Photographer focuses national attention on Reeds Lake

Photographer focuses national attention on Reeds Lake

EDITOR’S NOTE: For the sake of full disclosure, News 8’s Ken Kolker and the subject of this report, photographer Steve Jessmore, have known each other more than 40 years. They worked at The Saginaw News together in the 1980s.

EAST GRAND RAPIDS — Photojournalist Steve Jessmore figures he and his camera have spent 225 mornings on the boardwalk that leads out onto Reeds Lake, a lake flanked by million-dollar homes and around the corner from a Starbucks.

“Just trying to tell kind of a four seasons story of Reeds Lake,” Jessmore said Tuesday as he crunched across the ice-covered boardwalk.

Now, some of the images he’s taken around the lake over more than four years, mostly of birds, are getting national attention in the on-line Audubon Magazine.

A first-place win in the National Audubon Society photo contest in 2021 led the Friends of the East Grand Rapids Library to commission him to focus on the nature of Reeds Lake.

He discovered the boardwalk on the west side of the lake on his first day out.

“I thought while I was out here that first day what a great story this would be,” he said. “This is tremendously accessible, anybody can be out here. It’s flat, you can come out in a wheelchair, you can come out 9 (with) a baby carriage.”

Jessmore, 66, spent 35 years as a newspaper photographer, until newspapers started dying, then shot for universities, some of it as a freelancer. But in 2020, his freelance work fizzled under COVID 19. His wife suggested nature photography..

That led him onto a kayak on the Torch River. Pre-dawn.

“Ducks were kind of flying over my head, and I couldn’t get a picture of them.”

As a photojournalist, he knew he couldn’t return without the assigned picture.

“I literally said, Game on.’ I can remember, this is what my purpose is, trying to get pictures of these flying things in the dark.”

Within a year, he’d won first place and honorable mention in the professional division of the National Audubon Society’s national photography contest.

And, that’s what led him to Reeds Lake, where figures he’s taken a half-million photographs.

Half-million and one, as of Tuesday.

He turned and aimed his 600-mm lens. “Bald eagle,” he said. “Not a very good picture, but it was a bald eagle.”

“Look at the sunrise,” he pointed. “It’s just gorgeous. Every morning’s different.”

He said he still considers himself a photojournalist, that he doesn’t set out bait, doesn’t flush birds to get them to fly.

“I just kind of sit and wait and watch,” he said. “Let ’em do their thing.”

Which is what led to his trademark name: Birds Doing Stuff.

He rattles off some of the birds he’s photographed at the lake: great-horned owls, hawks, merlins (which are small falcons), wood ducks, mergansers, loons, tundra swans.

“So, there’s mergansers out there right now,” he said as his camera clicked.

“I saw a flock of tundra swans one morning, hundreds of tundra swans lifting off the lake. I’ve seen bald eagles almost every morning out here. It’s the sort of thing you’d think you’d only see in the wild. But it’s the wild right inside of our city.”

He said his work has a higher purpose, which is the purpose behind the Audubon project.

“If we all learn to appreciate and save what’s close to home, if we do it here in Grand Rapids and East Grand Rapids, if somebody else does it over in Hudsonville, if we all do it, the world gets saved.”

At the end of the boardwalk Tuesday morning, the rising sun reflected off the ice.

“See that bird out there on the ice? See those two birds? Pretty sure they might be bald eagles. They are. There’s two bald eagles just standing over there.”

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