Film Photo Diary: Camping on Lake Michigan

Pictures so dreamy they almost make me want to sleep in a tent again

A little background on me and film photography: I bought my first film camera in 2009. It was a 35mm Diana F+ from Lomography that my friend Sam sold me second-hand. We made the transaction in Mrs. Cashiola’s physics class. These were the early days of a new wave of film photography. As millennial teens and young adults, we were entrenched in hipster culture, influenced by movies like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, we worshipped at the altar of Urban Outfitters, and retro was king. The return to analog film photography was obvious, and while many of the aesthetic sensibilities of hipsters came and went.. and came again (rebranded as twee and indie sleeze?), the film photography revival has endured. I never would have guessed that 16 years after acquiring my first film camera that camera companies would be releasing new mass-market film cameras. Just this month Chicago gained a new brick and mortar film lab (Shoutout to Constant Agitation for developing and scanning the photos used in this blogpost). To both my delight and surprise, film photography is thriving.

My single camera has grown into a collection of vintage film cameras, and I’ve picked up and put down my cameras several times, sometimes for years at a time. I really got back into film while living in Tallahassee, Florida. Around 2021, a year or so into my career designing knitting patterns, I made the switch to photographing my work on an old 35mm film SLR instead of my Iphone. This was actually a practical and inexpensive way of producing high quality images for my business without dishing out thousands of dollars for a fancy digital SLR with a good lens. In recent years, I’ve primarily shot my knitting patterns on film, and I’ve had to remind myself that my photography hobby need not be relegated to girl-boss purposes and that it is actually really fun to take pictures just because!

Last month I went on a short camping trip with my best friend and famed Idahoan knitwear designer, Park Williams. This was the perfect chance to dust off a film camera just for fun for the first time in several months. Here’s the camera I brought along:

This is the Yashica Lynx-5000, a 35mm rangefinder produced between 1962-1968. I won’t get too deep into the technical elements of this camera. Due to its age it is a little difficult to focus, but all things considered, it works very well. The results are unpredictable, romantic, dreamy, many shots are heavily vignetted (when the outer portions of the frame are darker and underexposed), and the camera can create hypnotizing swirly bokeh (the blurred background).

I hadn’t camped since Boy Scouts (which I hated and was forced to do as all Mormon boys were). Though I didn’t love it as a kid, I figured it was worth trying again as an adult who loves nature and has a high tolerance for roughing it. Park is a professional camper, thank god. She brought the equipment, expertise, and her unfailing initiative and good attitude. I only have the good attitude and only sometimes at that. As we both love swimming, and summer heat had already firmly been established for the season, we decided on a campground at Warren Dunes, a Michigan state park on the shore of Lake Michigan. We figured even if it was sweltering, we’d survive as long as we could plunge into a cool lake.

When we first showed up and checked in to the campgrounds, we were nearly met with disaster. We had to choose a campsite to book online without really getting to see how it looked. When we pulled up to our reserved spot we were horrified to find it: small, exposed, and sandwiched between two other reserved spots all sharing a single small area. If there’s one thing we need as an extremely in love platonic couple, it’s utmost privacy. Thank god for Park because this is where her initiative really shined, where I would’ve said, “this sucks I guess let’s just be miserable for 2 days,” she said, “oh no, we are going to drive around the entire campground twice and write down every unoccupied spot and give it a star rating based on cuteness and seclusion and then go to the camp office and beg for them to let us switch.” Not only did they let us switch, but our number one choice was available! “Yayyyyy!!!” we literally squealed in unison in front of our allies, the alternative-adjacent midwestern gen-z girls working at the camp office.

Here’s a look at our cute-ass campsite. Made cuter by Park’s fancy girly floral-print tent (Sorry that I called it a Vera Bradley tent lmao). Here I am in my heavy-duty camping chair, knitting a mesh sweater in designer Japanese silk yarn on luxurious solid copper knitting needles, living the good life. And here is Park, cooking up a yummy breakfast in our kitchen.

It was already hot before our camping trip, and of course a heat wave rolled through right as we hit the road. The lake, which felt like ice a mere two weeks prior, had been microwaved to an almost warm 74 degrees. The beach here is beautiful. The lakefront is expansive, white sand beach blends directly into thick forest, and enormous sand dunes frame it all. (Cue the Dune theme song which we did in fact sing every time the dunes entered our view.)

On the day we arrived, after setting up camp and rushing to the beach as quickly as we could, we saw a couple people walking by covered head to toe in sun-baked clay. Skin care on the beach, that’s fun, did they bring a clay mask from home? Within 30-minutes we’d seen no less than 20 clay-covered beach goers. The day was late, but our mission for the next day was clear, and our joke of the night had been established as we rambled, “I have a feeling there might be clay nearby,” “Guys, we know about the clay, do not try to hide it from us, we are going to find it,” “Where the FUCK are they getting all this clay?”, “If I were a patch of Lake Michigan clay, where would I hide? Think like clay,” “There are rumors concerning clay.”

Come the next day we veered off to a far edge of the beach where an opening to the forest produced a little stream wandering into the lake. Typical secret clay hiding spot vibes. After a few steps under the tree canopy we found a single blob of clayish sand muck and excitedly proclaimed “Oh my god is this clay? did we find the clay?!” We picked it up and started rubbing little test patches on our arms. We were immediately suspicious of this “clay” as it was pretty muddy and very sandy and definitely wasn’t drying like the clay masks the other beach goers wore. “Is this it? This doesn’t seem right, it’s definitely clay-y, but..” In our hurt and confusion, a high quality local NPC ran up to us and said, “Sorry to be nosy but I overheard that you’re looking for clay and had to say something. Those little mud blobs you found do have some clay in them, but the really pure stuff that you keep seeing people covered in is about a twenty minute hike into the forest. Just follow this stream until you cross under a bridge and you’ll find huge deposits of pure wild clay.” Honestly at that moment we were like pirates being told the location of precious treasure, we were so ravenous for clay. GOD BLESS this woman who gave up her mysterious clay secrets (apparently the clay patch is ON the park map, something I didn’t ever and still haven’t and won’t ever look at LMAO).

The hike through the forest was so beautiful. I wish I had my camera, but it was for the best I didn’t as it doesn’t have a neck strap and I needed both hands to climb over rocks and logs. After what felt like a LONG hike, and having to ignore the siren song of more and more patches of increasingly pure but still not 100% clay (“omg is this it?!”), we were rewarded by entire banks of thick, clean, smooth, gorgeous and unmistakable clay. We immediately lathered ourselves head-to-toe in the clay, and mused, “should we take some clay back with us to make pottery on the beach?” “Yeah we should, right?” “Yeah totally.” So we began our hike back, two gray swamp creatures with handfuls of clay for our beachside ceramics studio.

As we walked around covered in clay yesterday’s jokes immediately morphed into something even more idiotic and a little evil: “Clay? what clay?”, “We don’t know anything about any clay,” “This is just my skin,” “If there’s one thing I know, it definitely isn’t where to find clay,” speed-running the culture-vulture to gatekeeper transformation. We posted up at our beach spot, let the sun bake us dry, and got to work in the studio where park sculpted an ancient idol of great power, and I made a bowl, a hot dog, and the classic iconography known as dick-and-balls.

Speaking of hot dogs, could any atmosphere intensify the enjoyment of a hot dog more than beachside camping? I think not. On the menu were hot dogs, chips, baked beans, sub sandwiches, chicken chili, plus pancakes, sausage, and eggs for breakfast, with coffee, coke zero, and ghost energy drinks for-to-drink.

While we both loved spending all day at the beach swimming for two days, we were really chasing a cozy vibe for time spent at our actual campsite and due to reality, we were never quite able to catch the vibe. It was hot as hell, there were one million mosquitos, and I had sand in my perineum. We were only planning on spending 2-nights camping, and of course, on night 2, at 3 AM, we were treated to an hours-long torrential downpour. Can you imagine being Park, who woke up and in the dead of night, exited the tent in the rain to cover as many of our belongings in tarp as she could? I can’t. I would’ve let the rain drown me in my sleep if God willed it.

All in all, I had fun, it was nice to chill by the water with my bff plus phone off and out of sight for a few days, but it was also good to get the camping bug out of our systems. Would I do it again? Yeah, unfortunately. I would have said that I’d need some time to recover from this most recent trip, but after getting this film developed, the magic of film photography is burrowing into my brain like a romantic little parasite and convincing me that this camping trip is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life and that every moment was a beautiful tender memory to be cherished and now even remembrances of quarter-sized mosquito welts ON MY FACE are being viewed through an alluring patina of moody vignetting, gold glittering lens flares, and.. clay.