Photos from 20 Years Ago

It’s been 20 years since I moved to Minnesota. It’s hard to sum up that experience in a short article, but I think the typical cliche is to say that it has been a wild ride. I wasn’t expecting to be here this long. I thought that maybe we’d be here five years, and then I’d be able to talk my wife into moving to Maine or Colorado. For this issue, we’re going to look back in time to 20 years ago.

In July of 2004, I took a solo canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. At the time, I had no idea that I’d be moving to Grand Marais. I had quit my job in corporate retail management and didn’t have any real plans other than move where my now wife but then girlfriend got a teaching job. That summer she was working for the Minnesota Conservation Corps as an instructor.

From that Boundary Waters trip, this is the only photo that I really like anymore. I think this was from Lake One. I believe the trip started on Hog Creek to Bald Eagle, and then up to Lake One. From there I paddled back to Kawishiwi Lake and walked to get my car.

After that trip, I camped for a night in the Grand Marais campground, and the fog horn’s deep warning blasted the entire night. In the morning, this is what I looked like. I didn’t know when I’d be back, but to my surprise, my partner got a job teaching in Grand Marais. By August we were back in town living in our cars, a hotel, a tent, or a cabin without any running water and sketchy power. It was several months of that until we managed to find a house to rent. That house was so bad that in the winter during snowstorms, snow would come into the windows and land on our bed.

It’s interesting to me to have these images from 20 years ago, because it seems like 20 years is a mile marker. It’s two decades. Over that time, you can notice changes. We seldom notice those things that remain the same, such as the Hjordis, which is the ship that sails out of the North House Folk School. It was a fixture of the harbor then as much as it is now.

I remember wondering why a pirate ship was sailing in and out of the harbor.

While I had been doing photography since high school, looking back I wasn’t that great at it. I always had it in the back of my mind since high school that maybe photography would someday by my job. I didn’t really have a job in Grand Marais when we first moved here, and people were suggesting that due to my park law enforcement background that I should apply for the Border Patrol. I thought it would be a good time to try and see if I could make a living through photography.

This was the first photo that I sold a lot of prints of.

I actually hated it. I almost deleted it until my partner told me to save it and put it on my website. I don’t know how people found my website back then — there wasn’t any social media to speak of — but I sold many copies of this shot.

While I loved being around Lake Superior, it wasn’t until November when I figured out that I love photographing Lake Superior. I was shooting a Nikon D70 for digital. I had several film cameras, but my favorite was the Nikon FM3a. The D70 had beautiful colors. I’m not sure that Nikon has made a camera since then that has had a pretty of reds as the D70. Or maybe I’m just seeing the photos through rose-colored glasses.

I loved the first winter in Grand Marais. We got lots of snow. I was amazing. I couldn’t believe it, and the colder temps than I was used to just made everything seem a bit better. I was hooked.

As I’ve been deleting 1,000 photos each day over the last month, I’ve found a lot of photos that strictly from a quality or landscape standpoint aren’t that good. But from a memory and documentary standpoint are worth keeping. They also work as a reference photo to track by progress as a photographer. During that first winter, I took the following photo from a spot that I’ve photographed many times since then.

It’s hard to believe that I’m still taking that same photo 20 years later. Here it again more recently. It’s almost the same composition as the above photo that I took 20 years ago.

Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed my reminiscing about 20 years in Grand Marais and looking back at my first year in the area. I really has been a wild ride. Twenty years ago, I would have never guessed that I’d be teaching photography workshops for a living and that my workshops would fill almost a full year ahead. I have a total of 5 spaces left on my in-person workshops for next year. I still have about a dozen spaces left on my new Master PhotoPills Online Class. I just opened up a second session in January because the December one filled. You can register by clicking this link.

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