If You Walk, the Photo Will Come – One Shot Story

I recently picked up an SMC Asahi-Pentax 100mm f/4 Macro lens to use on my Nikon Zf and headed downtown to try it out. The walk wasn’t especially inspiring. Much of downtown Escanaba is currently torn up for waterline construction, with fences, barricades, and piles of dirt occupying many of the places I normally enjoy photographing.

After more than a decade of carrying a camera around my small hometown, I sometimes wonder if I’ve run out of things to photograph. The buildings haven’t changed much. The streets are familiar. I’ve walked them in every season and under every kind of light. There are days when it feels as though I’ve already made every photograph the town has to offer.

Still, experience has taught me that the solution is usually the same: keep walking.

I eventually found myself near the boatyard. As I wandered along, sunlight caught the top of an old fire hydrant sitting alone in a field. It wasn’t a remarkable subject. But something about the way the light skimmed across the metal caught my attention. The chipped paint, rust, and texture seemed to stand out against the surrounding grass.

I spent a few minutes exploring the hydrant with the Pentax macro lens, moving around it and looking for different angles and learning how to use a macro lens again. What had first appeared to be an ordinary object slowly became more interesting as I paid closer attention.

The photograph reminded me of something I often forget. Interesting pictures don’t always come from interesting places. They don’t require exotic travel or dramatic landscapes. Sometimes they are waiting in the most ordinary corners of our world.

As photographers, we can easily convince ourselves that we’ve exhausted the possibilities around us. Yet every time I think I’ve photographed everything Escanaba has to offer, a small scene like this proves otherwise. Sometimes the photograph doesn’t appear because you found a great location. Sometimes it appears simply because you kept walking.

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