lynn

Photo Walk: Gordie Howe Bridge

lynn@stylishdetroit.com (Lynn Bernardi) — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 14:30:00 GMT

Another cloudy day downriver.

(I've decided to catch this blog up with some of my photo walks I've taken over the past couple months.)

The weather this past winter was absolutely disgusting. I've never been a fan of winter, but climate change is somehow making it even worse. When I was younger, I hated cold weather, but over the years I've kinda of made peace with it. With good enough warm outerwear it can be pretty bearable, if the wind isn't bad. The one thing I used to be able to count on was that there seemed to be more sunny days in the winter than in the summer. (If you didn't know, Michigan is one of the cloudiest states in the US. Yay.) But we haven't had anything approximating a true winter here in years.

Instead we get endless overcast, depressingly cloudy gloomy days that descend into full darkness by 5pm, an alarming amount of rain, and maybe if we are lucky 1-2 days of snow that almost immediately melts. The temperature often sticks around the 40's. Too cold to be pleasant, too warm for any snow to stick around. At least when it was colder, the snow would make everything seem bright and marginally more cheerful even when it was overcast.

Instead this "blah" is our new reality. But staying indoors for 6 months is even more unbearable, so I've been trying to just force myself to go out and shoot regardless. I literally took a photo the other day of a tree and I glanced at the back of the camera and thought I had a black and white film recipe selected because the image appeared to be in B&W. No, that's just literally the way it looks outside. It's stark. And the lack of directional light is really soul-destroying as a photographer.

One thing I have learned is that under these conditions, it's often better to just give up on shooting during the day entirely, and to use this constantly wet weather for shooting at night. Plus it gets dark so early that it's basically night all the time. But on this particular day, I had a film camera I wanted to use, so we ventured out. Being me, I can't leave the house with one camera, and I didn't particularly like the film shots from this location, so I'm posting some x100v shots today.

We drove aimlessly for an hour and ended up somewhere south of Zug Island and in an industrial area near the water. Every place we went by looked interesting in a post-apocalyptic dystopian way, but also like we would surely get arrested if we stepped foot out of the car. I ascribe to the school of thought of "the photo will be taken and I'll be back in the car WAY before the police show up" but Andy is always nervous about these things.

But I spied a sign for a public park, and we drove down this long weird industrial drive that really felt like we were trespassing and ended up in this tiny crappy waterfront park that most definitely had some terrible air quality and overlooked a similar industrial wasteland on the Canadian shore. But it did give us this vantage point to photograph the progress on the Gordie Howe Bridge. Some factory near by obligingly farted out giant plumes of smoke on a regular schedule which added some drama to an otherwise really drab landscape.

When i took this photo, I was really excited by this yellow handrail and that yellow thing the seagull was perched on which fell smack dab in the middle of the opening of the bridge. And then I got home and faced the reality that this was shot with a 23mm lens and that bird is freaking teeny tiny. Such is life as a photographer in the bleakest of midwestern states in the middle of January.

Afterwards we wandered around some more and I eventually found these really cool tugboats that I was very excited about, but the light was miserable and I only had wide lenses. We also walked over one of those old bridges where the platform is made of corrugated metal you can see through, which to me is terrifying. These yellow trucks were the most colorful thing I encountered on this excursion. Don't ask yourself why the grass is green in January, the planet is on fire. The piles of gravel in the background are the closest we get in these parts to hills, and thus were a novelty.

I'm appalled to admit I took this photo out of moving car, but I kinda like it. I realize the toning is absurd in these photos but there's only so many photos you can edit of a completely white featureless sky before you try to do something to "spice it up". I wish I hadn't cut off the bottom of those spindle things. I find industrial sites like this fascinating, I always want to know what they do, and wish I could properly explore them. I'm a sucker for grungy textures.

Old Books

lynn@stylishdetroit.com (Lynn Bernardi) — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:47:14 GMT

When they ask if you want to see the rare photo book room, the answer is yes.

A couple weeks back, when it was still far too cold to contemplate doing a photo walk outside, Andy and I found ourselves at the venerable John K King Bookstore in Detroit. This place is such an institution, not sure why we don't visit it more often. Recently I've been moving all our photography books from home to our studio. I just never look at them at home because I've got no good place with great light where I can spread them out and pour over them without worrying about a random pet jumping on the table and messing them up. It seemed much wiser to bring them to the studio, but it's been an ordeal because our studio is on the second floor and photo books are HEAVY. And one day when we eventually move I'm really going to be questioning my life choices. But in the meantime, I'm finally spending some time actually looking at the books I've collected, and realizing it's been far too long since I've added any new titles.

That needed to change, so my sneaky idea was to say we were going to John King to just browse and maybe take a couple photos, but I planned to scour the photography section for some new additions to the photo library.

Unfortunately, the regular photography section was mostly a bust. It was very small, there wasn't many monographs in amongst dated how-to books, and overall it just wasn't that exciting. I found two Bernice Abbott books. Andy found a couple books and some old Hasselblad brochures. We've been on a bit of a Hasselblad kick lately (that's a story for another day), so he scooped those up. Then we just wandered around for awhile.

I always feel weird taking photos in stores, because A.) it seems obnoxious, and B.) I know this place probably gets overrun with people trying to shoot portraits in here so it feels like a cliche. But I mean, look at this place. I had my Fuji x100v, but what I did not have was a memory card with much space left on it so I got in an whole 12 photos or so before I couldn't shoot anymore. Oops. I'm sure I had more cards in my bag, but for some reason this place was packed and we couldn't even park in the lot, so we left our car blocks away. Plus I was on the 4th floor when I realized I was out of space. Oh well.

I'm not sure if it was just a typical Saturday (we haven't been here in years) or if someone recently wrote an article or did a TikTok about this place, but the first floor was just absolutely overrun with people. It was literally shoulder to shoulder and the stacks are already so dense that you often have to turn sideways just to navigate down a row. This didn't stop unaware people from blocking the entire aisle and leaving you stuck in a labyrinth with no other way forward. It was a claustrophobic nightmare, but thankfully the upper floors were much less crowded.

It's kind of crazy how old some of the books are that are just laying out here for the public to paw through.

After standing in a crowded checkout line for at least a good 20 minutes, we finally made it to the front. The cashier looked over our cache of books and before ringing anything up (this place is so old school you get a receipt printed on one of those accounting calculators) and asked "Are you interested in seeing the rare photo book section?" Um, yes. Of course we were. Not sure if our wallets were ready, but tell us more.

Turns out the 4 floors and approximately billion square feet of books that makes up the main building is just part of the store. There's outbuildings. Outbuildings which contain a rare photo section. You can make an appt to visit it, but the cashier told us to hang on and he'd see if someone was available and luckily there was. We were led out outside and to another a building where no lights were on and whisked down a hallway to end up in a room that was just full of amazing photo books. I should have taken photos in there with my phone at least. I honestly feel conflicted even mentioning it, because I'd prefer to keep this secret all to myself, but probably no one will read this blog anyway.

But yes, this was the selection I was dreaming of. There were so many titles I wanted. We could have easily dropped hundreds of dollars in this room, but we reigned it in. I found a cleaner copy of one of the Berenice Abbott books I already had grabbed for like $5 more, we found a pristine copy of Mary Ellen Mark's 25 Years, which turned out to be a signed copy, and we scored this hefty Koudelka book. There were definitely some rarer books with steep price tags but there was a lot of affordable books as well.

An Introduction

lynn@stylishdetroit.com (Lynn Bernardi) — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 18:46:53 GMT

The part where I explain this...

Writing a first blog post always feels so weird. Will anyone ever actually see this? Will I actually keep up with posting, or will digital tumbleweed litter the stark landscape? I guess I'll find out.

My name is Lynn and over the course of my life, I've had countless interests and hobbies. Many of which cause me to fall into a deep rabbit hole of obsession that lasts days, weeks, or even months, until the one day I abruptly forget the very existence of said thing and abandon it, maybe forever. Most likely it's undiagnosed ADHD. However the one fixture of my life that's been somewhat constant in the last twenty-odd plus years is photography. I remember being a young teen and nosily snooping thru my mom's closet and finding a leather bag tucked away with an absolute pristine looking Canon FTb inside. I was instantly drawn to it. It was just a beautiful looking camera and though I knew nothing about photography, the possibility it represented intrigued me. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Of course, initially after asking about it, I was told not to touch it and put it away, but it became a goal to figure out how to make it mine. It was so strange to me that my mom even owned it because I had never seen her use it. Time passed and when I started at a new high school that offered a darkroom photography class, I knew I finally had a reason to commandeer the camera.

I'd love to say that I was just naturally talented and took amazing photos those first few years, but YouTube didn't exist then, digital didn't exist then, and learning was a slow process. Yes, I did put in the effort to actually learn the ins-and-outs of exposure and darkroom developing and printing, but I didn't have a wealth of free and instantly available knowledge to me like people who start off with a new hobby do today, thanks to the internet. (I know, I sound a million years old.) There wasn't tons of great work out there easily accessible to compare yourself to. So basically my little wannabe goth self wandered around graveyards and the places of downtown that felt safe enough for a kid and I took weird photos that I thought were much more interesting than they actually were. Along the way I started collecting any weird old camera I could find at resale shops. I had a particular fondness for Kodak Brownie Hawkeyes and Argus Seventy-fives. I had a Lubitel 166 and a Holga before lomography.com was a thing. (Back then we didn't embrace light leaks, you learned on Flickr forums to paint the inside of your camera flat black and to gaff tape the living shit out of it.)

Fast forward to college where I took some photo classes, and the very first "digital imaging" class our university offered, which didn't involve digital cameras (still barely thing) but it did introduce me to Photoshop. Photography continued to be an interest but I didn't think it could be a "real job" - and when my camera kit was stolen out of my car that put a real damper on things. I replaced the camera, but the new one was never quite the same, it just didn't operate as nicely as the original FTb, and a lot of the magic was lost to me for years. I saved up for my dream film camera (the Canon Elan 7E - eye controlled focus!) bought some digital cameras here and there, but photography mostly was on the back burner for awhile.

This all changed pretty drastically around 2007. A bunch of pretty significant life events all happened in the space of a couple months. I returned back to Michigan from living in Florida, I almost immediately met my partner Andy, I bought my first house, and one of my dearest friends from college had a sister getting married and she asked me to be her wedding photographer. To say I was unprepared for this was a colossal understatement. I hadn't touched film in years, my current camera was very non-professional Sony Cybershot. ( Maybe this one? ) I explained that I was not the person for this job and was told that if I didn't do it, no one else would be doing it. So I found myself with a wedding booked. I immediately asked Andy to help me. We had a freakish amount of things in common, and one of them was a similar photography background. But he at least had a dSLR. He helped me pick out a Canon 40D, and we photographed that wedding. And surprise! We kinda pulled if off!

Not only that, we discovered we loved it. Wedding photojournalism was a new thing, and I was hooked. Having access to this intimate and pivotal part of someone's life, and all the emotions that went with it was fascinating and felt important. The technical challenges involved in getting great shots no matter the weather, lighting, or level of your subject's inebriation appealed to the technical side of me. In college I had always bounced back and forth between creative classes and technical ones. I would get bored focusing on one and go back to the other. Wedding photography scratched both the right and left sides of my brain.

We got good feedback from that first wedding, and tentatively put up a website and booked several more weddings the following year. Our first real photography business was born. By the 3rd year we were averaging 25ish bookings a year. Pretty much every nice weekend May - October we had events booked. After about 7 years shooting weddings, and fully burnt out from rarely having a weekend free during the nicest part of the year, we started to transition to another genre. My day job involved real estate and we started getting requests to shoot houses. What started as an occasional thing spiraled into another full-fledged business, Stylish Detroit - which is now a full service real estate media company. We have a team of 9 photographers & videographers currently, plus photo & video editors.

As the company grew and we hired more people, and we were able to scale back on our real estate shooting, which was fine because after shooting your 100th or 1500th house, the mystery is kind of gone. We evolved two side brands, one for portraits/branding ( The Shot Shop ) and another for commercial/product photography ( Phlora ).

Between these different brands, we have a lot of work to keep us busy, but as a result we both stopped taking photos for the enjoyment of photography.

I realized one day that it had been a long, long, loooooooong time since I had taken a photo for me. The burnout from our wedding photography days had creeped back. I no longer followed photography blogs, or looked at photography monographs, or really thought about photography the way I used to. And it bummed me out. I was so focused on what was necessary to have a viable photography business that paid the bills that I had lost everything that originally drew me to photography. I set out to change that.

So if you're still patiently reading through this, that's why this website exists. It felt quite silly to have been doing photography for two decades and not to have a website wholly dedicated to my own work. But more than just slapping a portfolio of personal work together, I really wanted a sketchbook and notepad of sorts. A place to talk about photography, throw up recent work, talk about cameras, techniques, and work that I'm intrigued with.

I've spent the last two years slowly falling back in love with photography and I wanted a place to document that.