Tuesday, 10/15

What I found (or, actually, didn't find) stunned me.

First of all, hope you had a great (extended) weekend. I did, even though it was the first truly “Fall” weekend in Marquette this year and, as such, I didn't quite know how to handle it. But what with it being cold & rainy means I had the opportunity to get some work done, and when it was getting said work done that I made my discovery.

Or, depending upon how you look at it, my lack of discovery.

Let me explain—I was putting together my “Life in the 906” for Monday and, as I seem to do every week, spent almost as much time looking for pictures to go along with it than I do writing. That was really the case this weekend as I was looking for a picture of Lake Superior—just the lake, and nothing else—to illustrate a point I was making.

Now, I've been taking pictures with digital cameras for over 20 years, I have tens of thousands of shots on my laptop, and you think I'd have one—just one—of the lake, and nothing man-made in front of, on, or near the water. But you know what?

You'd be wrong.

It actually did blow my mind. I spend summer afternoons just wandering around Marquette shooting pictures. Many of those wanderings take me right by the lake, but not once—not once—did I ever take a picture of just the water, with nothing else in the shot to show humans were around. This, in fact, was the closest I got--

And even then, if you look in the trees, you'll see the tops of several houses and a few power lines. And since I needed a shot that had NO sign of human habitation, I was almost resigned to walking down to the lake in the cold rain and taking, for the first time (apparently) in two decades, a shot of water and nothing but water.

Luckily, Loraine looked through her accumulated photos, and found this--

Thanks to her I was spared having to go out in the rain, and it's the shot I ended up using last night. But it just blows my mind that in over 20 years I have yet to take a picture of just the lake, and nothing else. Here, I thought I had taken every conceivable picture there was to take in Marquette.

But, as is often the case. I was wrong. Guess I now know what I get to do on the next nice day I go out for a wander with my camera in hand, huh?

(jim@wmqt.com)