Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: cloverdale

Cloverdale Lake, Cloverdale, Michigan.

Barry County, Michigan.

Cloverdale's a tiny town that's nearly surrounded by lakes--Cloverdale and Long Lakes can be seen from where I took this photo; Guernsey Lake's nearby, a lake called Number 21 (must be a section number) is just over the hill, and Wall and Wilkinson Lakes are just down the way. Dozens of large and small bodies of water are within a five mile radius. Somehow this little hamlet grew a pair of brick houses that could fit comfortably in a crowded city block. They were visibly aging when I first noticed them, and one eventually deteriorated and was knocked down. This one still stands. I call this place the Painted Pony because for a time it housed a shop--probably an antique store--with that name. The building was restored at the same time its neighbor was removed, and is now a very attractive home that overlooks the park (mostly a boat launch) on Cloverdale Lake.

Not my best picture. The light was odd, so it's partly overexposed and partly way too dark. I'm posting the pic because the barn in the photo collapsed a few weeks back, and I want to memorialize it. It's not really relevant to the photo, but forty years ago this stretch of road would flood with very little provocation. Coming around that curve at speed could be an adventure. Yes, I've improved both lighting issues, but I'm not particularly happy with the result.

In one of Colin Fletcher's books he breaks his camera and discovers that not-taking-photographs alters the way he looks at the world. The converse is just as true: If you're shooting photographs every day, eventually everything you look at becomes a photo opportunity, boxed in an imaginary frame. On the whole I consider this an unpleasant side effect.... Cloverdale's a small town, surrounded by lakes, on M-43 in Barry County. (I've told this before, better, here .) The town's been part of my mental geography since the early 1970s, when we lived in nearby Delton; these days it's one of a half-dozen hamlets I pass through travelling between Mulliken and Kalamazoo. Since I'd been driving that route several times a week for the past few months, I'd pretty well scoped out the photo possibilities. So I stopped in the little park on Cloverdale Lake a year ago to capture a few photographs, mostly of the lake and the building I call the Painted Pony . ========== This photograph is an outtake from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps . Number of project photos taken: 9 Title of " roll :" Cloverdale Other photos taken on 10/5/2012: As usual I brought along the Nikon 1, and used it mostly to capture autumn's color ....