July 2025: Flaming Skull

 

Posting early this month because I am going to be unavailable to do so later.  

This looks worse than it is, don't worry. It is a papier-mache Halloween decoration. Some wasps had begun nesting in it, and since I am very allergic to wasp venom I condemned the structure and evicted them. :)
Never one to pass up a chance at a fun photo, I grabbed a camera first. Glad I did, this is really creepy!  Not your typical 4th of July BBQ, that is for sure! 

When I was shooting this I was remeinded fo the Photo Challenge I did back in 2016, when I photographed a skull a day for an entire month, which you can see beginning here: https://jondersonphotography.blogspot.com/2016/06/june-photo-challenge-intro-and-entry-1.html 
When you get there, just click on "newer" to go to the next entry in the series.
That was a fun challenge, and I should do another one coming up here later this summer or early fall perhaps. I will have to think of a fun subject for it though.

Lots of exciting things coming up this month for us here, hopefully you will get outside and enjoy the summer too!

June 2025: Robin Chick in the Nest

Spring is the time for newness, and birth, in the natural world. Leaves emerge, flowers bloom, and new animals appear on the scene. Change happens year round, but spring always offers newness, and with it new opportunities.

This robin's eyes are closed, it has no idea what lies ahead for it, but it is eager to take in whatever life has to offer...good or bad.  An excellent approach to life in my opinion, although I no longer lead with my face as it is doing.  One of the benefits of age is wisdom. :)

As the summer approaches and the weather warms, take the opportunity to get outside and enjoy what nature has to offer you wherever you are. Even in your own back yard, amazing things are happening if you take the time to look carefully. 

May 2025: Abandoned Church

 This month we have a very striking-looking abandoned church, which was built in 1888. There is a companion one-room schoolhouse across the street, built in 1907, but it is nowhere near as photogenic as this church as it was still being used into the early 1970s and so had been kept up until then.

Rural America is dotted with structures just like this one, remnants of history, anchor points to a very different age. Though different, it is still an age whose structures have lessons to teach us about ourselves even today, though the doors are shut and the windows shattered. It is one of the reasons I have enjoyed shooting abandoned places for the past several years. The past, even though it is over, is still very much alive and part of our world, and can be learned from just as readily as one can learn from a present day classroom (or online!) lecture. It is a shame to overlook these lessons, and in many cases we do so at our own peril as a civilization. 

March 2025: Waiting for Warmth

 

Here is a shot from a couple years ago which I have not released anywhere else. It is another shot from my Traverse City State Hospital archive, depicting a small room with some impressive pipe fittings and what appears to be a heat register or radiator of some sort. 

I miss shooting here very much, as the angles, textures, colors, and lighting always made me feel like a kid in a candy store. The juxtaposition of that artistic Eden against the narrative of what the place actually was...an asylum...never ceased to carry a tremendous impact for me. The parallels and imagery were unavoidable and in your face all the time. The beauty and complexity of the pipe fittings and of the human mind, both broken and now fallen into disuse yet still very much visible...the broken heat source amid cold walls while the warm sun blasts through the all-too-often broken window glass...it was a place I could have spent years in and still found new things to capture every day.

I chose this image for this month because while spring is approaching it is still quite cold here, and in some ways I feel like this room...waiting for warmth. Warmth is coming, for both myself and for this room. Spring is just around the corner, and this room is now being renovated and will likely serve as someone's climate-controlled office space (an asylum of a different sort, some would say) in the near future. 

February 2025: The Devil is in the Details

 

An interesting experiment this month with a combination of infra-red photography and simulated reverse tilt-shift effect. Extremely simplified, tilt-shift is a technique used to make a real life scene look like it is a miniature. What I have done here is the opposite. This is a miniature which I have adapted using the same basic visual concepts in reverse to present a miniature as full-sized. The garden shed pictured here in real life is a model which stands only ten inches tall. While the proportions in some of the details give it away, the details themselves are quite intricate and help "sell" the illusion, as does the infra-red effect, which provides an additional sense of visual disorientation unrelated to scale. 

An interesting study in architectural photography, and a great deal of fun to integrate several different techniques which are not normally used together to make this one!

Credit also rightfully is given here to my wonderful and talented wife, who assembled this amazingly detailed model.