistant position in Washington D.C. She will start law school at Penn this Fall. A frequent way for me to escape the tedium of lawn and garden related chores is to throw one or more camera systems in the Toyota RAV4 and head out into the wilderness of the Upper Peninsula, with no particular plan or destination. And that is what happened this morning for my Father’s Day gift to myself. Drove 1.5 hours to Rockland, MI and photographed in the spooky Irish Hollow Cemetery. There is a bit of a legend to this completely overgrown place, as with many others in the U.P. When the cemetery was celebrated by the town in the early 1900’s, a little girl stayed at home while the rest of the town was at the graveyard. She managed to light a curtain on fire with firecrackers, eventually burning down the entire town. Most of the graves are in deeply wooded areas and are covered by vegetation, trees, and the ill effect of years of neglect. It is not hard to imagine a horror genre film being made here.
Historic Old Victoria Copper Mining Village
Onward a few miles outside of Rockland to the historic copper mining village of Old Victoria, which operated from 1849 until 1921. The buildings in the village has been renovated and preserved as a valued historical collection and are available for tour during the Summer and Fall.
My next subject was some 1950’s tourist cabins that had been abandoned years ago. The house in front of the cabins was vacant, which made me more comfortable in walking back to make a photograph. At home, following post-processing, I decided to join the two images into one diptych, which included both the cabins and sign from the highway. Places like this were abundant in the northwoods when I was a child in the 50’s.
Tourist Cabins/Motel-Ontonagon County, MI
Driftwood Roots-Lake Superior Shoreline-Ontonagon County, MI
Following the Lake Superior Shoreline from Ontonagon, I stopped at one of my favorite beaches, which I had to myself. The location is also a favorite spot of my grandsons for swimming, as it is sandy, rather than rock-filled like most of Superior’s shoreline. I have photographed this large driftwood root system with many formats and different films over the years. It decomposes so gradually, it will likely outlast me. Each season provides for different light and offers variety for composition.
One downside of using a rangefinder like the Mamiya 6 in this case, is parallax error. In simple terms, what you see through the viewfinder may not be what you get in the photograph. This is especially more prevalent when shooting at close distances, like the image above, which had to be cropped tighter on the left side to get my previsualized image. In future work with the 50mm and this camera, I will have a better idea on how to place the image in the viewfinder to compensate (moving the camera slightly to the right).
Returned back to Rauhallinen Farm by 1030AM, with plenty of time to develop film, scan, and post-process images.
“The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best. ”