Getting Unstuck Together
By Michael Bradley
21 February 2007
An abandoned copper mine is probably a really weird place to go on a first date, but that is how it all started. I met a girl with a penchant for abandoned industrial sites to photograph and away we went to Copperhill. My wife Toby, who is a painter, and I have been together for eight years now and we really owe it to photography and a way of practicing and inspiring ourselves that we still continue to do every week. We regularly go on Photo-safaris to destinations known and unknown. If you don't know where to start on your next photo project, take a safari and get inspired. People often ignore what is right in front of them and close at hand. Be a tourist in your own town for a day, go out and shoot pics of what you would take your friends from out of town to see. The common and familiar when approached as a safari target can be inspirational. When you go out and photo together you can feed off each other's energy and perception. I generally focus on the traditional outdoor style while Toby sees the human influence as beautiful. By combining our sight and passion, we both gain from our trips
We now live in small town Tennessee as we can both do our work from anywhere, but we have done this in every place that we have lived from Charleston SC, to Asheville NC, to Chicago IL, to where we are now. Some days it is as random as getting in the car and driving until something catches our eye like the abandoned Concrete Plant in Sherwood TN, or sometimes it is as specific as going to Suck Creek to capture the water and rocks that I am so fond of.
Inspiration is often a difficult thing to find, but the best way is to go seek it. Our photography has drastically improved over the last several years, even through a lack of equipment, by simply shooting often and a lot of shots. My wife is one of the earliest digital converts that I have met, shooting with a Panasonic Prototype Camera that was acquired through some rather gray channels. Battery Life was terrible, Speed was slow, and resolution made a pong game look great, but it was convenient, and easy to shoot a lot of pictures on even an 8 meg card. Composition and an eye for what to shoot get easier and easier if you just keep clicking over time. I have composed some of my favorite images when I least expected to just by being out with camera in hand or at least in car, when the right opportunity presented itself, or was pointed out through a different set of eyes. Things that I would have passed by become some of the best compositions because of outside influence.
Safaris don't have to be long or specific, we often go out and shoot what I call Yard Portraits by walking around our yard and finding ways to compose shots of the intimately familiar into something new. This often leads to a new way of viewing things when we go out on longer safaris and helps us create better and more diverse images.
Some of our favorite places have been Copper Hill Mines, Charleston Naval Base, and Gary Indiana Steel Works. I guess that Urban Exploration Photography is very hot right now with articles in other mags showing up about abandoned asylums, military bases, hospitals, and industrial sites, but to real safariers this is nothing new. We simply wanted to see what we were fenced off from and went in. It is amazing the places that a camera will get you in to, and more importantly out of, if you will just be polite, confident, and careful. We have always had a desire to preserve the modern ruins of society in one way or another. We feel the need to collect, recycle, reinvent, and document the passing of the things that built our society, and that our society built, but are now considered eyesores or wrecks. I am often reminded how disposable our society is by a German friend who tells me that his house is 300 years older than our country.
Safaris are a great way so share your passion, improve your skills, and work through inspirational blocks, as well as meet someone to spend your life with. Grab a friend, lover, significant other, stranger or whatever and go share an adventure in photography, you never know where it might lead.
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