It Shouldn't Be This Hard Tour

It's been years since I've attended Dally in the Alley, and I'm trying to make a concerted effort to be less of a hermit, so I grabbed some cameras and wandered around for awhile this weekend. Parking was quite a challenge and after a few frustrating detours, we gave up and drove further north and then took the Q-line back down to the neighborhood. It was my first time using the Q-line, and usually when I see it go by it's empty, but it was packed when we got on. And somehow it was bumpier than the People Mover which seems like it's propelled mostly by vibes. Anyway. Now in its 47th year, the Dally in the Alley is Detroit's longest running, free, and volunteer-led street festival, taking place in the Cass Corridor.

Went back for a round of nighttime shots at the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival. I was looking forward to a return trip and had an idea for the kind of images I wanted to take, but that kind of went out the window when I got there. The problem with being an anxious person is that sometimes my brain overrides my desires and I just feel a bit paralyzed. I brought my R5 and intended to get tighter street shots, and more reaction shots from the crowd, but it just felt like an obnoxiously large camera for the event and like I was being rude. I 100% know this is just me being crazy, but it is what it is.  Not long after arriving I realized I left my phone in the car, and so I had to make the longish walk back alone to retrieve it. On the way back to the fair, I got these three little vignettes and then basically left the canon on my shoulder and shot with the x100vi for the rest of the night.

The Hamtramck Labor Day festival is an institution - it started back in 1980 during a time of uncertainty for the community after the closure of the Dodge Main factory which provided jobs to thousands of local residents. The city has always been a hub for immigrants, first the Polish, and now Arabs, Bangladeshi, Bosnians, and Serbians call this place home. Somehow despite living just a few miles away, this event completely escaped my notice until now. I was genuinely shocked and delighted by the scale of this event. I went to a smaller street festival here a few weeks earlier, and figured it would be more of the same, but there were rides, concession stands, multiple stages, and a bunch of street vendors.

It was a cold, wet, and dreary Saturday, but that didn't stop hundreds of people from turning up on the streets of Detroit to protest ICE and the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good.

I have a confession. Despite being an avid gardener for a number of years now, and generally understanding the benefit of native plants, I've been kind of terrible at actually planting any. I'm mainly a vegetable grower. Over the past five years I've torn down two raised beds that were rotting away and replaced them with 5 new metal raised beds. Then the next year I added four more. And the year after that I added more again. I'm up to 12 now. Along with an unruly assortment of grow bags for all the seedlings I don't have the heart to toss on the compost pile and can't find homes for. Inside the clearly defined boundaries of the beds, I have a plan. Everything outside of them however mainly is chaos. I have never really cared much about my garden's aesthetics beyond having healthy looking vegetable plants. But after the first frost, all that stuff is gone. Peppers and tomatoes are from South America and basically melt after the first hard freeze, sometimes still with plenty of fruit on the vine because usually by that time of the year I've run out of freezer space or the energy to preserve what's left. My garden turns to mush.

Where I take a walk on a really bleak day and look at some random industrial stuff downriver.

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.