I’ve spent the better part of a decade wandering the edges of the Great Lakes with a camera that’s usually buried somewhere in my bag until the light does something interesting. These landscapes weren’t planned or hunted down — they appeared on their own time. A streak of sun between trees while heading back to the car. A shoreline that looked different than it did the day before. A fog so thick it felt like walking inside a forgotten thought.
Sunset bleeding into the surface of the lake.
A dock holding its breath before morning.
Fog swallowing the end of a pier until it becomes a sentence without a period.
A scrap of blanket on sand still warm from the day.
People shading their eyes toward an unseen horizon — not searching, just wondering.
Umbrellas pitched like small declarations against the wind.
A puddle in a park reflecting more sky than it has any right to.
None of it is extraordinary in the traditional, calendar-ready sense. It’s more like keeping a quiet logbook of the small things the region does when no one’s asking anything of it. A dock half-asleep at dawn. Umbrellas leaning into the wind like old friends. A lone person standing at the water’s edge, hand lifted to shade their eyes, not searching for meaning — just adjusting to the brightness.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate these modest scenes more than the dramatic ones. They don’t demand your attention; they simply exist. Sometimes I’d take a photo because the way the light landed on a patch of sand felt familiar. Other times it was the colour of the sky in a puddle — a whole season distilled into a few centimetres of water.
I’m not sure the images have a grand theme. They’re more like a trail of crumbs marking where I’ve been, what I paused for, what made me stop walking for a moment. A collection of unremarkable moments that turned out to be the ones I remember most.
If these photographs share anything, it’s the sense that the landscape keeps its own rhythm, and occasionally lets you fall into step with it. The camera just happens to be there when it does.
