Todd Reed: 50 Years Seeing Michigan Through a Lens

Dream Voyage

Rainbow covering Ludington Lighthouse. The Gold was definitely at the end of this Rainbow.

Little Sable Lighthouse

My local knowledge of good locations to photograph a sunrise at Ludington State Park paid off on this April morning. I had only to adjust my camera position laterally by a few feet to align a gap in the trees on the Island Trail with the sun. Nature did the rest.

A smartly flemished line finished off the squared-away appearance of a six-man Coast Guard rowing surfboat housed in the VanOort U.S. Coast Guard Boathouse at the Michigan Maritime Museum. The craft is part of an exhibit featuring the nation’s only complete and restored collection of the last three types of wooden rescue craft used by the Coast Guard.

A boat ride on a tranquil summer evening has always been one of the finest life experiences. During one of my Lake Michigan sunset cruise/photo excursions on my trusty 13-foot Boston Whaler, this classic-looking runabout passed by as I was waiting for the carferry Badger to leave port. The beautiful watercraft reminded me of my childhood days aboard a classic wood speedboat.

Small but mighty, the Coast Guard Cutter Raritan towed the carferry City of Midland into Ludington harbor. The 100-foot tug and the Coast Guard Icebreaker Mackinaw had come to the assistance of the carferries Spartan and City of Midland after the ships became lodged in the ice just outside of Ludington breakwaters in February 18, 1977. The ice, packed tight by the wind, had damaged the rudder of the Midland.

Mute swans are not native to Michigan and have made themselves unpopular with many naturalists in recent years, partially due to their interference with other native species of waterfowl. From my standpoint, I understand efforts to reduce their population. At the same time, I love seeing splendid mute swans like this one I photographed on Lincoln Lake in 2017.

It strikes me while I am being stunned by a wintery view of Kinney Creek near Branch that the late great Fred Picker would have loved to have been able to photograph and make black and white prints of this winter scene. Fred was one of the world's grand masters of black and white printing. As much as I love black and white photography, I have chosen to render the scene in color because I think the golden water and green lichen and other hints of green complement the otherwise monochromatic scene and emphasize the stream.

Wind contorts my face, waves roar and crash just short of the feet of my tripod, sun gleams and dances across the water, clouds paint the sky. I am in my glory. This is as good as it gets for a Lake Michigan photographer. These are the days I dream about and rarely experience. This mid-September day of 2001 on the Ludington waterfront was one of the best moments of my life. My camera recorded it so I and others can experience it again and again.

Each fall I look forward to trying to be at my favorite Michigan Lower Peninsula fall color vista during peak color. My wife, Debbie, and I timed it well when we chose the morning of October 12 to make our 2020 visit to the Buckley Rollway. I love the birds-eye, above-the-treetops view from the lookout of the forest land and winding Manistee River.

When the ice on the Great Lakes started impeding shipping, Coast Guard icebreakers bust open paths. On this ice-cold February morning the Coast Guard Cutter Biscayne Bay broke up the ice in Ludington harbor.

When the quality of light is this extraordinary at Big Sable Point Lighthouse, I have come to realize how breathtaking and beautiful everything looks compared to more ordinary days. I still like the more ordinary days, but I crave mornings like this one!

The first two weeks of October are a glorious time of year along the Lake Michigan shoreline. For several decades, I have told my photography students more often than they want to hear, “Clouds are your friends.” Early October is a great time to experience sunshine, fresh breeze and crisp, clear air painted with billowy clouds. When these conditions exist, the dune grasses and beaches appear most alive, and so do I! I visualized this image months before making it about 2001 when we lived near Lake Michigan at Crosswinds south of Ludington. My beloved Labrador retriever Beamer and I passed this spot during our daily hikes through the dunes to and from the beach. For several months, this particular stand of dune grass stood out to me from hundreds of others. I wouldn’t let Beamer go near it because I knew it had the makings of a great image; I imagined what the scene would look like in the sharp “magic light” of October. One early October morning, as Beamer and I were passing by this special spot, there it was! Mother Nature had brought all the ingredients together. All I had to do was turn around and take Beamer back home, grab my Nikon F100 and tripod and finish making the photograph. Since I had the image designed in my mind for months, all that was left to do now was fine-tune it artistically and nail it technically. That meant applying years of experience to make certain I made a perfect exposure on the Fuji Velvia transparency film I was using at the time. Almost two decades later, this image remains one of my favorite lakeshore images because it is so experiential for me and others. Brad and I say good photography is all about feeling. I can touch, taste and smell this image. I think a lot of other people feel the same way. The image puts me there; it puts others there.

The day was November 10, 1975. It was—and still is—the roughest I have seen Lake Michigan. I was amazed by the 20- to 30-foot waves slamming into the Ludington lighthouse. The roiling sea engulfed the breakwater. Hurricane-force winds made it nearly impossible to stand up. I braced myself against a tree and held the camera as still as I could. Sand blasted me and my Nikon camera. Of course, I could not know that within a few hours, the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald would succumb on Lake Superior to what meteorologists would later describe as the “Perfect Great Lakes Storm.” What I did know without a doubt was this was the fiercest storm to hit the Ludington area shoreline since the Armistice Day Storm of 1940. I knew this storm was more than a match for even the mighty self-righting 44-foot Coast Guard motor lifeboat at Coast Guard Station Ludington. Thank God my shipmates there didn’t have to try to go out that day. The barometer dropped to the second-lowest level ever recorded in Ludington. Even the waves inside the Ludington pierheads appeared mountainous. The breakwater leading to the lighthouse was not even visible because the waves rolling over it were so large and storm surge so great. The waves were so big inside the harbor it was impossible to discern where the submerged breakwater was. This was a day for the history books. It was not the only big story I covered that day as a reporter and photographer for the Ludington Daily News. I had been sent earlier that day to a farm an hour away near Chase, Michigan, where a group of farmers herded their dairy cattle into a massive pit excavated in the middle of a farm field. The farmers surrounded the pit and shot and killed dozens of the cattle to draw national attention to the fact that their cattle and some farm family members were being poisoned by PBB that had been accidentally mixed into cattle feed they had purchased. The slaughter was a gruesome undertaking, carried out in pouring rain. I drove soaking wet back to Ludington. Upon reaching downtown Ludington, just before turning off Ludington Avenue onto Rath Avenue, where the newspaper was located, I could see the mountainous waves on Lake Michigan a half mile west of my location. I didn’t make the turn. Instead I drove straight to the west end of Ludington Avenue, jumped out of my Ford Bronco and began photographing the greatest Great Lakes storm I had ever witnessed. After a half-hour or so, I was too numb to shoot anymore. Incredibly, when I crawled back in my vehicle, I realized the hurricane force wind had blown all my wet clothing dry. I headed straight to the Daily News because I couldn’t wait to develop the 400 ASA Kodak Tri-X black and white film containing my storm shots. I was not anxious to see the cow-killing shots. Give me a great storm to photograph any day!

Pentwater Morning - Panoramic