Brogan Road, Stockbridge MI

August 03, 2018

Motorcycle Mornings

Early to bed, early to ride!

A continuing series of early morning roadside photographs taken from the saddle of a 1976 R90/6 BMW motorcycle.

Beginning in 2018, one morning each week, from dawn until just after sunrise, Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend. Rural landscape photographs of and around Jackson County MI. All photos were shot using a Canon prime 35mm lens.

* Click "Next” at the bottom of the page to scroll though the pages for earlier dated photos.

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Drifting into the heavy chill of a dark and tranquil rural morning, unattached and uncertain, the clarity of solitude breeds intense focus. The hum and faint tappet ticking of the old boxer engine and hissing of wind become white noise. I breathe in everything - grass, gravel, corn, manure, a smoldering fire. Free to follow any road I choose, I glide beside lakes and ponds, between pines and oaks and maples. I sluggishly ramble over gravel lanes, and push cautiously through advection fog. Temperature and moisture — ever changing. Opossum and deer, coons and rabbits, scamper and leap from the tall roadside brush, fueling my disquietude. My eyes, hands, and feet work in harmony: scanning, shifting, braking, accelerating - and always anticipating. With my canon around me like a bandolier, I hope for a setting that beckons me to the shoulder to be framed and captured forevermore with a click of a shutter.

As civil dawn shifts into sunrise, any lingering trepidation surrenders to pure exhilaration. A zen-like state settles on my shoulders, and both mind and body slip into a new morning, immersed in it, in total harmony.

My vessel. A 1976 BMW R90/6