Brown Swiss

WIKIPEDIA: Famous Brown Swiss:
Hoosier Knoll Jade Monay Set a new bench mark for udder quality when she won Supreme Champion in 1994. When she was classified, the udder was scored E-96 which is still one of the highest scores ever obtained for udder quality by a Brown Swiss. Recently Monay was awarded the distinction of being the All Time All-American 3 Year Old for the Swiss Breed.
Old Mill E Snickerdoodle is considered by many as one of the best Brown Swiss to ever walk across the show ring. She was undefeated from her first show in 2003 up until the World Dairy Expo in 2007. She currently sets a record across all breeds for most consecutively won classes at Harrisburg and the World Dairy Expo.
Jane of Vernon "Almost all Brown Swiss today trace to this magnificent cow who lived from 1929 to 1945. She garnered Grand Champion honors at national Brown Swiss shows in 1932, 1933, 1934, and 1936. Jane of Vernon was bred by the late Orbec Sherry of Viroqua, Wisconsin."[1]

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Though the title of this photograph nods toward Kuener Farm and Andrew Wyeth's painting of the same name, the scene has shifted from Chadds Ford to Twin Elm Farm in the Oblong. Beyond sharing a common title, this image has nothing in common with Wyeth's painting.

The main herd at Twin Elm are beef cattle. They roam most of the hillside above the barns and cover considerable territory. They are a mix of breeds including some Brown Swiss. When I'm in the fields with them they are a curious bunch who will watch me closely and then walk over to see who's trespassing in their pastures, and sometimes when I'm out there taking pictures, they'll sneak up on me, and I won't know they're there until I feel one breathing behind me. When I turn, however, they jump away. I take comfort in knowing they are more afraid of me than I of them... not too much comfort.

This photo, however, is of one of the dairy ladies. There's only a handful of them (What a concept! They can easily weigh a ton each.) They are all Brown Swiss, and their personalities are entirely different. They'll stand and watch me with their sad, brown eyes and their large, furry ears, and when I walk toward them, they'll let me pat their necks. They are slow, gentle giants. Brown Swiss have a reputation for their sweet disposition and docile nature. It is well earned. Even among the beef herd, the Brown Swiss steers, although the largest animals in the herd, are the least threatening.

Then again, all cows spend 6 hours a day eating and eight hours a day chewing cud, but I was warned that some of the bulls may not have been properly castrated.

For more on these cows visit: Autumn Cow in Retrospect

Pretty Lily

JOHN LOENGARD: "A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I plead, guilty as charged, but I couldn't resist. More adventurous efforts coming soon.

Orbits

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Before leaving Chadds Ford, let's make a brief stop at Longwood Gardens as Gary and I did on both visits. It has greatly enlarged my concept of water lilies. These are not the innocent lilies of Connecticut woodland ponds that are from birth beset by lilivores of all shapes and sizes. They are invadors from another universe, armored and armed. What horny beetle or sucking slug challenges their ramparts? What evanescent visitor sips their honeyed nectar? What are his stingers like?

I wish I'd had a moment to reset my aperture to sharpen the foreground thorns, but by the time I made the adjustment, the rings had disappeared from the back. I must investigate if similar displays are at the Bronx Botanical Gardens or anywhere in my orbit.

Barncat (Sophie) with Spring House & Kuerner Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Thoughts while watching Sophie:

I leave it to others to advise me if this photo was worth the effort it took to bring it to fruition. It is another case of light that entices the eye but defies the lens with extremes of bright and dark. One sign of the stress is the extreme graininess of some sections.

Making it, required an HDR composite of four different exposures. However, the center of the HDR lacked clarity. It is a picture within a picture and needs a level of realism beyond Sophie's grainy, barn world. In order to preserve the clarity in the center picture I inlaid a segment from one of the original exposures. If one zooms in very close one may spot some of the Frankenstein-like sutures. That's a lot of touch-up work, and I'm not sure the whole thing is worth it, but I do love it when light starts playing with windows and windows start playing with light. I should have photographed more in that corner and at the shed just across the farmyard.

I know some will object to the intrusion of Rubbermaid. Oh, and the spring house! I had passed here on my way out 40 minutes earlier when the sun fell beautifully on its end gable. I didn't shoot it then as I was heading to another possible shot. The other shot was worthless, but now I'd like to know what images might have been prompted by that other lighting. Have I missed a better moment? One never likes to admit such things. Choices!

American Gothic

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Cobweb

Tightrope of time
Transforming idle barns.
Who is it that strung them there?
Who patrolled those wires
Before they got soiled and gray with age?
Before new lines were strung.

They age and gray
Until they grow plush
And the rafters are webbed,
And the joists cocooned.
Time's tightropes
Layer to downy forgetfulness.

Belly of the Beast, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This was taken earlier in the morning looking down from the third floor. I had just returned from a tour with Karl, our host. He wanted to take us into a section of the barn we had not yet entered. An addition to the barn along the southern wall includes the famous room that is the subject of "Spring Fed." It is the bottom floor dug into the bank to which Karl Sr. cleverly diverted a natural spring.  It had been the first section of the barn Gary and I had entered, and both of us had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to photograph our own "Spring Fed."  Now Karl led us to a storage space above the spring room, a shed addition leaning against the south wall of the great barn.

Even with the doors to this space open it was too dark to photograph. To make matters worse, the siding was rustic and had large gaps between the boards. The bright sun projected black stripes everywhere. The south wall was alternate shadow and glare. The light, such as it was, blinded rather than illuminated. Karl led us through the space with pride as, one by one, he pulled back covers on beautiful, old, horse-drawn sleds and explained how each had been carefully restored. Winter sleigh rides! I've always thought it must have been wonderful to glide through the snow, pulled along by a strong horse as in Welles' Magnificent Ambersons.

When I asked about sleigh rides, Karl showed us a photo of himself and Andy riding in such a sleigh.  It was an event he seemed to take in stride except for the presence of Andy. A sleigh ride with Andrew Wyeth!

Sleigh rides are gone, and hay rides aren't really hay rides as they must have been once. If both lasted longer here, that may not be bad. I recall that there was little modernization while Karl Sr. was alive. Long after tractors and balers were common everywhere producing hard, little rectangles of crushed hay, Kuerner Farm still processed hay loose from the field, forking it onto the hay wagons in a heap. It was significantly more work haying that way, but back then the hay rides must have been a lot more fun.

Oh Hayloft Where the Cobwebs Cling

ANDREW WYETH: "My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom of so-called free and accidental brushwork . . . Not to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it; and make it rightfully the hand-maiden of beauty, power and emotional content."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Later in the afternoon I'm following the light beam from the gable window into a new quadrant of the barn where it is lighting some webs. Karl the host is working there. I watch. He is excavating bales from the back of a shaft that leads through the hay to near where my beam is falling. He has a small hand cart and is calmly loading bales and shuttling them to a new location in the shadows at the other side of the barn. He works slowly but steadily. There is no way for both of us to work in the shaftway at the same time. I watch some more. Can I get in as he leaves, make my three exposures, and get out before he's back for more bales?

I watch him leave - he has a half dozen bales precariously balanced - and then slip into the shaft where there is scant room for me and my tripod. To get my angle I'm squeezed against the hay bales, and I feel the dust and grit slipping into my shirt collar. The shaft has the feel of a catacomb, and I understand why Karl wears a face mask as he works. I set my tripod as I listen for Karl's approaching footsteps and the grumble of his cart. I must make three exposures without moving the camera. The composition is fussy and I struggle with the tripod to get the lens into position. I hurry. Haste makes waste. I do the longest exposure first, two long minutes. Two minutes of grit down my collar. Two minutes through which I keep listening and doing my best not to move. Then exposure two, thirty seconds. If I can get this one done, the last is only 8 seconds, and I'm at it, and it's done.

I'm already gathering my tripod and camera before I hear the grumbling wheels and the reply of the floor boards in the next room, and I hurry out of the shaft. In three more intervals, while Karl ferries hay, I complete two more sets, compositional variations.

Hayloft

ANDREW WYETH: "I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Karl Kuerner, known as Karl J. Kuerner III, met us Monday morning at the barn. I was glad to see him again. He is the grandson of Karl Kuerner, Sr., Andrew Wyeth's first, and arguably most important, muse.  Karl J., was there to feed animals and take care of morning chores. The barn was dark inside, and he helped us open whatever could be opened to let in light, and sometime early mid-morning was gone. He is an artist, and we'd hoped to stop by his studio to see what he was at work on, but a bad cold kept me away. 

Sometime later in the morning another man arrived and began shutting up the doors. He was somewhere in his eighties, a bit unsteady yet fit. It took awhile to explain that I was photographing the barns and needed to keep the doors open for the light. I explained we might be shooting for awhile, and tried to make clear "awhile" might be measured in multiple hours, not minutes. He was as hard of hearing as I am but had no aids; it took awhile to find the right wave length for communication, and I wasn't sure if we ever completely found it. When he left he said he'd be back later to close up; he was worried about children falling through the open hatches where hay was tossed.  So was I and also worried about me falling through a hatch or Gary, and the man's concern doubled my caution. 

He moved further into the barn and had a similar conversation with Gary, and I returned to shooting, a bit guilty that I might have rushed him on to get back to my image. It was perhaps a half hour later when he appeared with a book to show me, and I instantly realized my mistake.  The book was the book I'd bought at the Brandywine Museum on my last visit, the book of Karl J. Kuerner's paintings. This man was Karl Jr., the proud father of the artist and the proud son of the muse, here for his chores. Do I recall Karl the grandson saying his dad still ran the farm, did the haying? We were pleased to discover he would pose for us.  This was Karl Jr., our host.

The Belly of the Beast

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In mid-October I met my friend Gary in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, for a repeat visit to the Kuerner Farm, made famous in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. This visit I was not so focused on Wyeth's example as on this great space. In the spring, when we were here last, Karl Kuerner's hay barn was nearly empty. Although far from full now, at the end of the season, this much hay changes everything. Passages that were open are now blocked with hay, and it took a while to orient myself, but it also made the spaces more interesting.

The barn is divided into thirds. The thirds on the two ends are for hay storage. The center third is a core for access to the hay. One enters the barn along the broad side at the back. Hay wagons can be pulled or pushed up the ramp and into the barn on the third floor, adjacent to the hay storage bays on either side that are clear space from bottom to top. From the center section of the third floor hay bales can be tossed to the floor of those bays below and eventually stacked to the top of the gable. That's three "flights" of hay. At the back of the barn, beneath the ramp one can enter the the second floor of the barn through a kind of loading dock. The second floor is the bottom of the hay storage. Chutes allow hay and grain to be passed down to the first floor where animals were kept in the winter. Alternately, hay can be taken to the loading dock, loaded on wagons, and delivered to field or dropped through doors at the front of the barn to the farmyard below. At one time the barn would have been full of hay in October, but now the season's hay doesn't quite fill to the top of the second floor.

At 10:20 AM, when I took this, the light coming through the gable window on the southeast side of the barn reached almost to the front of the barn. Gary and I spent a good part of the day following that beam of light as it moved east across walls, floor, and hay while the sun moved west.

Yellow Tree

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: All that glitters is not reflection. There is no beaten path through this valley which runs for about 5 miles to the Housatonic. The busiest residents are the beavers who continually re-engineer the water's flow.

The prevailing grain of hills in northwest Connecticut and nearby New York state is north-south in row after row, but here and for about ten miles around, by some freak of nature, the hills are skewed more east-west,; this valley bends along the path of the sun allowing me to catch this revealing side light.

Even so, finding places to photograph the resulting ponds and swamps is not always easy. A road passes on the south of this swamp, but even there the shrubs at the perimeter constrict shooting angles. I'd circled this area unsuccessfully several times looking for a place to shoot, but found this angle unexpectedly while walking the pastures around White Farm. It's a spot worth remembering.

The Old Lake Road

E. H. GOMBRICH: "The photographic enthusiast likes to lure us into a darkened room in order to display his slides on a silver screen. Aided by the adaptability of the eye and by the borrowed light from the intense projector bulb, he can achieve those relationships in brightness that will make us dutifully admire the wonderful autumn tints he photographed on his latest trip. As soon as we look at a print of these photographs by day, the light seems to go out of them. It is one of the miracles of art that the same does not happen there. The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A few year's back, in the 1700s, this was Waramaug's Lake, the place where he and his Wyantenock tribe lived and hunted and fished in the summer and from which he ruled much of this part of Connecticut. When the trees were like this he was already thinking of his winter hunting grounds south of here, near a gorge and a waterfall in the Housatonic River. Here, where we find rustic beauty and the vitality of nature, he might despair at how beaten down and limp all nature seems. There, in the broad valley below the gorge, Waramaug's winter hunting grounds, where the Housatonic River once rushed, he would be surprised to find a long, deep lake with steep walls and a hydro-electric plant where eagles nest.

Waramaug sold his summer hunting grounds, including the lake in 1703. The first Yankee's built farms and their children built guest houses and inns, and today real estate developers, water conservationists and land preservationists debate the future.

In spite of that, this image asks us to linger. The fall here is at its perfect peak and under perfect light and perfect wind; a coincidence to delight a photographer's heart? In fact, not so. Again the eye is not like the camera lens and it took three images to get detail in both sky and road. Without a computer even Ansel Adams, I think, could not have coaxed clean detail from this old road.

A previous generation of photographers found their expression in the very limits of the technology they used. Today, the power of the home computer asks every photographer to decide where to set limits and may render moot Mr. Gombrich's comments. Although I needed technology to get the road to read more as my eye saw it, the color on the opposite shore needed no help from me. Yet any knowledgeable Photoshop user might wonder if I pushed the saturation. No, that's exactly as I and the camera saw it.

In Search of Edvard Munch

TERRY FENTON: "Modern painters have inclined to an art that appeals directly to feeling apart from representation with its inevitable overtones, distractions, and prejudice. Of course, representation couldn't be abandoned overnight and much of value stood to be lost in the process. It was abandoned in stages and often with reluctance and regret. Artists didn't pursue abstraction for the sake of the abstruse. Far from it. They were driven to it as a kind of last resort. It was a kind of necessary purging for the sake of a deep and fundamental universality, one that was part and parcel of painting itself."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The primary aim of the photojournalist or the portrait photographer or the naturalist is usually representation, often artfully done, but getting the representation right is the essential thing. Art, however, lies in the realm of expression. Without wanting to get any further into the question of what is art, the photographer who chooses expression as his or her primary aim is immediately confronted by a medium that clings to representation and in which representation often comes to dominate. The spectator who asks, "What's that?" of an abstract painting fears he's being tricked. The one who asks it of an abstract photo feels cheated.

I'm recently back from the Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, PA, the farm Andrew Wyeth made famous. Wyeth was interested in this issue, and I can never follow his footsteps without thinking about it. Seeing the way he treated real nature is instructive, but there is an essential difference between photographer and painter. Whether the painter is Wyeth, Vermeer or Fragonard seeking to represent some physical reality in the external world, or Turner or Kandinsky or Pollock working in a realm where representation is obscured, they all begin with distinctive ways of laying color onto a surface. A painter with any degree of facility begins expression the moment s/he applies paint to the art surface or draws a line. It's right there in the medium. A finely controlled physical act driven by the coordinated effort of mind and muscle is a primary element of the painter's expression. There need not even be a real scene. Similarly the manner in which a violinist touches bow to string asserts the violinist's expression. It is highly relevant to the art of both that muscles and emotions are so deeply linked. To whatever degree artist or violinist is facile, expression emerges naturally from the physical act of creation.

In contrast, a photographer begins with the things that lie in front of his lens. Where is the point of combustion between the expressive photographer and the lines and forms photographed? Where does physical engagement take place? Is it in the dance I do to juxtapose elements and set boundaries? Is it in that corner of my eye where sometimes something clicks? Or is there nothing analogous to brush and bow to connect my expression to the forms I use?

Furthermore, without the painter's brush the canvas is blank. If there is no violin there is no music, but the landscape I photograph often makes its own music without me, expressive in itself; a swooping heron, a bank of lilies, a rock formation in the desert, a Grecian urn all sing their own songs. While the thing I photograph must be central to what I express, how is its expression related to mine?

And what alteration is it that transforms a postcard image into expressive statement? On the back of the postcard one often writes, "Wish you were here." The postcard is a second-hand and second-best experience. To be expressive, a photograph must become a thing in itself apart from what it represents, independent though reliant on the moment that triggered it. It must catch something specific yet universal, maybe just a quiver of sensation or perhaps a deep resonant chord, and it must isolate it. Is this the goal that the photographer seeking expression should strive for?

This image was photographed late on Monday. The sun was slipping below the hill, and the filtered light and lonely shadows added a note of disquiet to the quickly changing scene. That note is caught also in the rock jetty that juts violently across this finger at the end of the lake.

Autumn Detonation

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is not just that large, still lakes are hard to find, but that their seductive prettiness poses photographic challenges. As one correspondent wrote recently, "...usually the bilateral mirroring effect is corny...." The problems: Opportunities for cliché are everywhere. How does one avoid it? Composition is also difficult. Where does one put the edges of the image, especially with a long, recumbent shoreline that defies punctuation? Finally, there is that prettiness itself that expresses omnipresent stillness with visceral clarity. Motionless air, air at its most impalpable, is made palpable. It is a phenomenon so expressive that any photograph must be a runner-up to the real event. The photographer trembles at the responsibility of somehow giving that stillness a point of view, an angle, a barb - to find in the scene, not Emersonian profundity, but something of moment.

In this photograph I've zoomed my longest lens to 400mm (600mm full-frame equiv.) and pointed it at a stretch of shore visible also in the previous image. Alas, I fear this image fails the criteria described in the paragraph above. (this is a far greater fault than the imperfection of the reflection which I secretly prefer to clarity.) ...but how could I resist it?

This week autumn climaxed. The colors are richer than any fall in memory, like a fireworks finale but silent; no booms, and extended over days. Sunday and Monday were a serendipity; a 48-hour window of clear, dry air has lit the hillsides just at the most magic moment. Prettiness has run rampant. The situation begs the aesthetic question I've posed more narrowly above and is the subject of a future journal entry.

Smooth Sailing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Mirror calm on a large lake is an elusive event unless one lives on the lake. For at least four years my photo explorations have regularly taken me by Lake Waramaug, and from time to time a portion of the lake has been nearly still. Complete stillness is most often found at dawn and occasionally at dusk. One stops and waits for a large lake to calm to mirror stillness at the risk of wasting an entire shoot, and so as I've passed the nearly calm lake I have usually driven on.

It was therefore a complete surprise to find the lake like this twice in the past week, and a special bonus that this gift has come at the peak of fall colors and on this occasion with a clouds like feathers.

I had returned from a three-day shoot in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania just the night before. I had slept in and let sunrise pass, and I had small hopes for a midday shoot except for a particular image that might still work before fall colors dimmed. I was headed for Kent Hollow, but as I passed this spot I knew I had to stop. Stopping is nearly impossible on the road around the lake, but I found a place to turn around, drove back to the only spot where I could safely park, and began shooting. I photographed for just 15 minutes before I decided I'd gotten all I could from the location and decided to return to my car and drive to the state park at the end of the lake, where parking was easy. However, by the time I was back in my car the calm had ended.

Photographers seize the moment or lose it. I continued with my initial plan and continued on to Kent Hollow and the photograph posted previously.

Click the image to view it large.

Waller Woods, Winds of Change

GALEN ROWELL: "One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The previous photos were from March of 2008. Here is the same hillside a week ago in the very late afternoon. The hilltop above was still green. By this week autumn color had reached the hilltop and the tree behind the house was nearly bare. The clouds roll on.

Waller Wood, Passing Clouds Two

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

In stealth the shadow moves upon the meadow,
becomes a stain on the hillside
before spilling into the next hollow.
A ceaseless, silent trespass no hand can alter;
No will but the wind to usher its motion.

Waller Wood, Passing Clouds One

GALEN ROWELL: "At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is another of the overlooked Waller photographs from Winter, 2008. (See also Great Hollow Rhymes).

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 3

SUSAN SONTAG: "photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Larger than the Clouds

And so in one afternoon
the clouds moved
through many moods,
and I danced to
the southwest corner of the field.

As the sun neared the horizon
the spaces between the clouds became
larger than the clouds,
bales tumbling in the layered troposphere
on over Washington Depot and into darkness.

****************
Earlier photographs of Peakéd Mountain Farm:
Cartwheeling Rumble
Making Hay
Above the Bog before the Storm
In Fog at Sunrise
Etude in Diagonals

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 2

AARON SISKIND: "We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect.... But as photographers we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Continuing my shoot it became clear that the cloudscape I'd been photographing was made of two cloud layers. The bottom layer, the evaporating remains of the morning cloud blanket, seemed to hover barely higher than the hills until it became thin enough to reveal the great white monster in the background.

A big sky shot taken shortly after yesterday's image shows both cloud layers clearly. It's one of those "not quite," images. The diagonal of the cloudscape is not quite defined enough to make the image move. The dominant effect is linear and static. This image is even more linear than the one rejected. There's nothing wrong with a linear image if it's integral to the meaning of the shot.

What might Church or Cole have done here? Of course a painting is a fantasy, and a photograph is reality. Is it possible to photograph this landscape long and not find their ghosts lingering in spite of all that has changed?

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 1

• What do I learn from returning to the same sites that makes results improve over time?
• How do I approach familiar sites differently than sites which are new?
• How familiar is familiar?

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The next series of images were captured on a single afternoon in early July from the field to the west of Peakéd Mountain Farm. Even though this is the most interesting side of the farmstead; even though as one moves around the field the forms of the buildings seem almost contrapuntal; and even though on clear afternoons everything is bathed in light almost until sunset, in spite of all that, until now I have never captured an image from this field worth sharing.

Timing is everything. When the weather changes skies are often most interesting. So it was natural that when the clouds began to break apart on the afternoon of July 2nd, I hoped that music would be playing over Peakéd Mountain. Clouds are fickle things (so Joni Mitchell tells us), and as I passed through Bog Hollow I worried that what I'd seen developing back in Tanner Valley was already evaporating here. There's always a tension - take the clouds where you are and make the most of them, or go somewhere special and hope that they're as good there & then as they are here & now.

Coming out of Bog Hollow I discovered that, if nothing else, fate had arranged a hay rake, a hay wagon and a dozen hay bales tastefully about the field. In this region farmers generally do two hayings a season. This year June rains that continued into July hampered farmers' efforts to cut and store hay from the first haying. They worried that the hay would rot before they could deal with it, while I was glad the bales and the equipment were still in the field when the clouds blew through. Timing is everything.

Since I knew the patterns in which the buildings danced I suppose I was more comfortable moving with them than I might otherwise have been, but finding where to stand in the counterpoint takes full and spontaneous engagement as the whole dance unfolds. Once the image is found I work quickly to correct so that the top of the pine has separation from the edge of the hill and so that telephone poles and other details do not get cluttered up together - work quickly before the light or the cloud moves on.

Timing is everything. I entered the field at the southeast corner because the sky. though constantly moving, is unmovable, and it told me to. The clouds felt tentative, quickly shifting. Would a few rays of sun break through? I watched the shifting cloud shapes watching for openings, and grabbed the few brief moments provided. In this exposure a bit of sun has just reached the first building, with the dark roof. Moments later the light reached the gable of the main barn and brightened slightly, enhancing the shadow under the roof line and causing the front walls to glow softly. It was a calm moment except that the clouds were no longer right. No matter; the tentative light of this first exposure also characterizes the moment. I call that, "catching the falling leaf," or at least whatever piece of it you can get hold of. When shooting landscapes I find the farther back one pulls the camera's eye, the harder it is to capture that falling leaf, but sometimes my pleasure comes in standing back.

I'm glad to have this shot as the small building with the light gray roof is precarious. It may not last the next winter. The loss of the building means little to the owner of the property, but to me it is an important dancer gone. Timing is everything.

Sun Spots

HARRY CALLAHAN: "I feel a little bit like a painter. A painter applies brush stroke after brush stroke, working toward something. It's just a matter of knowing when to quit. You know it's in there somewhere."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Back at Beardsley Farmstead this September I saw this late summer whirl, and I remembered images I made right here in 2008 (1), (2), (3), in the middle of winter in a snow storm. The painter, "applies brush stroke after brush stroke." The photographer shoots image after image, experimenting and refining, reaching after the potential that made him stop and shoot in the first place.

The recent series of blog entries was an attempt to sample some of the new farmsteads visited and photographed this summer. Reviewing those shoots and looking closely at some for the first time was overdue. As expected there are many photos I hoped for that proved to be, "not quite," even after I tugged at them in Photoshop in every way I could think of. As always, there were also days that yielded several images worth "developing." However, it was the old sites, farmsteads I'd shot last year and some the year before, that produced the majority of the best shots. New farm sites like Blueberry Hill, Smithfield Guernsey, Salmon Kill Hollow, Hammertown Road, Cream Hill, Sedgwick Hollow and others have potential not yet realized.

•What do I learn from returning to the same sites that makes results improve with time?
•How do I approach familiar sites differently than sites which are new?
•How familiar is familiar?

I came here because I knew the field would be "ripe," and the afternoon sun would make it glisten. I knew that even with my ladder the angles from the top of the field, between the rowed trees, would be tough. When I failed, I knew to check the garden. I noted one of the outbuildings had fallen down. I would have stayed longer, but I wanted to get to one of the new sites.

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This is one of those images that needs to be seen large. Click the image above to enlarge.

Quonset Barn & Swamp Foliage

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: "The Road from Sedgewick Hollow," Part 2

I knew I was heading toward a dead end. Not finding an outlet ahead and forbidden to make a u-turn, Gidget was near to having a nervous breakdown. She kept plotting the course over and over again, continually repeating, "Recalculating!" Moments later the road ended in a farmyard and I found my car surrounded by howling hounds. This was not the way I had hoped to introduce myself to Aunt Josephine. As they often do, the public road had turned private without warning, and I struggled to turn my car without squashing any of the pooch pack. Then Aunt Josephine appeared, running from the house and waving her arms. No. running is the wrong word. She moved as if her hips were frozen across, and the waving arms might have been unsteadiness, but she was moving fast, and I was surprised at how quickly she was beside the car. She was shouting something, and as I was backing to leave I simultaneously did my best to lower the window and the radio so I could hear what she was saying.

"Stop, he'll run right under the wheels." She was already bent over and snatching a long and low brown dust mop of a dog from the ground and restraining him forcibly in her arms as he tried to sniff at me. The barking continued through my introduction and apology. The commotion had not kept me from noticing that, "the mother farm," was even more photogenic than the buildings across from the quonset barn.

She was a trim octogenarian. Her hair was long and straight, her cheeks hollow and pale. Her eyes were straight slits. If there were any curves on her they had long ago been lost in the baggy overalls she wore, but she finally smiled and seemed happy to chat. My repeated apologies eventually put her at ease, and half the dogs had stopped barking so I could almost hear what Aunt Josephine was saying. I got a bit of farm history before I put my question to her, "May I photograph these barns?"

There was a long pause and a breath, and she looked right at me and the pupils of her eyes narrowed. It was as if she was trying to look inside me and a century suddenly had flown between us. "No." It was a strange "no," - full of forced determination. Then she added, "but if you talk to my niece she can give you permission. She's away now but she'll be back tomorrow.

She seemed quite unaware that I might not know who her niece was or where to find her. I had to ask repeatedly until she finally said, "Well, she's just over the hill," and she pointed vaguely somewhere behind the barns. There was no road that way, nothing but woods. I think she quite expected me to set off into the woods on foot, but I finally made clear to her that I needed directions my car could follow. As it turns out, the niece lived back where I started, at the house across from quonset farm.

I puzzled over the meaning of her, "No," and the subsequent half retraction. I took a few days before I went to see the niece. I wanted to be sure aunt and niece had time to deliberate. When I drove into the niece's yard, there were no dogs, but immediately the niece came running from the barns in overalls looking like a slightly younger version of Aunt Josephine. Before I could fully get my question out she interrupted me, "No." Clearly the two had met and the issue had been decided. "No photographs," she repeated. I tried to make conversation and barely got out that I'd photographed the swamp, but she was already heading into the house. Her voice trailed as she went inside, "You can photograph the swamp all you want."

All the photos I've made of Great Hill Farm have been from the public road.

Farm Fence & Quonset Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:
"The Road from Sedgewick Hollow," Part I

The road back from Sedgewick Hollow leads through another century. When I point my GPS toward home it plots a course from the Hollow, not always the same course, through a warren of old country roads. Some are crumbling pavement, some have never been paved. The way is always sparsely settled and with more than its share of 18th century buildings and a few ruins. Without the soothing voice of Gidget, my GPS, I'd quickly be lost in time. After leaving Sedgewick Hollow she doesn't reach a road with a route number until I'm a few minutes from home.

I've been photographing in Sedgewick Hollow frequently over the past three weeks. Along one of the common routes, half way to the hollow the road forks. Both roads lead to Sedgewick Hollow, but I hadn't noticed that along this route Gidget took the left fork through the valley on the way out, but she brought me home over Great Hill and through the right fork. As a result, when I returned home from Sedgewick Hollow two weeks ago, I didn't know quite where I was when I stopped. I stopped in the futile hope of photographing a scene which had ended moments earlier. I'd have to find my way back here, wherever here is, at the next sunset when the sky was clear, and it would have to be soon.

At the top of Great Hill is a level area which may have been pasture once but which had become swamp. Leaves turn earlier around swamps, and here they had recently burst into color. As I reached the top of the hill, and came out of the woodland into the open swamp, the last few minutes of sunlight were being filtered by low haze. There was just enough light to make me realize the spectacle the sun's clear backlighting had made moments earlier.

It wasn't until I returned a day or two later and began photographing that I realized the cleared area was part of a farm or what's left of a farm. Warped boards and rotting roofs, rusted machinery, and across from this structure a farmhouse and a ragged collection of wooden out buildings. Nobody was around, but the house was inhabited, and I didn't want to trespass. I learned later that there had originally been many more buildings, but the farm was badly damaged in the tornado that blew through a decade ago.

As I was shooting beside the road, a guy in a pickup stopped to chat, and I asked him if he knew who might give me permission to shoot the farmstead here. He had the whole family story. Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin had died recently. Frank kept "the mother farm" going to the end, and Stephen ran this place and Martin had another place.... His explanations included names of roads I didn't know and, when I pressed him, directions I couldn't follow. I learned of marriages and divorces and who had done what and how they had or hadn't cared for each other as ends neared. He spoke to me as if everyone knew these people and where they lived. Clearly, this was an intimate community where everyone knew everyone. Still, I wanted permission to photograph here. Before he drove off I learned that the only one left was Aunt Josephine, and she was living on the "mother farm," to which I made sure I had good directions. She would certainly give me permission.

I would find Josephine before returning home.

Farmtique

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The yellow farmhouse on Route 202 was in disrepair even in 1974 when we first moved to Connecticut, but the yellow stood out and the various signs that directed non-existent traffic. We lived a few miles away and shopped at the old general store a bit further up the road. Back then one could still read the sign, and when I needed props for an "Old West" play I stopped here and bought an "antique," wooden box. The old guy who sold it to me emerged from somewhere deep within the house, said little, and happily took my five dollars. We keep kindling in it now.

When we moved in 1979 they were beginning to pave some of the old dirt roads from which spurs sprouted leading to cul-de-sacs lined with pastel dream houses. A new school was just opening. Nobody lives here anymore, and the roof is failing. A few weeks after I photographed here a sign appeared on the roadside, "Lot for Sale."

In Blazing Soy

ANSEL ADAMS: "You don't take a photograph, you make it."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the landscape the first decision is always where to stand. Yesterday's image of this ruin was taken seventeen minutes and forty seconds after this one. The light was similar yet they are almost opposite in their effect. The making of these two images seems typical of the way I approach shooting. Compare the two and you may be tempted to ask, "Who moved the mountain?" My mantra is always, "You don't know what it looks like until you get there."Standing by the silo, you might not guess that by walking further down the soy hill, away from the farmstead, the tops of all three silos would be below the top of the background hillside.

When I shot this near the top of the hill I hoped that might happen. A slightly different grade and it would not have, but I'd already previsualized at the top the two shots I thought I'd get on this shoot, one with sky and one without; one in which the farm curled up at the base of the hill like a cat snuggling into an old blanket and one in which the crumbling silos raged against their demise. Move left, right, backward, forward, and relationships change; things are lost and things gained. I spent time studying how the top of the background silo might best intersect with the hilltop, and ways of strategically cutting the tops of the two silos, and the effects of compressing/expanding the cluster of buildings by moving laterally. I watched the balance of tonalities and how they met the margins and corners of the image. Sometimes I lost my light, and when it came back I considered how to utilize creeping shadows.

I moved slowly through the soy field trying to find the most committed version of each idea, but since I could only guess what things might look like from untried positions, I carefully composed both possibilities each time I stopped. I did this even though I suspected I'd already passed the most committed angle for this shot early on. I never want to have to go back and re-find a position.

In the end I had many exposures to look through. In this image I was up close with my lens zoomed wide and tipped steeply downward. In yesterday's I am standing back with my lens zoomed in tight. While I may have a good idea what I want the image to look like when it's done and that the essentials have been captured in terms of focus and exposure, it's not until I see it large that I know what I have and if it will work. When I finished that afternoon, a third of the "making" of the image was done. If there is a quicker way, I wish someone would tell me.

Forsaken Acres

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It will be harder to unseal the time capsule on this old ruin. It has no name nor clear signs of what went on here or when. It is further north on route 22, not far from Boston Corners, NY, a town with a lot of history. Jane and I spotted the tall silo from the road, glowing bone white in the afternoon sun. We had been exploring and were on our way home, but I made a note to return and investigate. Was it here when Boston Corners was the meeting place of three railroad lines?

When I got back a week or two later it was also late afternoon. From the roadside I could see all three silos on what appeared to be an island rising out of a sea of soy. I made some images of the silos and the soy rows and learned from a neighbor that nobody cared who went here. He'd explored himself, but he had been afraid to go into the house.

House? By the time I said goodbye photo light was gone. Before heading for home I explored enough to see the house. It was in the grip of a jungle, and getting to it would not be easy. Photographing may be impossible.

When I got back the third time it was the end of September, and the soy had just turned yellow. Where there are silos there were usually dairy barns once. Silos came in to common use between 1880 and 1900 (The tall, cylindrical form was invented in 1891). They made it possible to store enough feed to sustain milk production through the winter and capture the high prices paid for winter milk. Alas, it's common to find old masonry and metal silos standing beside a concrete slab or stone foundation. These silos were in terrible condition, and I never expected anything was left of the barns. Life is fluid. They were in the final stages of being swallowed.

I spent nearly an hour making images of the barn ruins from different points in this field before exploring the rest of the site. A newer, metal work shed, also abandoned, is to the left. Beyond the field the ground drops off steeply, and from below I could look up and see the house. From directly below the second story barely reached over the goldenrod that covered the embankment.

Grand Cowshed

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - The Harlem Valley in New York State is an important corridor running north-south from Brewster to the start of the Taconic Mountains near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border. Through it run the The Harlem Valley Railroad and New York Route 22. What's left of the train remains one of the principal commuter lines to New York City, and the road is New York State's longest and oldest north-south route, stretching from the Bronx through Albany to Canada.

The Harlem Valley is not only long but also relatively broad, a series of gently rolling hills between, on the east, the steep ridge that divides Connecticut from New York, and on the west, the Hudson Hills that roll toward the Hudson River. In the Harlem Valley dairy farmers had easy access to transportation and flat open land for growing corn and grazing large herds of cattle. The farms that once were thriving here have left vast and hollow behemoths with giant silos that loom over the pastures. This is a small portion of one of these ruins.

I've been trying unsuccessfully to capture the hulking immensity of this farmstead for three years. The main shed is actually three times as long as the part shown in the back of this image. It has four more dormers like the two in the image, and throughout the sheds length it sprouts other buildings of various sizes. The patchwork nature of the whole suggests success-fueled expansion. Imagine the amount of hay that was stored over the dairy stalls on the first level! Four large silos stand at the back of the main shed. The metal roof gone on one and on another, rusted to a smokey bronze. The old farm house is in ruins as are many of the outbuildings.

No trespassing is strictly enforced, and most of my pictures have been shot from neighboring property. It is a matter of considerable frustration to me that I've been unable to make full use of this palette of forms and textures and insinuations. In any case, for me windows are always eyes, and I couldn't resist this grouping.

The Road through Fox Hollow

FREDERICK CHURCH: "Imagine this fairy like Temple blazing like sunlight among those savage black rocks.”

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: North of Pleasant View Farm my explorations took me through Fox Hollow, and several Fox Hollow farms are now regular photo stops.

What if Jane and I could follow the old road right through Fox Hollow and into the past. Somewhere beyond Ancramdale the road would turn to dirt, and then the power lines would stop, and we'd be in an open carriage, rattling behind a horse at a pretty good clip. If we were lucky, we'd have an invitation for dinner at Olana, Frederick Church's Persian, fantasy house on the Hudson. I shot this photo on August 31 at 5:45 PM in my own century. With another 45 minutes and 130 years to sunset, our carriage will still only be half way to Olana, but If we hurry we can get there just as twilight gives way to a nearly full moon.

When we get to Olana torches will be blazing on the terrace high above the Hudson River, and there might be a tiny glow from behind the shadowy Catskills. Church will show us his studio and his latest work which will look like our journey turned to a romantic adventure. We'll talk about his travels in Europe, the Middle East and South America, and he'll complain about his rheumatism and pass on a few wise words from Thomas Cole. Then we'll look at some of the rare plants in his conservatory and sit down with his family to an elegant meal, and plan a long walk for the first of September.

Fox Hollow didn't look much different then, fewer trees and more fields under cultivation or given to pasture. Some of the same families are still farming here. When we get back to the twenty-first century I will send copies of my images over the "new" power lines to their grandchildren's computers.

A Pleasant View

GALEN ROWELL: "You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: To call the view from Pleasant View Farm, atop Winchell Mountain, "pleasant," is to commit a felonious litotes. Much of this summer's explorations have taken me north, up the area known as, "The Oblong," on the border of New York and Connecticut. With the rising sun shining across Connecticut at my back, the view on this morning extends at least 40 miles. The most distant mountain in this image are in the southern Catskills on the far side of the Hudson River. Had I walked a few hundred feet south I could have looked east almost as far into Connecticut, but that's not where the view was on this morning.

As a breed, landscape photographers tend to be scavengers, combing the hills to rescue moments of sunlight, fog or cloud from the dissipations of time. Planned shots rarely are what one anticipates, but at Pleasant View I can count on finding rising valley fog on most mornings. I will return here often.

This panorama was made from three distinct images stitched in Photoshop. The original file has enough resolution to produce an image at least eight feet long.

Gereg Farm in Summer

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Neither hip nor gambrel, the unusual, many-hued roofs of Gereg Farm are wonderfully sculptural. Although I photographed here early in 2008, I photographed from the road. As I've expanded my territory northward this summer, I made an effort to meet the owner who was happy to give me a tour of the barns and permission to shoot from the pasture and yards.

If Misty Morning Farm (1), (2) is among the most difficult to photograph, Gereg Farm may be the easiest. At Misty Morning the hillside and large trees block the sun on all sides but the north, so light is almost always wrong. Morning light is best at Misty Morning, but often it is too misty and the metal roof is silver and glares blindingly under morning sun. Then there's the hill descending to the east; it is so steep that the barns almost disappear behind the crest until one is a long way off.

In contrast, sun washes the Gereg barn throughout the day, and out in the flat pasture there are clear views from east, south and west. At the perimeter of the field on the south is a rusted. rustic fence that gets tangled with weeds and wildflowers in summer, a delicious foreground screen to shoot through. Three Belted Galloway, "Oreo," cows pasture here. though in the summer they hide from the sun in a shaded alcove. I've caught them grazing in front of the barns in late afternoon, but I don't yet have the picture I'm after. In fact, everything is so photogenic here, that I'm having difficulty casting antique gloom across the barnscape. Everything comes out completely sane. Perhaps in fog I can make them loom.

While the view from the north is just as interesting, there has been a dumpster blocking it through most of the summer. Even from the north, once the dumpster is gone, I expect no problems shooting the intimate spaces there. The barns have some interesting features not visible in this image including the sheltered exterior passage tunneled under the barn where the cows like to huddle. It should be interesting to shoot there in the first half of the day. The barns are being sensitively restored, and as soon as some new wood weathers, they will be as good as old.

Misty Morning

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Misty Morning Farm has been an ongoing photo project throughout the last year. Few sites offer so much potential and pose such difficult dilemmas. Mist and fog are the least of the difficulties. On this morning 8 days ago I woke at 5:15 in order to catch some mix of sunrise light and pond mist.

Misty Morning Farm sits on the north side of a hill and does its best to face east. Down the hill from the farmstead and its fields and before the hillside disappears into woodland there is a broad pond. If mist will form anywhere, it will form here. Sometimes it is just a small plume that drifts with the prevailing breeze. Sometimes it is a rising mist that draws a delicate veil up the pasture and over the bushes and barns. On the particular morning it was a fog like a head cold that blotted out everything. I waited at the bottom of the pasture to see what the fog would do, but nothing moved.

I finally decided to drive a 4 mile circuit of the hilltop to see what things were like elsewhere. As I completed my loop, coming down the hill toward Misty Morning from the other side, the sun was just penetrating and dissolving the head of pond brew, and as I quickly parked and rushed around the yard, the sun through the fog sent rays through the trees and magnified the landscape. One can never plan such shots and must take gratefully whatever is given.

I'm developing Misty Morning Farm as a seasonal portrait. Preparing presentation images of Misty Morning from the last year has been keeping me from TODAY'S for at least a week. This was not the shot I had intended to follow next, but I'm happy for the excuse to process this image as a stand-in so as not to divert my concentration from Misty Morning Farm.

This one needs to be seen large. Be sure to click the image.

Great Hollow Rhymes

EDWARD WESTON: "Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I wonder what viewers will make of this image. I'm not even quite sure what to make of it myself, but I'm drawn to its abstract simplicity and the suggestion that all things are in dialogue.

I set out to post photographs from the past summer and have been momentarily distracted by a commissioned project that requires my attention. While working on that project I came on this overlooked photograph taken at Waller Farm in late winter, 2008. The rhyme of its forms seem a natural sequel to "Bolland Farm and Hills," and so it becomes part of this new sequence on farms and farmland.

Bolland Farm and Hills - May 1, 2009

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: "There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There are few farms I find as aesthetically pleasing as this one, the way the barns ride the hills, flowing with their contours, digging in to the earth. I've been driving by here for two years seeking to get permission to shoot. Although there are usually cars outside and clothes on the line, I've never seen a person here, and I have not yet been moved to knock on the door of the nearby house.

On this lazy spring afternoon, under a soft, sprinkling rain and swept by a bit of spring mist, I stopped the car on the side of the road and composed this image. I struggled to keep raindrops off my lens. Greening had just begun.

Dairy Barn & Cow Stalls, Elliott Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There's always been farming on this hill. I took this a week ago after a morning of photographing the barns from the fields below. The farmer who dug this barn deep into the hillside and near its top, knew that on chilly mornings he'd have the early sun on his back and on the backs of his cows, and that he'd catch the sun again in the afternoon as he loaded hay directly into the hay loft from the street side.

The 1853 map shows no barns, but the house is there, right where the road from town turns just as it does today as if it were to lead from town right up the front steps onto porch, only turning sharply left at the last moment to climb the hill rather than the stairs. Was it the Elliotts, who lived in the house in 1853, who built this barn?

The porch is gone from the vacant house. When did they stop farming here? Was it in 1928 when the creamery closed or in 1930 when the railroad stopped running, or were there dairy cows in the fields when I first passed by? Last year some of the barn boards were stripped away and the cupola tipped a bit more this year, and the roof won't survive another winter. One day I will come by and find the cupola fallen through the roof and smashed on the floor, the weather vane and it's four miniature gables shattered.

But it's impossible to know when. Perhaps it is miraculous that farming continues on this hill at all, more miraculous that some of the original families are farming here still.

Spring on Skiff Mountain

VERLYN KLINKENBORG (from "Goldenrod Time," NY Times):
"Somehow my internal timekeeper failed this summer - broken down, perhaps during the utterly sodden month of June. Time passed, and all the natural events that happen on this farm happened in order. But when the goldenrod began to bloom a few weeks ago, I failed to make the connection between the two.

"The Goldenrod ripens with nearly the same power as the leaves turning. It's one of the strongest temporal cues I know, and I usually respond to it the way I respond to most signs of shifting season: with an inward emotional tug.

"This year I seem to be absent, or perhaps I'm just resting in the lull of late summer. Or perhaps I've become just another of the creatures on this farm."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This has not been like other summers. For some time now I've been feeling what Verlyn Klinkenborg describes, a sense of having somehow come loose from the constant unwinding of the season, and now as the trees are suddenly starting to turn I feel unexpectedly reengaged with the ever-turning wheel. What happened to summer? Wrenched into autumn, can I find my stride before nature's pace quickens?

I exposed this image on May 18th, in the time between skunk cabbage and flox, exactly four months ago today. The fragile spring leaves had recently darkened. Six days later I would be driving in Nova Scotia and delighted to find a second spring just unfurling there. What timing! It was after that I became uncoupled.

Jane feels it too. She says it is not only the endless rain which extended well beyond June but also that the thermometer barely sweltered. That may be true, but it strikes me that before I began my photo and hiking regimen the gears of my life were not so tightly engaged to nature's clock, and a disjointed season like the one suddenly completed would not leave me feeling a bit unhinged.

Was there summer? I hiked almost every day back to favorite farms and into to much new territory, to Massachusetts and the Hudson, but I wonder if this year I didn't lean a little too comfortably on the feeling that summer was a lazy time, that its pleasures would last, that shots missed today would be much the same tomorrow. Would I have dug more deeply if summer had the urgency of spring or fall? Tomorrow begins today.

And yet I'm reassured when I look at the summer's farm images that I shot while processing and posting lilies. It seems I didn't miss it all. The next photo series explores some of the farms visited this summer.

I've been on top of Skiff Mountain before, but on the afternoon of May 18th the clouds put on a remarkable show. Because the fields surrounding these barns are open and vast, and because the sky that afternoon was dancing everywhere, I kept moving, taking in new angles. I didn't want to miss anything, but I didn't rush, and the clouds kept on dancing as I made a complete, great circuit around the fields around the farmstead.

Bugged

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: "If you don't like it, that's your problem, not mine."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Life is fluid. Even before the bee has probed the water lily's nectar, the transformers are at work on the grand, procreative, digestive economy of things.

Lotus Wind

ZHOU DUNYI: "I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is the Sacred Lotus or Bean of India, worshipped among Hindus as a thing of purity. It does indeed strike the eye as something divine. Most people would know it immediately by the iconic, flat-topped seed cup, like a watering can, that is left after the petals fall away. Lotus roots in the pond bottom and spreads broad, round pads on the surface of the water while sending a stem 3 to 5 feet into the air where it produces a large bud that blossoms hugely and gets tossed by the wind in shades of pink and white.

The Sacred Bean of India Lotus is not to be confused with the Egyptian Sacred Blue Lily which is sometimes called the Blue Lotus.

From Wiki I learn that the Sacred Lotus of India can regulate the temperature of the flower as warm-blooded animals do. That distinction places it in the rare plant company of Philodendron and Skunk Cabbage. Certainly no water lily can do that. It is not yet known if it can read minds, but all parts of the plant are entirely edible.

Pirouette

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There are 8 genera in the family of plants we commonly refer to as water lilies. The yellow lily, which has lost all but one of its petals, is of the genus Nuphar. The petals of these lilies are stubby and stay so tightly curled that they look like perpetual buds. In fact, the petals hinge back only slightly. Once they are open the flowers are as popular as a good Irish pub; it isn't long before many bugs are clamoring at once for a seat inside at the bar.

The pink lily is of a different but closely related genus, Nymphaea, goddesses of the woodland spring. The species of Nymphaea are much more numerous. They blossom in the air and sleep below water. The bugs visit here too, but are much more polite and refined.

Nuphar water lilies are sometimes referred to popularly by the term lotus, but the sacred Indian lotus for which the term is more commonly used is of an entirely different genus and family from Nuphar and the other genera of the family we call water lilies.

Pink and Blue

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience."

Lily Passage

Composition in Menisci

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On Tuesday, in responding to "Paints and Painters," my friend Gary praised my meniscus. A meniscus forms at the margins where the pond water turns up to meet a lily leaf, a blade of swamp grass or any object on its surface. Often the meniscus will be revealed by the interesting way it catches the light. The Greek root is the diminutive form of moon and refers to the moon's crescent.

In the photo in question there is also water lying on the surface of the lily leaf. The surface of the lily leaf is designed to repel water (As I also learned from Gary, it is, "superhydrophobic," a condition known as, "the lotus effect."), and so the surface tension of the water curves downward at its edge. As a result, unlike the water in the pond that turns up to meet the lily leaf forming a concave surface or lens, the puddle on top of the leaf turning down forms a convex surface. Although the term meniscus is also used to describe this effect, I wonder if there isn't a better term; the moon's crescent seems less appropriate to describe this convex phenomenon.

I thought this might be an antimeniscus. Artie suggested descibing the phenomenon as imbricosity; the thing itself would be an imbriscus. Jane thought it might be an oobleckus, clearly caused by Suessian oobleckosity.

Clearly, there is still room for improvement. Is there a word maven out there who can invent a word to describe the downturn phenomenon described on the surface of the lily leaf?

Lily's Embrace

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Is striving the most fundamental characteristic of life? Rocks don't strive. All living things strive. From whence that yearning? The lily's striving is the bee's hunger and my adventure. When striving stops we are dead.

Lily No.106, July 28, 2009

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Life is fluid.
They tell us it comes from amino acids
in a process that began in a colossal,
super-nuclear,
big bang
furnace
that expanded outward from a center creating space as it went, where galaxies popped like firecrackers on strings hurling stars and planets corkscrewing through time and space.
Well, something like that.

Contemplate the protean thread
of life stretching backward
to that point.

Contemplate?
Where did we learn that trick of observation and reflection?
Where did we get the drive, the striving?
What force made it inevitable?
Did tenderness and compassion and a yearning for justice and beauty originate there as well?

Were they all there at the beginning in some concentrated "spirit"?

Or is that spirit self-made and tentative and ultimately uncertain, perhaps brewed from an predictable reaction of chemicals and passed
to slug
and toad
and a jackrabbit
and a student reading Pascal,
to a strap-hanger pausing on his morning commute,
and one day posed on a blog by a dude in an internet café and answered around the world.

Such question lie in a galaxy beyond reason and impervious to its probes, and regardless of the answer, what's precious is in that spirit.

Paints & Painters

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Anything having to do with water and light is a natural for photography, and I've enjoyed shooting water lilies since I began hiking with a camera. Few plants seem to me quite so mysterious from the first stirring of shoots beneath the prenatal soup to their full blossoming. Many water lilies open daily at the beckoning of the sun and close every evening. No sooner do the flowers hatch than they are beset by a host of small things from both water and air that find their nectars sweet and their landing places convenient. The tragic decline of the lily under this assault is every bit as dramatic as its rise.

Using a polarizer to photograph water lilies is essential. The polarizer allows control over reflectivity. Set one way, and the image penetrates the water's surface. Rotated 90 degrees, and the surface reflects the sky. Between these extremes one can dial in the desired composition. The polarizer also permits control of glare reflected by the lily pads.

Most of the lilies in this series were growing naturally in ponds and swamps I frequent. Among the pond's various bits of living and dying matter I like to capture mini-scapes, and I welcome the detritivores that delve the crevices and graze the tablelands. Look closely.

Steeped

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Until the previous Today's all the photos since early June have come from my Nova Scotia-Maine trip. However, for the past three months I've been shooting locally and expanding territory. This photograph continues the series of water lily images begun in the spring:

Pond Musk

Unfolding Spring

Surface Tension

In April the lilies were sending out stalks and strange tubes that unfolded into yellow and pink leaves which turned green as the sun hit them. On June 7th, a week after my return from Maine, the broth is still simmering after abundant rain and under June sunlight.

ISO 400, f18, 1/100th sec
400mm (non-digital = 600mm)

Great Blue Heron

MINOR WHITE: "Some degree of mirroring happens with any photograph, but it is especially strong with photographs rendered in a stylized or non-literal way. Mirroring is also strong in photographs in which the presence of design is equal to or supersedes the sense of the presence of the subject in front of the camera." (http://www.jnevins.com/whitereading.htm)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'd never seen a heron taking off before. The first time was at a teacher conference in Lakeville, and a colleague and I had gotten up early to take one of the resort canoes out onto the lake before breakfast and the first session of the day. As we paddled closer to the bird it spread its wings, and I could feel my own rib cage expand and hover with the bird in flight. The moment was too short, and I desperately wanted a replay.

When I returned seriously to photography one of my goals was to catch that shot of the heron inflating. I haven't done it yet, and other goals have always pushed that one back. For one thing, where I walk the herons are very shy, and they usually sense my presence and are in flight before I can reach a clearing suitable for shooting, and I have not sought out a suitable blind.

In some previous segment of TODAY'S that featured a gold finch and then a mourning dove I protested, "I don't do birds." Perhaps that's the more important reason. It's not that I dislike birds, Jane feeds the songbirds, and I love to see them each morning as I wake, and I feed the humming birds and will jump from my chair when they begin their antics. It is that birds (and insects and camels and much else) are so rarely seen with clarity that the eye is drawn to examine the image of the stilled, close-up representation of the actual object; as a result it becomes much harder to achieve what Alfred Steiglitz called, "equivalence," or what Minor White refers to above as, "Mirroring."

When my friend Rick Cassar invited me on an early morning photo shoot on Candlewood Lake I saw my chance to return to the heron hunt. The herons on Candlewood are a good deal more used to people, and Rick was an expert guide for finding them. I hope he invites me back. He did a great job maneuvering us for this shot, and I'm pleased with whatever degree of formality organizes this shot. However, how much more directly does the inadvertent, under-exposed graininess of Glide (previous TODAY'S) invite us to walk into its expressive spirit! That release is the serendipitous consequence of my inability to set the correct exposure fast enough.

NOTE: I've titled this, "Great Blue Heron." If there is an expert around who can tell me differently, I'm ready to learn.

TECH NOTES: ISO 800, f16, 1/80th sec, 400mm (full frame equiv: 600mm), VR. I probably could have given a stop of aperture for a quicker shutter, but the boat was drifting so focus was as delicate as steadiness, and I hoped to keep the background as sharp as possible.

Glide

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I thought the show was over, and I was ready to pack up my gear when this visitor arrived. I had the wrong lens on the camera and made a quick guess at exposure catching five, quick shots as he landed. But the picture isn't about that, and the evening was just beginning.

Mahone Reverb

GUY TAL: "The answers are ambiguous – the image needs to be complex but not to a point of clutter, or it needs to be simple but not to a point of being too literal. It needs to have a message yet without the message being too obvious… or too obscure. Confused? If so, you have just learned an important lesson – art does not follow hard and fast rules, and thus transcends any attempt at a ubiquitous definition."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I've often thought that by definition the the true nature of art is to defy all previous definitions of art but that even that definition was perfectly useless.

Composition in Blue Rocks

CASPAR DAVD FRIEDRICH: "I must be entirely by myself, and know that I am alone in order to see and perceive Nature completely. Nothing should stand between her and myself. I must give myself to my surroundings, must merge with my clouds and cliffs in order to become what I am."

SHERMAN HINES: "Someone asked me once how I got to the spot where I actually took a photograph. I found that I followed noises, clouds, the winds, smells – but most of all it was the light that guided me. I don’t force myself on the environment, I let it manipulate me. There’s no confrontation with nature because I give in to it. I let myself be seduced completely."

PAUL STRAND: "Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as sky and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: No matter how I submit, nature can be impenetrable. On the evening when this was taken, however, I was embraced. A clear sun that sparkled and defined form had given way to clouds that seemed to suck up the air. I was somewhere in the center of the peninsula, but the moaning song of the fog horn accompanied crows perched in still pines. Verse after verse sounded as the sun set. Not too far off the sea was changing, and I would change with it.

As a photographer, I live for those times when I'm so enfolded by the world around me. Day after day I may go out and submit myself to nature and she is closed, and then on one evening like this she leaves me breathless and vitalized. I point my camera and see compositions everywhere.

Composition in Red

GARRY WINOGRAND: "Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Of course Gary Winogrand's photographs look nothing like this, but his statement above strongly suggests a photography of abstraction. How to resolve the quotes accompanying the last three TODAY'S? Should the photographer aim for Evans' "what else they are," or only, "light on surface," or, as Eric Lindbloom suggests, will metaphor always slip through the smallest apertures? Should photographers cultivate an aesthetic philosophy, stake out a position with this camp or that, or is it better just to follow the heady brew as it delights my lens?

I know some who follow this blog will throw up their hands in exasperation at this image. I hope others will enter the space of the image, move with the curves, reserve judgement, and be surprised to learn it is a simple thing, nothing more than a reflection in a red car along a street in Lunenburg. André chose to publish it in our workshop highlights book along side yesterday's image, and I thought they belonged together.

Whatever your ultimate opinion, I'm especially eager to hear reactions to this one.

Wild Things, No. 2

MINOR WHITE: "One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are."

Cottongrass at Sunset

ERIC LINDBLOOM: "Try as we will to make a fair representation of things in the world that move us, metaphors know the trick of entering the work through a small aperture in a fraction of a second."

WIld Things, No. 1

BOB LEJEUNE (http://boblejeune.blogspot.com/) reacting to recent photos: "Before I did photography I sort of went along with the notion that pictures give a more accurate rendition of reality than words, as in the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words." Now I know that's nonsense. You move one foot, and you see a different reality in the viewfinder. You change the angle or zoom, and the world becomes more abstract. You photoshop out the garbage, and everything looks pretty. Etc. Forced to see reality in frames, I realize more than ever that there is no reality. So spending all that money is good "therapy" even if I never become a great photographer."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A good friend used to argue with me that architecture was not an art form because art was forced to serve an independent program focused on issues of functionality and economics. He argued that art must be free to follow the artist's imagination, that the artist's passions must be given room to operate without extraneous concerns. This photo was shot "on assignment," as part of the final project for the Lunenburg workshop. My shooting for 24 hours was restrained and regulated by time and program. Without that assignment, I'm sure I never would have stopped to shoot these leaves, nor would I have discovered later that a tiny insect had momentarily scurried across one of the images. Contrary to my friend's beliefs, I find a strict program or assignment can lead to new discoveries and new seeing, and that success can rest as much on serendipity as depth of feeling.

Bayside Op

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Once seen, the pressing question was where to crop. That's always the case, but rarely must edges be so precisely calibrated at all sides and corners. The temptation is to shoot large and preserve all options by cropping in the computer. I prefer NOT to do that, and I try to compose to the proportions of the image my camera makes. (Of course, at a certain point the image has laws of its own that dictate proportions.)

A major question here was whether to include the details in the top right corner. Intuitively, I thought they should be avoided, and made most exposures that way. Back in Lunenburg, however, it was this one I chose to present to the workshop. Without the detail at the top left, this is a curious op pattern. Included, the detail is an annoying (perhaps slightly surreal?) presence that must be unravelled.

Have you figured out what it is, or did you grasp it right away? Once you do, you can enter the image space. Some would say that it is only then that this becomes photographic.

Can you stay in the image space? No need to anymore.

Of course there were many more images to be made here, but the sun was moving quickly and the moment was passing. I had come on this by chance, and I have no idea how it looked moments earlier. Surely, it didn't last long. Could I ever find my way to the time and space of this alignment of elements in order to watch the full arch transpire? Do I really want to go looking for images I've already seen?

Starboard Watch

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

The snake-skin sea slinks across the harbor,
Sounds the music of the old hulls,
Lingers in the underdocks,
Ready to uncoil.

Wharfside

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - I must give some credit for this image to one of my colleagues (Sparrowhawk: http://www.btlens.com/) at the Lunenburg workshop. During a group shoot I had spotted these nails forgotten on one of the pilings and admired the colors and textures, but Sparrowhawk stopped to take the picture, and I merely made a mental note to get back there later while I hurried to something else I was after. When I saw Sparrowhawk's picture I remembered the spot and regretted not shooting it; when I found myself back at the boatyard another day the light was excellent, and I decided to try my own image. I'm pleased with the way this came out, but my colleague has a very sharp eye for composition, and I'd love to compare my choices with Sparrowhawk's.

Boatyard Composition No.2, June 2009

RENE MAGRITTE: "Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible."

Boatyard Composition No.1, June 2009

ANONYMOUS: "The film that survived a bomb blast, got wet when your boat sank , survivived x-ray machines at 5 different airports was ruined when someone opened the darkroom door and let all the dark out."

Hunk of a Dory

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "The Dory Ethic": A dory is essentially a, "plank boat," that's easy to build. It is a workhorse that carries a big load and that two can row with ease. The deep hull, flat bottom, and and natural curve make it maneuverable and steady. Coastal settlers in the northeast launched them from beaches and filled them with fish. When all else fails, one wants a reliable dory.

This photo was taken at The Dory Shop in Lunenburg, NS

Herring's Lament

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Mucilaginous porridge of brine,
The viscous vat, a universe.
Then scooped and bucketed,
Drawn and quartered,
Packed into purses,
And drowned in the parlor.
My essences drift,
Draw hungry crustacea.

The Lobstermen

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I met Howard on the pier at Thurston's Lobster Pound in Bernard Harbor, Maine. He and Roger were loading buckets of herring onto the "Dillon, Chris, and Linda." The herring would be chopped up for bait once they were at sea. I had already asked Howard if I could photograph him at work. When Roger went to get more herring Howard began a conversation about women, drink, marriage, and life. By the time he was ready to push off, we were friends.

The previous year I had vowed to get beyond photographs of the landscape, architecture and props of lobstering and photograph the lobstermen at work. Bernard, Maine, was the most likely place. In most of the lobster ports the fishermen leave from private docks which can be scattered. On some piers a photographer could wait all morning, and no lostermen would appear.

In Bernard there are two common piers used by most of the lobstermen. On the community pier lobstermen begin arriving in their pickups at sunup. The pier is a place of socializing as they fetch their boats, load them with bait and sometimes traps, stowe away lunch buckets and drinks for the day's work, and climb into their vinyl lobstering overalls. In the afternoon the boats return with the day's catch. They sell the lobsters to independent marketers who drive onto the wharf in white delivery trucks and wheel large scales out on the tailgate.

Other lobstermen leave from Thurston's pier. The lobstermen who sell at Thurston's take a lower price but they don't have to work to sell, and they use Thurston's large, dockside warehouses to store their bait. The pier is often a labyrinth of passageways through the lobstermen's idle traps.

That's where I met Howard and Roger and shared philosophy. As they pushed off, I asked if they would be back the next day. When Howard told me, "yes," he also asked if I'd like to come along.

I met them at 5:30 AM. This slide show contains some of the more than 300 images I shot aboard the "Dillon, Chris, and Linda," and it is a first attempt at telling a lobstering tale. I fear it fails to convey the fast pace and exhausting, assembly line routine of the work. In about 4 hours they pulled, emptied, baited, and set 200 traps and caught 55 usable lobsters.

On Leaving Peggy's Cove, June 2, 2009

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - "Peggy's Cove, Future Thoughts":

I left Peggy's Cove without all of the shots I wanted. I'd reserved Tuesday passage on, "The Cat," the ferry from Yarmouth to Bar Harbor. No cat sailed Wednesday, and I doubted whether I would find enough in Peggy's Cove to linger until Thursday. I no longer think that's correct.

1. I had arrived with a primary mission of photographing the harbor. One can almost make out it's mouth, left of center in this image. The cove is a narrow groove with steep slopes, a classic and there are many shots of it. I wanted to find my own.

Where to stand? I wanted to look down the length of the cove, to take in as much of its complexity as I could; I wanted a picture that would embody the concept, "harbor"; that would be a classic rather than a cliche. Perhaps it is always a mistake to preconceive a picture that way. The moment often brings a thousand little pleasures that are quite different from what one is after. In any case, this was the place to do such a classic. I wanted to be at the mouth of the harbor in the afternoon and at the back of the harbor in the morning, but all my attempts to get to the mouth that afternoon and on my previous visit were blocked by, "Private property - no trespassing." I made some afternoon images from the back of the harbor, but the June, afternoon sun is a dragon breathing into the cove. It was not a subject for backlighting, certainly not what I was after. The next morning I was up at 4:30, but the sun barely appeared, and the light wasn't especially useful. From the few images I made then at a moment when the water in the cove was almost still, I realized that wind and tides were more important than early sunshine. I have a hunch I want to shoot near low tide. It's always a mistake to preconceive the picture.

2. Where can I hire a boat?

3. There's no lobstering after May 31. What is Peggy's Cove like when the fisherman are active?

4. After a short, early morning shoot I went back and made a panorama from the deck of my room at the B&B. The B&B is somewhere behind that big white building to the left of the cove mouth. My deck overlooked the harbor, a splendid view and a successful panorama but not my shot. I packed my bags - good breakfast and conversation before heading off for Yarmouth. It was with some amazement that I pulled off at the flight 111 memorial site, just outside of Peggy's Cove, and looked back. I took this just before the rain came, wilting my eagerness and obliterating the view. The photo makes clear that there's at least a half mile of road between me and the church steeple worth walking and exploring for photographs. How many moods can the sky and the landscape conjure over several days? I never know what it will look like until I get there.

5. Since returning I've read that the bushes on the barrens turn vivid color in October.

Click the image to view large.

Peggy's Point Lighthouse, No.5

H. E. Clark: "He carefully picked his cast of clouds, watched them intently as they swirled in before the lens and hoped the sun would break in concert."

Town & Barrens No.4

DAVID BOHM (as suggested by Jane Roth and quoted from The Tao of Photography): "All is process. That is to say, there is ‘no thing’ in the universe. Things, objects, entities, are abstractions of what is relatively constant from a process of movement and transformation. They are like the shapes that children like to see in clouds."

Cove Composition No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: ...or are there photographs that must be connected to a real event at a real moment and yet transcend their time and place? Whether successful or not, this photo might seem less interesting if the viewer believed the birds had been photoshopped in from another image or repositioned for compositional effect. Why is that so? All of the other arts use lies to approach truth. Is there a "code of honor," for photography that makes it different? And if I wanted to float a cloud from another photo across this sky... ?

Barrens Blossoms No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yesterday's photograph, more than most, raised questions regarding the complex relationship between a photograph's subject and its meaning, and it evoked an interesting group of reactions from readers of TODAY'S. One referred to the, "musical sky." Many commented on what one reader described as, "objects standing at drunken angles." Several people commented about the humor of the image and one even said it made her laugh. Although, like other images of this series, it was taken at Peggy's Cove, and its subject is the barrens around Peggy's Cove, the meaning is something quite different, something that can't be put into words, something that language can only talk around.

The difficulty is that photography, in a way not true of any other art medium, is always about a subject that has an independent life; we always photograph SOMETHING. While a painter can work with nothing but imagination and paint, our medium is light that comes to us from the real world and usually reflected off of things. Even after a photographer has distorted that real world, the audience still looks to find the traces of its real-world origins. Given a photographic abstract they quickly ask, "What is it?" in a way they never would if it was by Kandinsky or Miró.

On the other side, viewers often approach a photograph not looking to see more there than the apparent subject. Is it the photographer's task to find ways to make them look further, or is it enough simply to lay out the composition and leave it to the viewer to enter deeply or to stand at the margins?

Town & Barrens No.3, Fiddleheads

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Camped out in a land older than time,
balancing the megaliths,
numbering their shadows
by the sun's glow and the moon's,
waiting on the diastolic blushes of spring,
riding a wave in the echoing of eternity,
stopping the surf's fall.
Returning home to laughter and love.

Town & Barrens No.2, Standoff

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: "What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm – the relationship between shapes and values."

Barrens Blossoms, No.2

EDWARD STEICHEN: "I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself..."

Cove Composition

ARTHUR TRESS: "Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I am in awe of Arthur Tress's haunting images. On the other hand, I appreciate attractive abstractions whose colors, textures, form, and lighting make the eyes dance.

Town & Barrens No.1

JOHN ROSENTHAL: "When I look at photographs by Ansel Adams, I sometimes find myself wondering if Adams is celebrating the natural beauty of creation or simply the beauty preserved in our great national wilderness parks. Are his photographs about life or about zoning laws? Of course one might accuse me of asking dreary questions - but I don't think so. The act of cropping a photograph, which is a fundamental act of photography, is at heart a moral decision. In our landscapes, have we cropped out the tourists and the garbage in order to suggest 19th century America (which is to say, nostalgia), or have we cropped out what is truly irrelevant to our intentions as an artist? What photographers leave out is just as important as what they leave in."

Barrens Blossoms

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The barrens is a desolate place. One can see for miles across the stony hills. Nobody is allowed to die in Peggy's Cove because there's so little land in which to be buried, but look about your feet and nothing is standing still. These rugged plants know how to root in very little soil and hold on through fierce wind. Where there is no soil, orange, green, and black lichens are at work on the rocks' surfaces. This is not only a place of cataclysm but of birth. Rugged as it is, it's also very fragile, and a few badly placed footsteps can undo the work of decades. It's a Canadian, "National Preservation Area," which, unfortunately has no effect on mortality rates, but it does prohibit development. I arrived back in Peggy's Cove on June 1st, and spring was beginning all over again.

The Barrens

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Where I live the curtain has been graciously drawn across the cataclysm. Sometimes I come upon it unexpectedly in the forest, a huge rock turned at an odd angle and in an unlikely spot, but for the most part the forests have grown back where the farmers used to have fields. I search for expanses of open land where one can feel the rolling of the earth and see the ancient convulsions that stood in the way of the farmers' crops. Chances are good that there's a stone wall there.

Growing up in New York City, I used to admire The Palisades. Even though as early as the 19th century men had been chipped away massive quantities of them for cheap railroad ballast, such efforts seemed puny compared to The Palisades' immensity. Now condo towers hop across the them as if they weren't there as the city itself spreads over them. Of course the furnace that built the Palisades would quickly incinerate anything that has stood there in the last thousand years. In the case of The Barrens, the critical cataclysm came, not with fire but with ice, and nothing now hides the violence of its chilly lacerations.

Peggy's Point

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: After the week-long, Lunenburg workshop ended I decided to head back to Peggy's Cove and spend at least a night there. I was immediately drawn to photographing the barrens, shown in the distance above. However, I'm amazed at how soon I found myself scouting angles on the lighthouse. A colleague at the workshop said, "Go down behind the lighthouse." I guess that's about where I am. Behind me the waves explode against the granite. I'm at the tip of Peggy's Point.

If I return again, this is a perfect place for panoramas. The body of water on the left is St. Margaret's Bay, and just around the bend of the bay is the memorial to the passengers of Swissair Flight 111. Like the surroundings, the memorial is bare; simple text inscribed into the granite boulders and neat paths tucked among the scrubby pines and outcroppings of the barrens on a cliff above the sea. I stopped at the memorial briefly as I departed Peggy's Cove. It was almost all fogged in. I was alone, and it seemed as if all the people lost out in the water were especially alone. If I could have seen through the fog, I have a hunch it is also a good spot for panoramas back at Peggy's Point and the town.

Peggy's Cove, I mean the cove after which the town is named, is an abrupt inlet at the center of the cluster of buildings. The church is at the back, behind, and all around are the barrens. The coast continues somewhere to my right. It is made up of huge chunks of similar granite, broken apart and tumbled just as this point will be some day.

Visit Peggy's Cove on Wikipedia.

Lighthouse Polarities, Peggy's Point Lighthouse No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm very curious how viewers of TODAY'S feel about this image.

This shot was an afterthought. It was the last image I made before hiking back up the rocks to the car. I hadn't thought about the reflecting pool since earlier in the evening; from a standing position the lighthouse reflection was invisible. After finishing the previous image I thought quickly about checking to see if the beacon was still visible in the darkened pool. The light was fading fast, the path to my car uncertain, and getting my eye low enough to see the reflection had long ago ceased to be fun, but my tripod was already truncated. I fought with my gear to get the shot positioned. I recall thinking, shoot broad to permit serious cropping later. I made only one image and then rushed off furiously without checking the exposure. I didn't really believe it was worth caring about. Surprisingly, although underexposed, it was recoverable.

I'm still not sure about the shot. It lacks the vigilant calm of yesterday's image. At the Lunenburg workshop I dismissed it from consideration quickly, but each time I see it I find it both arresting, mysterious and paradoxical, an unpleasant clashing of dark forms against the stillness of the lighthouse polarities.

Vigilance, Peggy's Point Lighthouse No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: After everyone had shot their lighthouse reflection shots and sunset shots, and begun climbing from the rock ledge back up to the cars. I lingered alone below for a few more low-light, long exposures. With the sun below the horizon the lighthouse beam would be clear in my pictures, and there would still be enough ambient light to record the lighthouse, rocks, and sea clearly. This is the shot I submitted in answer to the assignment. The exposure was for 30 seconds at f22 and ISO 100.

Click on the image above to enlarge it and make the light clear.

Catching Sunset, Peggy's Point Lighthouse, No.1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As the forecast for Wednesday was rain, we went to Peggy's Cove on Tuesday afternoon, the second full day of the workshop. We were free to photograph anything while we were there, but we were also assigned to make an image of the famous lighthouse that, "is not your usual lighthouse shot."

Having an assignment was to some extent a distraction, though I enjoyed the challenge, and I knew it would be fun to see the various solutions. However, as we reached Peggy's Cove, I think we were all affected by the barrens that surround the village. Huge boulders dropped by the receding glaciers balance singly or in groups amid scrubby, rolling landscape. They are like the game balls of old Titans that have temporarily come to rest. I don't recall any other place I've visited feeling so old, while everywhere the stunted, seaside vegetation was flashing May vitality.

In the center of this wasteland the tiny fishing village hangs onto rocks surrounding the harbor cove. It is the quintessential Atlantic fishing village preserved in its decay and still with a few active lobsterman. It was definitely the kind of place I'd hoped to find in Nova Scotia.

Taking the assignment seriously would mean considerable scouting over a maze of treacherous, seaside boulders - slow going. This lighthouse can be seen and photographed from all sides and in some directions from far away. I'd want to explore it all. There was hardly time to photograph either the cove or the barrens well, and either one seemed more exciting to me than the lighthouse.

In the end I chose to concentrate most of the afternoon in the fishing village and take my chances on the lighthouse as the sun began to fall. I even skipped dinner to keep shooting in the cove, though I realize now I was working against the light.

When I finally turned my attention to the lighthouse I found one of my colleagues on some near rocks squatting by a small pool with his tripod close to the ground. I had to stoop down to where he was to see what he was shooting. Soon a bunch of us were taking turns composing reflection shots of the lighthouse in the pool.

Lobster Boats, Blue Rocks No.6

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Standing at the end of Blue Rocks Point it's easy to understand why this sheltered cove was popular with fishermen. However, it's not clear until one looks at Google's photos of the shore line (Go to Goggle maps, search for "Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia," and select "Satellite.") how gradually land blends to sea. Everywhere the coasts of Maine and Nova Scotia are dotted with islands, but here they take the form of long striations cut by ancient glaciers. These grooves form a labyrinth of long, rocky channels. The long channels and rocky islands run many miles out and form an additional buffer here in Blue Rocks Cove against the constant pounding of waves. Standing on high rocks and trying to look out to the open sea as I took this photograph I had no idea how far inland I really was.

The Flight of Narcissus

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I shot nearly fifty images while the gull enjoyed his snail and then looked around to see what else fortune might have put in his path. After a few minutes he hopped to the edge of the rock and stared down, as if admiring his image in the water. Suddenly he unfurled and leaped and floated down to the tidal pool for the rest of his breakfast.

Breakfast

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - The sunrise light on the rippling pool, exposed seaweed and rock ledge was perfect except the stage was empty until this gull came down to breakfast.

Nautical, Blue Rocks No.5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I think I only began really looking at lobster shacks & boat houses on this trip, and I find I've arrived home with far more questions than answers. Even if I limit observations to those that are really lobster shacks with traps stacked on the wharf and bobs by their side in the lobsterman's colors, the range is enormous. Some are clearly just storage while others have stoves, and some have several rooms and curtains. What was clear in Blue Rocks was that even the most utilitarian had marks of personality: a display of antique nautica, complimentary paint colors chosen to distinguish the door from its frame; a well-trimmed toy sailboat set on a window sill or in another, a decoy Canada goose hung as if strangled. Some beg the question, "Did someone do it this way for me to notice?" And some leave no doubt.

Are there any traditions I should know about that operate here?

Tourist Traps, Blue Rocks No.4

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Although I sometimes wondered if the collection of shacks clinging to the edge of Blue Rocks was the work of an over-zealous preservationist, I met and spoke with several lobster fishermen there and saw others packing up their traps and closing down the season which had just ended. Does anyone use wooden traps anymore? Or was this little scene a monument set up long ago by some lobster fisherman protesting the Canadian government's enforcement tight limits on the length of the lobster season. Next door in Maine they fish for lobsters all year long and wooden traps are only found in antique stores. Here they were plentiful, though the locals call them, "tourist traps."

Wired for Photography, Blue Rocks No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I reached Blue Rocks even before my Lunenburg workshop was set to begin. Arriving in town early, I found the B&B not ready for guests and began my explorations. It was drizzling when I threaded my way along Herring Rocks Road to the dead end. I was a bit surprised to find someone out there already shooting photographs from a tripod. I waved hello, and we kept to our solitary ways. As I shot, occasionally more cars reached the dead end, took in the scenery, and turned around; it was Sunday; everyone was on holiday. Then, I noticed another photographer setting up a tripod. As we momentarily engaged in a bit of photographer fellowship, comparing favorite lenses and cameras, a couple drove up and a woman began looking intently and opening up a tripod. Was this some sort of photographer's mecca? I patted myself on the back for sniffing it out so quickly.

Well, of course, the truth was that all of us were enrolled in the same photo workshop. When you reach Lunenburg, and the B&B isn't ready, if you're a photographer you head east toward the water. Doing so, one will eventually reach the dead end of Herring Rocks Road and the wharves.

Catching Sunrise, Blue Rocks No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Beyond The Lane there are no structures between the road and the ocean, only the blue rocks that give the area its name. The road dead ends at some piers with an open bay and the sea beyond. Although I spent little time photographing from the rocks, under the right light they are a rich slaty blue and run in ridges parallel to the shore, clearly a photographic target for some future visit. To successfully photograph them one must get both sun and tide to cooperate. What might they look like under a full moon?

Air Mariner, Blue Rocks No.1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The fishing shacks & cottages that perch on rocks along the ocean's edge in Blue Rocks range from the quaint to the idiosyncratic to the totally outlandish. I went over the hump onto tiny Herring Rocks Road. It hung out over the edge of the bay and then threaded its way between a cluster of ramshackle sheds. The majority of the shacks lie between there and The Lane. A small island, hardly more than a band of rock outcroppings with soil on top, encloses a tiny harbor and wharfs, and shacks straddle the harbor from both sides. At low tide it is an especially rocky affair with wharves perched high on stilts.

Rainy Night, Lunenburg

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - My intention was to wake before dawn and shoot in the early light. I'd set my alarm and closed my eyes early. That had been my habit whenever possible in my travels. It had never been my habit to wake at 2 AM to go out shooting in thunderstorms. I'd barely napped, but if the rain persisted, sunrise wouldn't be worth shooting anyhow, and I was out the door.

The truth is that after I took the photo on yesterday's blog, later that night, Lunenburg was watered down by a drenching rain. We were all in the common room working on our final assignments, and reluctantly I decided not to go out. I was deep in preparation, but the missed opportunity nagged at me. I was hoping there would be one more big storm. Be careful what you wish for. I didn't expect it then.

I've had several inquiries following the last two images wondering if they were HDR or what special techniques were used. In fact, I did nothing special unless using a tripod constitutes, "special." In fact if all you have is a point and shoot, you could have rested it on the hood of a car and taken this shot or yesterdays. If there is a trick, it is in learning to see places where surfaces reflecting a bit of light will glow under a long exposure. The shutter speed for this shot was 102 seconds but that let me keep a deep focus. The aperture was f22. I thank Neal Parent for pushing me to explore low light photography.

As my camera will only time exposures to 30 seconds, I carry a timer, but I've found that I can come pretty close counting in my head. Since there's only a stop of light difference between 45 seconds and 90 seconds, being off by 5 seconds in my timing means I'm off by less than a tenth of a stop - insignificant. Besides, there is a certain amount of guesswork in a shot like this. I know I will have to blow out the highlights in the street lights. The question is, by how much? One can only experiment. Digital makes that easy as feedback is immediate.

I should add there is a special time in the evening or at dawn when the sky is bright enough to illuminate exterior surfaces, but not so bright as to drown out the lights behind the windows. Yesterday's image was made at that special time as was New England Farmhouse.

I often worry about the redundancy of images. If two images are redundant, it seems to me neither has quite made its point. I was puzzled by this pair until one of my workshop colleagues suggested this might work best as a monochrome. I think she was right.

Entering Lunenburg

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The only road out of Blue Rocks eventually leads along Pelham Street through the middle of Lunenburg. The intersection of Pelham and King Street seems to be the commercial center of the city and a vital counterpoise to the shipyards and harbor. Once a center of ship building and home to a large fishing fleet, the activity is much diminished though not gone. At one point while I was there, three large tall ships were anchored in the harbor.

Time has settled on these two communities so as to open a particularly wide window on the past. While encouraging tourism and promoting its history on many public signboards, Lunenburg has kept honky-tonk to a minimum and the architecture is largely preserved. It's an architecture enriched by the community's ship building history. Has anyone studied this phenomenon along the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia, the degree to which the cross-fertilaztion of shipbuilding and home building enriched the inventiveness and fantasy of domestic architecture? Blue rocks is arguably even more fanciful though cobbled together with little craft.

One could spend weeks photographing details in either place, but my bent is a more direct kind of time travel, trying to find a path along the streetscape between the here and now and the there and then. I had a special sense I was on that path as I came over the first hill into Lunenburg, that some hint of ancient commerce floated above Pelham Street that evening. I stopped at the next street for this photo. Perhaps I caught some hint of the ancient salt air.

Lighthouse

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Blue Rocks seems more like a collection of shanties and shacks left high and dry by a retreating tide than an actual place entitled to a spot on a map and a name. However whirled about it is, it solidifies here at what seems like a crossroad. It feels like a center, though what it might be center to remains in doubt. A couple of houses down, one branch ends at the water, and two branches end as dirt ruts. The store is gone. The only real road from here is the road back to town. I drove past here at all hours, and once I saw a couple of children playing in the street, but most of the time not a soul was about. Of course it must have been a thriving community of fishermen once, and somebody still keeps the lights on from Sunday to Sunday.

Lobstermen's Sunrise

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Please redirect lights away from your computer monitor, or turn them off, and look at this image before reading further.

The sound, what there was of it, was gulls and crows. At 5:20 AM they were already disputing rights to the highest peak in the neighborhood. A tribe of gulls had recently claimed a lobster shack next to where I had set up my tripod. They were jostling for position. Occasionally one of the gulls would sermonize or sound off or the crows would scuffle, but mostly it was all wing flapping. One might miss the pickup trucks that drove out onto a nearby common wharf at ten or fifteen minute intervals. From them lobstermen, singly or in pairs, would cross the dock, stop and chat, then descend with lunch bucket to their dinghies. Then they'd paddle off and disappear among the anchored lobster boats. In a bit would come the soft purr of an engine and soon the boat would appear, and its spreading wake would momentarily rock the harbor. This is lobstermen's rush hour. The harbor was again quiet when I made this image. The gulls, having established pecking order on the nearby roof were already heading off one by one to colonize and re-fight the same battles on some other roof.

*****

"Keep it real." It was hardly what I expected to hear from someone who photographs dreams and nightmares and beautiful, inventive, and sensitive abstracts, who creates dreamy montage overlays, jiggles and pans while shooting, and who promotes all manner of experimentation. How could I make sense of this advice in relation to the body of André's work. Later I asked, "You don't really believe that, do you?" and he said, "No." But I wished I'd asked differently. André's comment occurred following a discussion of HDR, and I wondered if it was a reflection of his own uncertainty regarding the newly popular technique. He complained about the cartoonish look of HDR, but later showed a demo HDR that was completely realistic. "Keep it real," was a surprising comment. I can't recall any other bit of prescriptive advice in one of his workshops. It has always seemed to me that one of the pillars of Freeman's and André's workshops is that any time anyone says, "This is how to do it," one has an obligation to try to do it differently. Now suddenly such a broad prescription, "Keep it real."

In the end I disregarded the comment, but in part, perhaps it reflects the difficulties in adopting new procedures that significantly alter shooting and processing habits. It may be as difficult to begin seeing and shooting and processing for HDR as it is to start seeing and shooting and processing for jiggles, multiple exposures and montage techniques. However, there is another aspect. André spoke of the cartoonish look of some HDR images. For me the danger is that there is an HDR look which is often indiscriminately applied to all images; it is something I try to avoid. Ultimately, I can't make much sense of, "Keep it real." However, I take comfort in discovering that someone whose aesthetic beliefs are as fully considered and established as André, still struggles with the conflicting roles of photography, a medium that asks to be used to grab realistic moments from the continuum of life and that opens itself to the careful, hand-wrought and formally organized expression of painting.

Wharf

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - On Jiggling
One of the first points Freeman Patterson made in the workshop I took with him and André Gallant some years ago was that a photograph says as much or more about the person doing the photographing as the subject being photographed. On Wednesday we were asked to jiggle which has nothing to do with hips and thighs, and everything to do with how to guide the camera through an eighth of a second exposure that effectively makes the camera a tiny bit like a paint brush. Jiggles, pans, multiple exposures, montage overlays, shooting weird reflections are some of the techniques offered that effectively subordinate objective reality to subjective expression and got everyone in the workshop clearly talking and shooting in the same language.

Of course every workshop I've ever taken has been about making your photography more "expressive." Usually one learns a few strategies for composing or catching expressive images and sees lots of examples to emulate. Beyond that, you're on your own. Only in one of Freeman or André's sessions would you find everyone out in front of the B&B jiggling their cameras at otherwise unexceptional bushes. The result is workshops that get everyone photographing more freely and that open new paths to self-expression.

I know that the very best to be said of the vast number of my jigglings might be that they were, "unexceptional," and everyone accepts a high rate of failure in this. One of my images almost works. Had I known when I took it what I know now after seeing it on my computer, I would have stuck with that spot and maybe made it right. However, some of my workshop colleagues succeeded in creating images of great beauty and surprise, and André has produced a body of magnificent photo images in this manner. We saw one framed and matted and on its way to a gallery in town; its beauty sticks in my mind still.

So why am I unlikely to begin jiggling again regularly any time soon. I think that's true of other participants in these workshops, though I know several who jiggle still and with much success. Those who don't may feel some guilt as I did. Is it insecurity that keeps me from adopting the new techniques? I don't think so.

For one thing, as André confided, one must set out to jiggle; while seeking images to jiggle it may be hard to see other images. It's the same as when I photograph bugs or water drops among the weeds and become become blind to the roll of the hills. Also developing an eye and a hand for jiggling takes time and practice. One must commit to such a path. Of course if I see some curvy wrought iron stuff like the stuff that gave form to my, "nearly successful" shot, it might lure me to begin jiggling, and I'll probably look for some good side light on the swamp maples at Macricostas to pan or jiggle the way André did in the framed image he showed us. I may have a future in jiggling yet, but perhaps to jiggle or not to jiggle is not the question. The path of every expressive photographer is to find his own voice and articulate it clearly. Perhaps the real value in these strategies is that they break any link to photography as documentation or to photography as imitation while encouraging experimentation toward forever rediscovering and epanding one's expressive potential. The image above is not jiggled, but I find much in it that I recognize as my own, consistent with other images on this blog; and yet that stripe of green is definitely new.

Morning Comes to Consciousness

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Lunenburg lies across the neck of a rocky peninsula on Nova Scotia's ocean coast. A single road leads out onto the headland to the tiny, fishing community of Blue Rocks which sits perched on ledge as far out as one can build. The center of Blue Rocks is marked by a crossroad with an old, wooden church, but beyond that Blue Rocks is little more than a collection of piers and shacks, a handful of small homes clinging to the rock at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Roads branch from the Blue Rocks Road along low ridges, then turn to dirt and then to ruts with grass down the center to provide access to a scattering of small, vacation houses and fishing shacks on the various small bays and along the northeast shore, but nothing lies further out on the low-lying, rocky headlands than Blue Rocks.

We woke around four AM on the first morning of the workshop and were at the end of Blue Rocks Road before sunrise. One of the joys of this workshop was the energy and seriousness of purpose of everyone in the group. It's hard to believe that when I shot this we barely knew each other.

I set my tripod up on a tall flat rock to get as much separation as possible between the lobsterman's motor boat and the bit of island behind it. The land beyond is part of the headland and encircles a shallow cove. Lobstermen use small boats like this to get to the fishing boats which they anchor off shore and take to the open sea. We'd seen the lobsterman leave shortly after we arrived, and one of my workshop colleagues made a great silhouette of him walking along the dock with his lunch bucket. I almost didn't notice his boat passing in the background of this shot ten or fifteen minutes later. In a few minutes the sun will appear behind these rocks. Low clouds blocked much of the sunrise, but two of my colleagues got stunning shots anyhow. Another great joy of workshops is seeing the shots I didn't see.

Lunenburg Panorama

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I arrived in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia on Sunday, May 24, after photo explorations that took me to Jonesport, Maine, and across the Canadian border into Campobello. I photographed the lighthouse at the eastern most tip of the U.S.. After three summers of site scouting along Maine's coast, I'd finally reached the top, and I'd become familiar with fishing villages and other features at the tip of each peninsula. I crossed the border to Canada in Calais, a name which the locals pronounce like the numb, hard spots on my feet. I reached St. John, NB, late in the afternoon and ferried to Digby, Nova Scotia, docking after dark. I finally arrived in Lunenburg the next morning to begin a week long photography workshop with André Gallant. The best way for me to resume my journal is to reflect on that workshop.

I find taking at least one photo workshop a year to be a wonderful way of pushing myself into new territory, and challenging habits and beliefs that guide my picture taking. In a good workshop participants become aware of the aesthetic values and sensibilities of the instructor and are guided by them. In the end, one encompasses, makes one's own, what is harmonious to one's own sense of direction and purpose, but that is a lengthy process.

There is no shortage of competing photography workshops in New England to choose from each summer. I had taken a workshop with André and Freeman Patterson previously, the first workshop I ever took. That experience with André and Freeman combined with my interest in visiting Nova Scotia to make this workshop my overwhelming first choice. Anyone with an interest in creating art photography should look for a chance to take a workshop from André or André and Freeman together. Who better than André to guide me to the best fishing villages and other riches along the coast of Nova Scotia? And it was the right time for me to reengage with André's aesthetic and benefit from his sharp eye.

How can I put into words the subtle effect this week had on me? Am I even aware yet of its true impact?

The most tangible fallout is that it has led me to shoot panoramas, not that panorama shooting has any measurable importance in André's work or thought, but he showed us the way to stitch panoramas easily in Photoshop, and how could I not want to make my own panorama of Lunenburg Harbor? This is about three-fifths of the full panorama I shot. Even so, the cropped original of this jpg is still 20,983 pixels wide, though this copy is only 1280.

Most of the considerations for this panorama were technical rather than artistic, though every decision is ultimately an artistic choice. Except for color, it is essentially like the famous panoramas of New York harbor shot from Brooklyn more than 100 years ago. It has no special reason that dictates where it begins or ends, and only enough water and sky are included to set off the shoreline; the weather is generic; the time was chosen to accent with shadows. I debated whether it belonged in this blog at all. One could thoughtlessly go on producing similar panoramas of many waterfronts. especially when they can be easily viewed from across some bay and at enough distance to avoid dealing with the effects of perspective.

Never-the-less, my love of using my long lenses to flatten architectural forms into simple, clear compositions was teased and challenged by the possibilities of shooting this way. Prospects such as this always pose hard questions about where to begin and end, and the possibility of deciding later, thoughtfully cropping on a clear computer monitor instead of through a tiny viewfinder is tempting though also a bit unsatisfying. It avoids essential questions such as how to best make use of the long form compositionally and how to compose landscapes in the long form that integrate and lead the eye through foreground and background meaningfully. Throughout my travels after the workshop I kept trying to study this question, to see inside a different box. I'm also intrigued by the way panoramas complicate normal expectations of time and space in photography; the same person may appear repeatedly by moving into each frame, the space behind me will appear in front of me and soon repeatedly if I rotate far enough.

In any case I can't deny the amazing visual power of images such as the one above, the way it offers a sense of omniscience, and its automatic authority in documenting the life of a city. It's with good reason I saw almost identical panoramas of Lunenburg on sale in stores around town.

Hay Wagon

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

At the top of the stair
I was slapped by Spider Light.
Complexities resolve
To effortless geometrics,
Commanding the eye
Like the rose window
At the end of the cathedral nave
Where the organ point reverberates,
And like the inside of a fiddle,
Resonant and lithe.

Only later did I notice
The flying hay wagon
In the attic air
Like the lost chord,
Last vestige of
Kuerners working the land
Of root clinging to rock and earth.

So obvious and so enjoyable was the "vaulting" of the barn that it was awhile before I gave any attention to the wagon, here, on the third floor. I wasn't expecting it. This bank barn burrows in two full stories so that the hay wagon can be driven in here and the hay unloaded where it's dry. Hay is dropped left and right to level 2 for storage in the haymow and piled two-and-a-half stories high. Later it can be dropped again to feed animals housed in "the crypt" below or to reload onto wagons waiting down in the barnyard. Here, at last, farming still carried on by Kuerners. Betsy's hay lies somewhere below.

Karl J. Kuerner has done some beautiful paintings of this space. One of them, "Unloading Straw," is on his web site.

Spider Light

Tattoo

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there -
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

by Wallace Stevens

Over the Mow

KARL J. KUERNER: "The way I really came to understand hard work was to make hay with my grandfather. He drove the tractor while I threw bales on the wagon for my father to stack. Grandfather never slowed down to accommodate me. After he was gone, it was even worse. Dad drove and I had to load and stack."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I didn't reach the third floor until very late in the morning. Perhaps I should have taken time earlier to explore the building fully and to construct a mental image of its layout. It will require a return trip to think about and to reconcile what I know of the inside and the outside, but my approach to photographing here was more immediate. I stopped whenever I thought I saw potential for an image, and I never knew if something better lay ahead. My only goal was to move at a pace to permit shooting on all three floors before we quit and to try to move at the resonant tempo.

Looking at my interior and exterior shots now, I realize there are parts of the building I never saw, never figured out how to reach. On the other hand, and whatever the results, my seeing was always fresh, every step was an adventure, and I avoided the perils of returning later to search for a position and a shot that had resonated deeply on first approach but had vanished now. Cook when the fire is hot.

This flight to the third floor is not directly above the flight from first to second. I wish I knew why. I like the homemade hand rail on the left of the stair and the sheer drop on the right.

I took an especially long time in the stairwells; I suspect four distinct light sources is a photographic rarity. Two are obvious in this image. A third is behind us, a bit of glow from deep in the barn and of no consequence here; there is a fourth source behind the stairs, through a door to a room with an incandescent bulb that radiates amber light onto a wooden ladder half hidden leaning against the wall and casting a shadow noir. I made a number of images that tried to contrast these last three distinct light environments, especially the way the white light from the window met the golden universe of the bare bulb.

So many possibilities to compose! So many ways to lead the eye! I took my time, but eventually I could no longer resist the pull of that attic space, my ultimate destination for the day. Gene Logsdon ends Wyeth People by noting that Wyeth, "paints people who have learned this basic lesson of life: to endure. He paints endurance. He paints eternity." Was that what I was doing now, trying to walk through a bit of Wyeth's eternity? Where would it lead me? What might I find?

Betsy's Hay

from "WYETH PEOPLE":
"I tried to tell her [Betsy Wyeth] about my excitement in finding the subjects Andy had painted.
... 'But aren't you disappointed?'
... 'Not really. Everything is usually smaller than I thought it was from the paintings, but I enjoy seeing how he edited out all the stuff that would have weakened them.'
... She smiled. 'Well, at least, after that, you won't say Andy paints like a camera.'"

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is early spring. Out the window Kuerner Hill has recently turned green, and the hay mow is, understandably, nearly empty. It's clear that what farming occurs here now is just to provide for the few animals on the property and the livestock of a few neighbors. This is actually, I think, "Walt's hay," as the name on the front wall suggests. Betsy's hay was an even smaller pile to the left. At least here is a spot where real work is still going on.

I shot this too quickly on my way to something else. Had I been more patient I would have made one more exposure to clean up some of the shadow detail. Thirty seconds is a long exposure, but to get two stops more brightness for the next exposure, in the sequence required getting the pocket timer from my backpack and lingering two minutes more. I'd been doing it all morning, but somehow I didn't believe this shot would please me as much as it does, and time was precious. The pressure to rush must always be resisted; let the right brain lead.

Kuerner Hill

GENE LOGSDON: "The whole [Kuerner] farm was like a museum of Wyeth paintings cleverly concealed by reality. It was delightful hunting them out."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the great barn the spirit of Wyeth was always elusive, just out of reach, even as it was omnipresent in light and textures and in my thoughts. Like many barns, the second floor opens over the barn yard in a large Dutch door so that stored, hay bales can be dropped onto waiting wagons. The door is flanked by windows, and all stare eternally at Kuerner Hill. It is one of those views familiar from many Wyeth paintings and drawings. as is the view back the other way. Wyeth may have only rarely sketched the barn, but he sketched from it, perhaps taking a bit of shelter in the winter behind the Dutch door while he drew Kuerner Hill.

In the Nethers

KARL KUERNER, SR.: "Andy spends a lot of time over here, painting. We don't pay him any mind. We let him alone. That's what he needs. To be let alone. To know that we don't care how long he stays, or when he comes, or when he leaves. He could just as well be a rabbit coming and going. That's what he likes."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  When we arrived at Kuerner Farm Tuesday morning there was a red pickup in the driveway. Although we worried that it might be someone who would try to countermand our mission, fortune was smiling. We quickly discovered that the pickup belonged to Karl J. Kuerner, the grandson of Karl Kuerner, Sr., Andrew Wyeth's surrogate father and friend. Karl J. is a painter who learned to draw as a child, "watching Andy," and studied painting with Andrew's sister, Carolyn. Karl was happy to answer our questions and talk about art, and soon he was showing us through the barn and then showed us how to close up after he left.

Beyond the red door we passed between horse stalls into a deep, crypt-like space forested by columns. At the front and side of the barn, light poured in though several windows but barely seemed to penetrate the shadows. At the back, where the barn was dug into the hillside, a yellow glow came from a bulb above a steep, narrow stairway. How could I help but imagine Andrew Wyeth on his first adventure here perhaps as many as seventy-seven years earlier. Even though Wyeth rarely drew the barn, I sensed his spirit among the cobwebs and, I'd like to think, lurking in this image.

Karl Sr's spirit was quite evident everywhere. Karl J. writes of the, "No electricity needed here...stubborn independence that marked the Kuerner's 75 years of farming." Karl Sr. has been portrayed as a hard-working individualist who lived a utilitarian life and prided himself on his capacity for labor-saving, home-spun innovation. We'd already caught a glimpse of how he harnessed the underground spring. Most working barns are practical, make-shift affairs, added on to and altered as needs or crops change. Barns are studies in "form follows function," and Karl had made sure his barn was as functional as possible.

Kuerners' is a bank barn, a large one. The lower stories are dug into the hillside. At the back wagons can load hay bales and grain directly to the two upper floors. Inside, the arrangement of spaces was filled with surprises. It was clear it was the result of a careful plan integrating vertical spaces with horizontal layout. Making sense of them would require a longer visit or an expert tour, but I'm sure it's all geared to what needs to be where at which season. Various chutes and ducts seemed to have been added or altered as practices changed slightly. What was the adaptation that scooped a bit of daylight onto the steep, narrow stairs. Light was a necessity there before electricity. On the other hand, extra space for stair wells and in some cases stair rails were an absent luxury. I could imagine someone lugging an awkward bundle down the stairs and how a rail might make that impossible. Few bundles are lugged now. Hay bales are stored, but no cows are milked now and the dust has settled.

Later we visited Karl J. at his home, just behind Kuerner Hill, and I especially enjoyed his clean sense of design and the thoughtful characterization in two of the portraits I saw there.

Kuerner Stable

KARL KUERNER SR (quoted from Gene Logsdon): "This place is, well, like home to Andy. It IS home, by golly. Andy and me, we've known each other a long time. My land butts up against the Wyeths' over the hill across the road, and the Wyeth kids played around this farm from little on up. I raise my Brown Swiss cattle, grow a little oats and hay for them. My son and I work together. We mow grass and trim trees and such for people around here. I don't farm so hard anymore. More money in taking care of estates."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL "Following the Footsteps of Andrew Wyeth - Kuerner Farm, Part 1": It had been drizzling on and off all morning, big drops that felt as if they came from the trees, but we were in the middle of the field and trying to make the most of limited shoot time. We shielded our gear with towels and endured. I've been treading the footsteps of Andrew Wyeth again. Thanks to my friend Gary and access provided by the Brandywine River Museum, the two of us have just spent several days photographing in and around the Koerner House and other sites in Chadds Ford, PA.

Kuerner Farm is where Andrew Wyeth reached adulthood as an artist. He became part of the Kuerner family and the land. Among his best works are the "soulscapes," he painted here. One could certainly never stand and photograph one, nor would I ever want to try.

Gary and I were still in the upper field, once an orchard, when the rain picked up. We headed for the only open door, but I stopped first to shoot the Kuerner house behind clusters of yellow flowers, wet and glistening in the grass; so Gary arrived at the stable first and dryer. When I got there he was already shooting, peering over gates into stalls and passageways toward depths in the base of the Kuerner barn that had been dug into the side of the hill. Three more stories of barn were above us. It was an immense structure.

In the picture above most of the barn is in front of me. Behind me is the old milking room where Wyeth painted "Spring Fed." The great stone trough is still there, still filled from the underground spring which flows when the faucet is turned. At the foot of the trough the bucket is still perched upside down between the wall and the pipe. The windows are more as they are in one of Wyeth's sketches. Other sketches suggest this was not just the milking room but also the room where animals were slaughtered and butchered. In several Anna is seen busy, cleaning the milkroom. In a final watercolor, there is just a single window through which we see Kuerner Hill brightly glowing and the bull standing by the barnyard wall. In the final tempera, however, we are looking into another room, through more windows with bull and Kuerner HIll proud in the background. However, as I looked through the actual windows nothing lined up and a pile of farm refuse was in the outer room.

The facts of Spring Fed mostly remained but I felt none of its spirit. It was the barn itself that called to both of us. For the next hour we made images peering into the shadows of the lower barn, a place where time seemed to have stopped. Whatever lay behind the red door, for now it barred our way.

The Brandywine River Museum and Kuerner Farm

Waller Under Spring Clouds, April 23rd, 2009

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The barns of Waller are venerable. That's as simply as I can say it. Unless I'm preoccupied or totally insensitive I can't pass here without feeling their power. How long it took me to understand! They are so quiet now; they barely whisper, and twice a year the fields are hayed. Are the barns also in retirement? I like sharing in their quietness and their testimony, and it can't help but influence the kinds of photographs I make here.

The barns are great hollow shells. Inside, empty cow stalls remind us that this field once reeked of cow manure and urine, that it was often mostly mud. Or, more likely cows grazed on the uphill slopes, and this flat, rich land was planted with corn. One of the barns is a tobacco barn. At some point tobacco grown here supplied the prized wrappers for which Connecticut was known. What did farming look like when the American Revolution stirred within some of these walls? But even without their pedigree, the barns themselves are a venerable presence. It's in the wooden clapboards that hold their volume. They anchor the north end of The Great Hollow, one of the few places that a visitor from the late 18th century might almost recognize.

Others have noted that photography is 25% preparation and 75% luck. From two hills over, at the orchard on Baldwin Hill, I could see a patch of interesting cloud forms, and I calculated that the lake or Waller Farm might be, pardon the expression, ground zero. It's usually futile to chase clouds, but this felt right. I had to pass the lake to get to Waller. I rushed because the clouds were moving. Coming down the road from the left I saw my chance, parked, hoisted my pack, shouldered my tripod and took off across the field. Because I've shot here often, I knew where to stand to make the barns fan out across the field while putting the klieg light at the back. The first two exposures were a quick HDR set, just position, zoom, and shoot. I had time for five more shots and the clouds were gone. As it turns out, those last five shots were just wishful thinking. Fortunately, the first exposure was spot on, and I worked up two versions, one using the single shot and one with the HDR set.

A few other images made at Waller Farm:
The Hollow
Clarion Call
Peeking In
The Other Side
Colors of Winter
Waller Farm
Inner Space
Behind Inner Space
Composition in Triple Time
Barn Dance
Unarbitrariness
Window Faces

Hillside

HENRY PEACH ROBINSON: "A picture should draw you on to admire it, not show you everything at a glance. After a satisfactory general effect, beauty after beauty should unfold itself, and they should not all shout at once . . . This quality [mystery] has never been so much appreciated in photography as it deserved. The object seems to have been always to tell all you know.. This is a great mistake. Tell everything to your lawyer, your doctor, and your photographer (especially your defects when you have your portrait taken, that the sympathetic photographer may have a chance of dealing with them), but never to your critic. He much prefers to judge whether that is a boathouse in the shadow of the trees, or only a shepherd's hut. We all like to have a bit left for our imagination to play with. Photography would have been settled a fine art long ago if we had not, in more ways than one, gone so much into detail. We have always been too proud of the detail of our work and the ordinary detail of our processes."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It's not of great importance, but this strikes me as an odd composition. I thought so when I framed it. What is it that makes a photographer take a stand at a particular spot and compose? Jane wondered why I didn't jump the fence. Well, I'd already been shooting those barns from the other side, and I was surprised at the way they turned up in an odd place with the big fence hogging the frame. Now that I see it, what I really like is the objective, offhand point of view. Does it suggest a moment in passing? The rational mind wants to take aim at the farmstead; make a picture about that farmstead. This composition interests me because it gets past that prejudice of the reasoning mind. It splits our attention. Two roads diverge...

It all depends on balance, I shot two versions. The rejected version placed the large post further right so it became a frame element; it made the all-too-diminished farmstead became the subject of the image. Here the fence post occupies prime real estate at the "thirds" position. How odd! And it leaves us with choices. The angled fence leading to the too-important fence post opens a second path, and it's no longer just about the farmstead. I'd have liked a bit more mist rising out of the Shepaug River valley just this side of the last hill. Maybe I'll watch this spot until it happens, but by then the horse will have moved.

Whan that Aprill, with his Shoures Soote

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:    At long last, here is spring, still tender and whispering, the first blush enhanced by overcast skies. Correspondents have for the past few weeks hinted, urged and cajoled for images of Spring. The photographer is limited by what the landscape offers. However, what began in the swamp is now climbing the hill. For me, not even Fall can surpass the delicacy with which Spring paints the hillsides, but the changes at this season come as a relentless surge; one day the trees are all Seurat, the next day they are Van Gogh. Fall can wash away in one good rain, or it can drag on for weeks, but spring always marches through, and the photographer who wishes to make the most of the season must watch and plan carefully. No good dawn is to be wasted. Some days I shoot both dawn and dusk. For some Spring is a time of pilgrimages, for me it is a time for vigils.

TODAY'S PHOTO - Lower Plunge, Early Spring, Late Afternoon

Maeve Benchy: "Life is never dull if you know where to look."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Much of the time, especially in the "off seasons" when the landscape is drab, I set out on a walk to see what images I can make. In March and early April, everything is beaten down, and often the best shots are taken close up, or I return home having found nothing worse than a good walk. Then again, I welcome any time of year when my view can stretch out to encompass the grand landscape.

Where better than Plunge Pool. Really a series of five pools divided by beaver dams, the trail down to the upper pool is relatively untraveled but not so remote as the 4 lower pools. To reach the other four pools one must balance on logs tossed across a stream and cross over the first beaver dam. The logs have decayed badly over the winter. At the far end of the first dam one must cross two additional channels to reach the trail on the other side that leads back alongside pools 2, 3, and 4 to the last pool. Last week the dam could not be crossed, so I went in from the other side.

This approach is equally remote even though Pitch Road goes directly through the lower pool. With each season more of Pitch Road is under its water, but I've never seen a car even where the road remains open. Nor is it a pleasant stroll over the road's ruins which start long before one reaches the pond. No place in the vicinity has such a feral feel. The pond is a gaping wound consuming forest as the beavers tend their dikes. The beavers, the ducks, the Canada geese took over here long ago, but it is the wreckage of forest that makes it so forbidding. Root balls tipped as the forest fell are bathed in the rains and dried in the sun until they turn brittle and white. Along the shore fallen hemlocks stripped of their needles loom like the rib cages of felled animals. Everywhere the ground oozes as the broth warms.

I've been coming to Plunge Pool for many years. It's taken this long to figure out how to order the enormous complexities of the place into an image. It's a matter of getting to know the players. There were more of them in past years. I've finally realized that the cluster of dead white pines that hug the shoreline in the center back of this picture give the place its grandeur. If grandeur is the goal then all else follows from this. The dead pines must be visible to the very top. Because I know the place well, I've discovered where the best supporting characters can be found and which ones will be most useful in deepening the picture space. Of course there are many more images to be made here, but late on a sunny afternoon, this is the place to stand if you want to watch the slow power of time. It's been raining for two days. I'm eager to get back here and see how it will look when it is full.

Here are images of the lower pool made in 2007 and previously published on the blog: 1, 2, 3.

Surface Tension

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Even in a small pool the very slightest whisp of air will set the surface of the water moving long before faint ripples appear. The specks on the water are tiny, drifting barges that give away the motion of the pool. In a fifth second exposure (as above), unless the surface is absolutely still, one sees their trajectory rather than their form. I waited a long time before the pond stopped rocking and the spring flotsam came momentarily to rest.

I've been visiting Emerald Pool almost daily for the past week. Unlike the earlier photos, this one was taken in mid-afternoon so the lily is back lit. At first glance the transparency of the lily pad may make it appear otherwise, but the photo's focus is the backlight that reflects off the rim of the leaf, off several bits of floating matter, and off the bead of water that usually forms where the leaf fold bends the pond broth.

Migrating birds follow the stars. Tuberous lilies, deep in the mud, seek the sun. Where does body end and mind begin? How infinite the forms of spirit!

Self in Christina's World

Searching Wyeth's Footsteps

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: How many different qualities of light can be caught in a single image? It's not the first time I've thought of Vermeer while shooting in Wyeth's footsteps. Wyeth, himself, raved about the light here.

The shot is a serendipitous rediscovery from last summer's adventure rummaging in Christina's World. In this hallway the shadows were dark, and the highlights were bright, and the camera couldn't encompass the difference. Even though I wasn't processing HDR images back then, I shot the required steps and briefly contemplated doing the laborious cut and paste in Photoshop. Then I forgot about them until I stumbled on them Monday night. HDR is much quicker and achieves better results.

An interesting article on Andrew Wyeth

Unfolding Spring

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On NPR this week I learned that migrating song birds, not only travel by night, but that they navigate by the stars.

Aroused,
thrust through dark mud,
tubers,
subterrestrials,
touch and probe
their bottom empire.

Then,
folded and furled,
tucked and pleated,
infant tissues
spiral out,
unfold in spring waters.

Lily pads,
they seem so simple.
Origami nightmare
to put them back,
or redirect
their solar collection.

Pond Musk

MINOR WHITE: "Sequences originate for me from some hidden place. Though I habitually play photographs against each other, or words against images in pairs, triplets, or rows of four with expectations of magic, sequences originate from within. And I prefer to let them. In fact I cannot seriously do otherwise than photograph on impulse and let whatever words will, flow spontaneously."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What has been wiggling at Emerald Pool? Since my last visit the ice has completely melted, and here and there ragged, rubbery pads have been poking up through the surface and spreading out. Beneath the surface shoots and stalks stir the broth to cloudy life, while down in the murk tiny things scurry. Still no peepers here. We decorate nurseries with pretty flowers to flatter the eye and fill our yards with crocuses and daffodils, but throughout nature conception is a messy affair that begins in the dark mud. To find the start of spring I prefer to look for it there.

On Thursday morning I stood from 10AM to noon shooting things beneath the surface. Bright sun poked unevenly through the rim of trees occasionally spotlighting things deep in the water. I was in position when the right wind cleared the path for a beam to brush this bouquet, and I clicked the shutter before the same wind churned the water's surface.

March Meditation No.2

GUEST DIARIST: Ah Spring! The translucent ice has melted on Emerald Pool. The snowdrops are blooming in the yard. The skunk cabbage is popping up along the roadside amid the sand of winter. The day lilies are showing signs of life. The water of the Shepaug, like the water of Great Falls, is washing away the rotting leaves. Spring, Passover, Easter: times of remembering and looking ahead - a new beginning!

From the Haggadah:

"Were it our mouths were filled with a

singing like the sea,

And our tongues awash with song, as

waves-countless,

And our lips to lauding, as the skies

are wide,

And our eyes illumined like the sun

and the moon,

And our hands spread-out like the

eagles of heaven,

And our feet as fleet as fawns,

Still, we would not suffice in thanking

You, Lord God-of-us.

For those that sow with tears, with joy

will reap.

Walks-on the walker crying, bearing

the sack of seed;

then comes the comer, rejoicing,

carrying his sheaves."

--Jane Roth

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: "Emerald Pool"! To call it a pond seems an exaggeration. One must bushwack through forest to get to the shoreline except for where a remote trail leads by one side. To people it's not much use. Why is Emerald Pool here? I have no idea - an idea of foresters or beavers, perhaps? To the west the land falls off in an area known as "the boulder field" where one scrambles over stones as large as refrigerators and box cars and the forest grows in the crevices. Maybe the pool is merely the result of a dimple in boulders covered over and clotted with dark mud. As forsaken by people as it is, it is a meeting place for all sorts of animals who share its cool waters. It seems even more animal-friendly for being so small. In the summer it is where deer and great blues, frogs and water lilies, beavers and water striders meet.

It is in this remote spot that the last of the season's ice is just giving way to spring; as if right here the season was on the edge of tipping, the last of winter melting into the pool as the earth's axis positioned itself for spring. Even as I watched the leaves of 2008 swallowed by the dark mud, I also knew that shoots deep in the earth had begun wiggling. If I return the next time the sun shines, I may hear peepers.

March Meditation

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT: "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - I was at Emerald Pool a week ago. It is a small pond, deep in the woods, and ice along the banks had not yet let go of winter.

A Paneful Composition

EDWARD WESTON: "My eyes are no more than scouts… the camera’s eye may entirely change my original idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Perhaps this car image is redundancy? ...it is, I promise, the last of the series, but the image accompanies an observation or illustration of the mysteries of photographic seeing. ...and besides, I like it.

The process of the shoot took me steadily closer, first in the driver's window, then through it, closer until the grit on the dashboard nearly scratched my chin. "Noir Technicolor" seems to represent the optimum for sharp focus on both the steering wheel and the dash grit. Leaning closer, the soft focus grit made "Farm Noir." The car door was stuck; I couldn't lean further in; I thought I was done.

I gathered up tripod and camera to climb down from the culverts on which I was uneasily perched, when a flash came at me as if out of the corner of my eye. I was just pulling back lens, head, tripod - - - I had been in just this position near the start of the sequence, shot unsatisfactorily and moved on - - - but this time I saw it in a new way. I had a sense as if gears had suddenly meshed, and I knew that the car and I could travel. In yesterday's shot I had caught the logic of the things: steering wheel, dash, and through the windshield with it's wonderful shades and shapes. The gestalt had shifted now. I saw a rhythm of forms, flickering planes that were previously concealed. I was in sync with a different reality and knew just where to put my camera to balance the composition. Why had this shot been invisible fifteen minutes earlier on the way in? The light seems not too different.

The photographer's job is always to refine and simplify the complexities in front of the lens. However, much I may work on this consciously, the simplifications require changing eyes. Noticed or not, new images only form when the gestalt shifts. It is the practiced spirit behind the singer's voice that shapes & characterizes the sound; the photographer's eye must become like the singer's voice.

To make this composition work in the exposed image it had to be processed differently, not for contrast but for greater evenness of tone. The eye must be able to move easily from the driver's window to speedometer gauges, and on - from shape to shape. The viewer's eye follows a very different path here than it did in the noir images, and the outcome is different as well. Is this composition more abstracted than the noir images?

Noir Technicolor

WALKER EVANS: "The meaning of quality in photography’s best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system; ...our overwhelming formal education deals in words, mathematical figures and methods of rational thought, not in images."

ARISTOTLE: "You should never think without an image."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Stop. If you've looked at this picture and haven't seen the word, INTERNATIONAL on the dashboard, you might want to go back, turn down a few lights around your computer monitor, and get the image as close to full screen as possible.

There now...

Before posting, I always consider the danger of redundancy. Often exhibiting two slightly different versions of the same basic composition suggests neither of them is quite right. I post them both in order to consider their differences. However, if forced to chose I would pick this.

A number of people wrote to say that they liked "Farm Noir," but that it seemed unlike my other photos. It's not the subject that's new. There are other car shots on TODAY'S; it's a subject I return to from time to time. What's different in "Farm Noir" is the immediately recognizable, cinema, blue-gray, soft-focus wash of stylization. One can argue whether "Noir Technicolor" is really noir at all; "Farm Noir," leaves no doubt. Making such literal allusions has never been something I do.

Jane and I have been watching a lot of Film Noir lately, and I was consciously enjoying the noir ambiance as I shot seven distinct compositional groups of shots. So why is this the shot of choice? I think mostly because this is more true to what drew me to shoot here. Before I began shooting, I liked the high-contrast lighting on the steering wheel, it's noir possibilities. I liked the control HDR tone mapping would give me to reveal clearly just enough shadow detail down the dashboard, another noir effect. However, those things didn't draw me to shoot. Rather it was the wonderful windshield splashed with the late-day sun, a backlit, abstract, firecracker of a mural framed by the dashboard. This shot makes the most of it.

Having said that I prefer "Noir Technicolor," others are, of course, free to chose differently or reject both, and I'm delighted that I can keep both.

Farm Noir

MAXWELL BODENHEIM: "Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Every old, working farmstead has at least one old, rusting truck ready to drive me off into a 1940s sunset. Some of them have stories attached, but most are mute like this one. Brent, often full of stories, shrugged at my inquiry. "Gee, Grampa's International's always been there." I returned last week to discover he'd removed the Weber barbecue that had been snuggled into the passenger's seat for almost as long. It couldn't have happened at a better moment; the light was perfect.

Even by published standards for decaying farm vehicles, this one is a prize. There is much beyond what I photographed here. Where exterior surface remains unrusted & uncrusted, it has patina that ranges from cranberry to custard but which is mostly variagated slate. Where it has not been colonized, the finish is sometimes as smooth as egg-tempera paint. But much of the old International is teeming. The swooping fenders are a cornucopia of multicolored lichens and rust. Since the light is pretty good for much of the afternoon, one can compose these elements into compositions for hours. But best of all, the setting sun shines directly into the windshield. That's great for shots like this, but it also creates a glancing light across fenders and sides that is image dynamite.

The light pouring through the windshield was irresistible, and the window on the driver's side was long gone. I set my tripod there, by the driver's side door. I wanted to get close, but debris made it difficult. It took me awhile finally to get this close. Alas, as the photo shows, even at f22 I was too close to keep both wheel and windshield in focus. Sometimes a technical flaw is a compositional virtue; does the soft focus dash suggest the view of the last groggy driver, slumped on the wheel, opening his eyes momentarily, shortly after his last accident?

Rabbit Hill, Winter, 2005

WALKER EVANS: "When you say 'documentary' you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive the word. It should be documentary style because documentary photography is police photography of the scene of a murder. . . .  That's a real document. You see art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction."

WALKER EVANS: (from a wall label for an exhibition of signs and photographs of signs): "The photographer, the artist, "takes" a picture; symbolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim for that object or that composition, and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place. The claim is that he has rendered his object in some way transcendent, and that in each instance his vision has penetrating validity."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: March is the time of dead land. Change is in the bud and cracking up through the hard earth, but the ice is not yet melted, and the buds are tight shut. I strain for the least hint of color and wait for the warm rain. Tentatively I am crossing my fingers and hoping my dungeon labor at the computer is done. The backup genie seems satisfied for now. Enough! One more photo from 2005 suggests the mood I can't quite throw off.

I spent all of today shooting on Rabbit HIll where brisk wind drove the patchy remnants of tired storms over the hill. Later in the day breaks occurred promising, "theater lights." I scoped and waited. The sun frequently bathed next the hill south and later lit the hills north, but there were only thirty second when it fell on Rabbit Hill. An inky track of impenetrable gray gloom moved all day long over rabbit hill stopping the sun.

The photo above shot in January of '05 has never been shown before. Until recently I was bothered by the position of the wires. My compositional aesthetic is more reminiscent of painting. I don't seek a documentary style. Then again, the sense of moment is acute enough here that I've come to find this more documentary-style composition quite intriguing. Best seen, like the previous TODAY'S, full screen.

Corn Grater

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Three Maxims

My daily dungeon labors subvert all new photographic work. I hike and shoot as often as possible, but I do so knowing I must return to a stubborn and ill-tempered computer that balks at transferring almost 170 DVDs to new hard drives. As each folder of photographs is transferred I must move the link that ties it to my catalogue so that notes and keywords will be preserved and no images lost. For reasons I don't understand the transfer process devours much of my computer's power, so other work must be curtailed. My guru tells me to imagine a new Macbook. My son has been telling me to upgrade for years. All this stress and loss of work time is necessary for my backup genie to keep pace with the backup task. He won't stop nagging me until I'm done. Until then I must fight for every bit of concentration and know that I will have no time afterward for processing new work.

This photo was made the same morning in 2005 as Winter Burn. The contact sheet is always a record of consciousness. The first exposure of the day was taken on top of Rabbit Hill at 8:45 AM. It was a day of both making and taking. It appears that I stopped my car in two places and walked and shot a bit in each location. I made a number of exposures before the sun appeared dimly, but wind and snow forced me into the car at 8:58. I tried shooting through the car window. I took one "Impressionist-like" shot of whiteout before moving on.

Twenty minutes after reaching Rabbit Hill I was off the hill and shooting beside Lake Waramaug. Winter Burn was taken at 9:12. In fifteen minutes I made 26 exposures comprised of an initial exploratory group and 4 distinct compositional groups. That's very fast work, even hasty. The contact sheet is always a record of consciousness and sometimes of unconsciousness. My fitful wanderings show my struggle. The best shots in the set had compositional issues that might have been avoidable at the time of capture. Exposures were perfect. Seeing was imperfect, and it wasn't the whiteout.

By 9:29 I was back at the top of Rabbit Hill and shot this image. I think it was Atget who made the point that the hardest part of photography is knowing where to stand. This shot isn't as simple as it may seem. The fundamental idea is just that this strange sun should be of a certain size and in the center above the snow-blown tract. The corn field is a force field. If one walks along the edge (or had I greater wisdom or fortitude then, down into it) and keeps the sun centered in the image, the most important change will be in the angle at which one looks down the cornrows. How quickly and in what direction should the cornrows lead the eye? They are a bit like the rhythm section in that - how best to make the tempo harmonize with the background hills? How to let both set off that frozen fire.

Today I wouldn't be satisfied with this shot without walking the walk along the edge of the field and shooting along the way. Often I won't know what "the best place to stand," is until I've passed it. I snap as I go, each shot, hopefully, a refinement or improvement on a previous one. I never know what the scene will look like until I get there. Back then I was new to landscape photography, and didn't appreciate the importance of this last maxim; I was in the approximate right place. I took just three images. They reveal some of the details I was struggling with. Then I moved on to the Scottish highland cattle, covered in snow in the woods across the street.

Winter Burn

MINOR WHITE: "Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I took this photo during the first snow storm of 2005. Back then I was still a bit nervous about being out on the roads at the storm's worst and wasn't sure how much snow abuse my equipment could suffer. I knew enough to realize the sun was worth experimenting with, but I had no idea how powerful it could be in the finished images or how to properly expose for it. I got lucky, but had I known then what I know now, I might have spent the whole event at the top of Rabbit Hill and never driven down to the lake.

By the time I got there the snow was falling again and the sun was still trying. I stopped the car determined to make a solid effort at shooting, even though I hugged my car like a security blanket. If it were today, I would pull into the lot by the state park and walk, as I do on clear days, until I saw shots. I would have been relaxed and taken my time and known what I had when I went home. Back then I shot, excited by the beauty but convinced something even more spectacular must be happening over the next hill.

In spite of myself I made a few shots that day that I've often returned to, but this and one other taken a few moments earlier were milestones when I shot them. I've decided it's time to reinterpret this one in a new, finished image. The hardest part is getting the whites right. Too light and the sun loses impact. Too dark and the mist and snow can no longer be accepted as filtered and shadowed white. I've also removed branches from a tree that intruded from the side.

The image was used as the cover for the Winter, 2006, Washington Art Association Seasonal Bulletin.

First Lights

WALKER EVANS: "Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: It is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is defining of observation full and felt."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I did succeed with a few of the images I shot into the sun with my old Nikon 4300, but it was always a compromise. Without a tripod the only way to reduce lens flare was to angle the camera further away from the lens than I really wanted. The result was to reduce the wattage of the grass.

This is the most successful of the grass images taken before returning to 35mm SLR format. It was taken at the north end of the Macriscostas Preserve in September of 2005. When I took this, I knew I had a future in grasses no matter how sinful shooting into the sun was. Three months later I purchased a Nikon D70 DSLR (suddenly regretting all the Nikon lenses I had sold a few years back), and the great file swelling began.

Meadow Gold, Macricostas Preserve, 9/9/06

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I spent much of the summer of 2006 standing in Macricostas Meadow shooting images into the sun. It was a summer of meadow textures in preparation for a fall show. Even before attending Freeman Patterson's workshop in Shamper's Bluff, New Brunswick, I had pointed my lens toward the sun, but I did so guiltily and went back into the woods. The images I made were more swiped than composed. As expected, the images were filled with lens flare, but the little, hand-held Nikon 4300 I was shooting with left little chance to shield the lens. That December I returned to shooting with a single lens reflex camera and bought a hat with a wide brim.

My last morning in Shamper's Bluff, right after Freeman's workshop had ended, he invited me back to his gardens. For the first time all week the sun came out. After using the best of the morning light making compositions from the textures with early sidelight, I began packing up. Freeman suggested I go to the foot of the hill and shoot back toward the sun. I stayed and shot from there for an additional hour or two. Freeman had validated what I'd wanted to do, and I shot into the sun shamelessly.

Meadow Gold is but one of many photos made at Macricostas Preserve over the summer of 2006. Such backlit meadow textures were a significant addition to my photo palette and a favorite way of shooting even today. Throughout the summer of 2006, Macricostas provided an ever-changing variety of shapes and colors as layers of plants kept unfolding, throwing shoots and buds, blossoming, and going to seed. Each stage brought its own host of insects and the activities of the birds changed with the seasons. Every few days the show changed as I continued to look for new ways to shoot the same fields and new things to shoot in them. 

Looking back now I realize how important the experiences of that summer were. There were few barns that summer, but I'm still wading into grasses.

Freeman's Meadow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I have several reasons for changing the name of this not quite daily scrawl. First, "journal" more accurately reflects the way I have come to regard these pages; a place to jot down thoughts and musings of many kinds that flow from weekly shoots. No change in content: recipes, reports and ruminations from my photographic odyssey. The name change comes now to leave a mark that here the hard drive failure has led me to review old files and take stock. Where has this odyssey traveled?

I came out of the woods in the spring of 2005 - gave up mushrooms, tree toads, and indian pipe for the openness of the meadow. When it happened I was standing at the edge of an old pasture shooting toward a bolted-iron windmill out in the field. As I set up the shot - stone wall, vines and branches leading the eye to the windmill - just then the light changed and there was a Monet moment that fired up the branch. Thereafter, walking the tall grass I saw painterly textures of all kinds, many more than I had seen in the deep woods where there's no room for the light to spread out.

This photograph was made in the gardens of Freeman Patterson the following spring (2006). The painterly textures of the meadow have been drawing Freeman's lens for many years. In the fields that stretch from his house down to the loch in New Brunswick, he has encouraged a wild meadow of myriad surprises. The sun rises early behind his house and sets far away across the water. The meadow produces an ever changing palette from which he makes photographs of great beauty. As students in his workshop we were lucky to be able to play in his garden. I'd completely forgotten this photo and was pleased to rediscover it this week.

Misty Morning, October 8, 2008

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The backup genie and I have been talking lately. It all started when communication with the Dark Continent went dead. The Dark Continent is a 1 terabyte firewire drive that has been managing my 25 gigabyte/week photo habit. The drive was just five months old. When I bought it in October the backup genie said, "Sure. A better backup medium is just around the corner. Let's wait to act" The backup genie promptly hibernated.

The problem with the Dark Continent began when it spun up but failed to boot. A few moments later came the death rattle and my stomach rolled. Months worth of images flashed before my eyes. The backup genie was lying beneath the desk snoring thunderously. I shook him to attention, "Where are my files?"

He squinted from his left eye, "What files?" He and I have been talking a great deal since last week when the Dark Continent died.

It's clear that the backup genie was exhausted by the October's push to get multiple dozens of files crammed onto tiny DVDs, so we've been talking about how to make my gigabyte habit manageable. As to The Dark Continent, it's still under warranty, and the hard drive dealer routinely tries to retrieve data and load it onto the replacement drive, but I am convinced Dark Continent was beyond moribund before I received the RMA.

I suppose all this has come with a feeling akin to mourning, but the loss is just photographs, and most of them weren't very good. All "finished" work resides safely elsewhere. However, lost were images still in RAW form that I was eager to work on; five months of work gone and only the thumbnails in my catalog to remind me what I had. Gone are two more ice textures, planned to follow those just posted and two glittery, ice sunsets that I was especially proud of. Surviving are a handful of images that had at some time been emailed somewhere. These exist only in reduced resolution jpg form.

The photo above is one such image. It was the prize of many taken at this old farm last October. I was aiming to see what it was like in all four seasons. Unfortunately, there is probably not enough resolution left for a large printed version. A few more postings and I hope to be out of mourning. The loss, however, is only of photos, and most of them weren't very good.

The Shape of Wind

LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN: "The color of water, the shape of wind—if everyone thought of God in those terms and realized how far beyond human senses and ownership God must be, many of the feelings that divide us would be harmlessly blown away. Back to the basics, we should say, the true fundamentals—Earth supports us all; fire lights and warms us all; water sustains and purifies; air . . . air is the life of our life, the wind in our sails, the cool breeze on a summer day. Let's listen."

Radial Composition in Ice and Grass

MARC RIBAUD: "Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Impressionist painters attempted to paint light. In doing so they softened the firm outline of things and caught the dance of light playing with wind, heat and humidity. In emulating them, early photographers often blurred their images and added a romantic, "artistic" haze. My aim is exactly contrary. The painterliness that draws me to photograph exists in the illuminated subject itself. I seek to bring such subjects into sharp focus in order to better reveal the painterliness of reality. This photo should repay efforts to zoom close; see how the textures of each grass blade has been painted by light and ice.

Edenalia No.1 (alternate)

NOTE: Gary, a friend and fellow photographer, wrote to suggest this cropping. What a good idea! Unfortunately, printed at maximum size (12.5 inches high) on my printer, the resolution is 130ppi. That's low but probably not too low to get a good image.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: "Let photography quickly enrich the traveller's album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. So far so good. Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion, books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve our thanks and applause. But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!"

Edenalia No.1

EDVARD MUNCH: "The camera cannot compete with painting as long as it cannot be used in heaven or hell."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: "Taking Stock of Ice Storm Lessons, resumed": The morning of the January ice storm was rare, a real light show. Only now am I getting back to what I shot. The strengths and flaws of this photo should be a reminder of the difficulties previously recorded in this journal. There was a better exposure setting available that might have let me hold the depth of focus while still stopping the wind. The difference would have been enough to make the front branch sharp. Lesson learned, I hope.

A Farm

RENE MAGRITTE: "Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible."

Creepers & Climbers

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Wilderness returns
Brambles nibble pasture
Swallowing sod
Rocks heave
Roads rut
The hay barn sags and
Wind rips the tin roof
Purlins rot first and
The back house is last to fall.

Checkered

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I have a special love of clear textures, especially when opened by light. Consider this photograph a sampler of farm textures. Much more than most, it benefits from extreme zooming. Viewed on my monitor at 100% (1 pixel of original, captured photo for each screen pixel on the monitor), the image is roughly three-and-a-half times as large as the monitor. If printed at this scale it would be over five feet across.

Of course on my monitor I have to take it in pieces, but zoomed at that level, the hand wrought hardware of the heifer-barn door can be seen in some detail, and in the shadow of the gutter on the cow-barn I see where the installer twisted the wire hangers. Naturally, the three, mowed fields reveal three, distinct textures, but every blade of grass in the front field is visible right to the stone wall. At this magnification the decaying roof of the old cow-barn is a tilescape of debris on which my eyes graze, and in the depths of the shadows behind the dead, curling vines, the weathered planks and iron banding of the back silo stand clear. This texture overlay creates real space rather than murk behind the vines. I wish you too could zoom in and peak through the window, but unfortunately this jpg copy, reduced as always for the internet, pixelates long before any of these features come into focus. Putting aside the aesthetics of chunk viewing, I hope it provides some pleasure anyhow.

Sundown

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Are the only differences between smallscape and grandscape a matter of which muscles are challenged? I wonder. Whether looking into gears or across hillsides, I really don't know what it looks like until I get there. Therefore, I must go everywhere.

Climb or crawl, the best views always seem to be the most taxing, and a first visit rarely produces the best shots. I have to go back and go back again. Some of the best sluice shots were produced on my 4th visit. It took a full year until I even got to this hillside. Whatever is taxed is repeatedly taxed.

I had this pegged as a great sunrise view and finally made it out of bed at 6 AM on a clear morning to catch it. The sun was bright and the fall leaves were glowing, but the shot had no feeling. With the fall leaves hidden in shadow, this sundown shot poses the moment like a question. I'm pretty sure I still don't know all that can be done at the sluice or all that the sun can do to it. The sun will be entirely different at both sites by mid summer. One must go everywhere at all times.

Well, at many times; without fresh snow or spring color, lately most hillsides have been inhospitable to photography. Perhaps the season favors smallscapes. Like the possum who may be wintering under my wood pile, I'm enjoying the shelter of the sluice while the cold wind blows across the hills. I need a good reason to freeze and I'm persuaded to stop chasing the possum from the cat food bowl.

In any case, it has been a while since TODAY'S stepped back for a longer view, and I know a few readers will find this broad view refreshing.

Explorations of Form No.16, Syncopation 1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Thursday, Feb 5 - They say that to photograph well one must be part of the thing photographed. I, a cog in the sluice? I began shooting tight in order to feel the steel's heft and age. Slowly I pulled back, trying to encompass its complexity, but as the sun declined toward three o'clock my lens was drawn down inside the gears - left, right, backward, forward - each small movement turning the wheels around me until I could see and feel all of the parts moving together with the gliding infiltrations of light and shadow, as the sun followed its arc. I was free of gravity, a fulcrum clicking the shutter, syncopating the machinery's dance and the sliding sun. Then the sun fell behind the mill, the wheels were dark, and I noticed my knees ached and my fingers were frozen and numb.

Explorations of Form No.15, Perspective

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Thursday, Jan 29 - Photography is an art of the possible. I had more sluice to shoot, but I needed bright sunshine and the road toward Collinsville led into clouds. There would be good theater lights from an open hilltop, but shooting the sluice in the river valley left me waiting. I set up my tripod and tried to figure out how things worked.

The Farmington River bends sharply as it leaves Collinsville. The old mills are situated on the flat rocky land at the river bend, where the water level drops abruptly. I'm drawn to the Collins Factory site in part by the labyrinth of channels into which the Farmington River was divided in order to power the ancient machinery. The channels run between, around, and under the old mill buildings. They are a labyrinth of moats that move water independently of the way people move through the site. Is it my childhood love of old forts and castles at work again? I'm still trying to figure out how to photograph the mysteries of these moats.

I was shooting where the uppermost water is drawn off to supply the main canal. At the front of the oldest mill buildings a picturesque reflecting pool holds water from above the falls. This is the view most people see. When the wind is calm the pool mirrors the factory facade before the water tumbles over a grand cascade back to the river, but there is a secret channel that leads water beneath the buildings (Previous photos of pool and cascade: 1, 2, 3, 4). I was shooting at the back where the channel emerges.

The gears I was shooting serve sluice gates there. Six identical sets of gears and gates control the flow of water here. On the downstream side of the gates the channel divides. To the right two more gates control a stream that quickly plunges 15 feet to a deep moat. The moat bobs beneath various downstream shops. To the left the water flows freely to supply the main canal and its offshoots which turn the wheels of many more downstream shops. The gates I was shooting control the water that powered most of the old plant.

However other channels might have been rumbling further off beneath the mill. I've been in the basement and photographed where the last and greatest of the turbines catches the flow. Only a small leak hints that there is water that passes there, but I know which channel carries that water back to the river. As there is a maze of moats below, there is similarly a maze of bridges and access roads above. However, mapping canals and figuring out sluice mechanisms is not photography.

The sun emerged fully from behind the clouds just as the great stack that towers over all of the factory cast its shadow over my chosen subject, a colossal sundial. I waited another 15 minutes for the shadow to advance past my subject. Photography is an art of the possible; often I wait more than I shoot.

Explorations of Form No.12, Fugue

GUEST DIARIST: What is it about gear driven mechanics that fascinates and transcends the obvious? The delicate 19th century winding mechanism of a music box is as equally hypnotizing as the massive lifting device of a sluice gate. We stare, we listen, we challenge, and we stare again, each of us looking with different eyes, but transfixed and obsessed.

The pragmatist sees the engineering, the precise mathematics, the movement, and the practical application. He hears the repetitive beat and is excited by the end result.

The artist sees the delicate balance, the intertwining of shapes, the depth and perspective. He hears the fugues of Bach, and becomes alert with the anticipation of the next measure.

The poet sees the metaphor of a well set gear to marital bliss: a tightly run household, the meshing of intellect, emotions, and personality, and of course spooning. He hears the joy of laughter, and the sigh of satisfaction.

The challenger, while transfixed, cannot resist tossing debris into the sluice, and watching as it turns into dust. Likewise, in a good marriage, when challenged, the debris is churned into insignificance and tossed into the dustbin. -Jane Roth

Explorations of Form No.11, Context

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:  Just as a photo is a cross section of time, it is also a cross section of context. There is the context one sees, the given universe shown within the bounds of the image and disappearing off its edges.  Then there is something else perhaps akin to negative space and negative capability;  For that reason I like the term "negative context," presences to be guessed at and often more colorful in imagination than any reality?

Explorations of Form No.10, Shadow & Substance

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Thursday, Jan. 22 - Back at Collinville factories to shoot a row of wheels and gears that control the flow of canal water. On my previous visit (1/14), a week earlier, in the mid-afternoon, I had noticed that the low, winter sun articulated the forms and surfaces of this equipment clearly.  I noted also that the good light ended when the sun moved behind a mill building at about 3 PM. This time I was on the spot by 1:15, and the skies were clear. 

The equipment might have been 50 or even 150 years old. It had been painted, stripped, and repainted many times.  In between paintings it had sometimes rusted, and it was now mostly ignored. As a result, the ancient steel castings were taking on the look of organic things. 

Up close, I thought, they seemed a mystery of the stone age. I had brought a set of close-up lenses (sometimes called "diopters") as I wanted to get in closer than my macro lens permitted. At some point I need to compare the results through these lenses with results through extension tubes. Close-up lenses are far easier to manipulate.

A number of experiments suggested a single +4 diopter lens would get me in to where I thought I should be to make the most of the textures. I took a number of shots around the pin that attaches a crank handle to a heavy rod. I moved on to gears nearby but quickly concluded I wasn't feeling it and moved on.

The sluice gates were hidden out of site, but there must be 6 of them, each operated by a nearly identical set of wheels and gears. The sets were lined up, and, in addition to close-ups, I was interested in creating compositions that played on the repetitions. The framing possibilities seemed infinite, and I explored a number of angles, heights, and distances through my 103mm macro lens.  In some of the deeper shots I explored leading the eye to indistinctness by limiting depth of field. The more I shot, the more I became aware of the shadows and opportunities to lead the eye to silhouettes.  The use of these shadows in compositions is worthy of further exploration.

Exploration of Form No.6, Volume

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: 1/27 - My camera is a lever with which I move or halt, create or dissolve, rotate or skew, close down or pry open space. Yesterday inside a cathedral a fellow photographer confessed to me what I feel all the time, that there are too many angles, too many choices. The camera is a very powerful lever.

Exploration of Form No.5, Pattern

EDWARD B. LINDAMAN: "What seems mundane and trivial is the very stuff that discovery is made of. The only difference is our perspective, our readiness to put the pieces together in an entirely different way and to see patterns where only shadows appeared just a moment before."

Exploration of Form No.2, Implication

SHAKESPEARE: 
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days.
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?

An Aria

SHAKESPEARE: 

Since brass nor stone nor earth nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality oe'rsways their power.

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

Staccato

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: After shooting in the icy orchard for two days, snow arrived Saturday and temperatures dropped. It was not the kind of snow that sticks which was all the excuse I needed not to go out and shoot. 

On Sunday I wanted to see what the storm had wrought and hiked up to the orchard. In spite of a full day of snow, there were relatively few limbs trimmed white, but everywhere the wind had shaken and the white flakes had mottled the icy forms. That which had sparkled when the sun hit, now shimmered and when the sun went behind clouds turned pasty grey. More of the apples had been snapped free leaving these strange orbs hanging on as if they grew there. This is a tight shot, deep under the canopy of the tree, impossible to get all in focus, and there was no time to expose additional images. The sun was gone as soon as I had finished this HDR set.

In any case, I'm intrigued by the suggestion that the ice has not only born fruit and set blossoms like the living tree, but is also breaking apart like an old skeleton, and I like the cool whiteness of this shot when set beside the previous image and the one to come.

Golden Delicious

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I note in sadness the passing of Andrew Wyeth whose work I've come to love. Tillman Crane's, week-long, photo workshop at Christina's house, and the challenge of tracing Wyeth's footsteps and of interacting with his iconic vision deepened my understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of my art and his. I have a hunch that all the friends I met there feel similarly.

As I look toward inauguration eve I also want to celebrate the hope I share with people around the world regarding the new administration coming into office.  If they are as wise, honest, and diligent as they have so far presented themselves, and if they fulfill a quarter of the expectations they have raised, they will have done well. They have already done good.

The Dreamer Merlin and his Prophesies

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Tell William

An apple for the teacher,
an apple a day,
the forbidden apple,
never bobbed for,
Apple Computer,
Apple Records,
love apples,
sleep apples,
Newton's apple,
and Waldorf salads
(a favorite of mine) 
and the apple of your eye,
mom's apple pie.

It seems life,
like the mouth of the boar's head,
is full of big apples.  

A friend recently asked to what extent the symbolism of apples enters my thinking as I photograph in apple orchards. 

On one level I have to answer. "Not at all."  For the most part, such thinking is harmful to photography, at least to mine, as it causes intellectual considerations to supersede visual. When I start thinking about such meaning the image usually winds up looking contrived.  However, the life of a symbol often begins in expressive qualities of the physical thing. Additionally, I was trained in literature and art, and have lived life with myths and tales. The mind combines things most mysteriously. It is impossible for my consciousness and whatever might be moving below consciousness not to vibrate in sympathy to symbolic reverberations. While conscious manipulation of this is a pitfall for me, a viewer who remains open to such meaning may distill an interesting brew to swirl around a favorite image. 

It is, therefore, with a bit of trepidation that I have attached names to some of these images which may constrain imagination, and I ask viewers not to take the names too seriously. I'm interested in hearing opinions on this if anyone has them.

'The Joker,' setting by Cartier

ROBERT FROST: "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Taking Stock of Ice Storm Lessons, part III - "It's Easy to Get Lazy"

8. Habituate technique. Always remove a filter right after use. Turn VR off when the camera is put on the tripod. Frequently check and recheck exposure settings especially at the start of a shoot and after shifting subject or location. It seems every few weeks this lesson is driven home again, so I guess I haven't learned it sufficiently. Good habits must be cultivated. There's no problem if I'm setting up for a particular effect as I did for the shot above. It is after I've moved on when I carelessly assume the camera to be as I "always" have it.

9. When moving in for close-ups, it's always worth switching to my 105mm macro lens or my 50mm prime. Over the past few months I've gotten too comfortable with my new, all-purpose, 18mm-200mm, zoom, VR, street lens. It has barely been off the camera. While it provides pretty sharp images in its mid range, when I need to get closer it's a very tempting shortcut to zoom out to 200mm and thereby avoid awkward setups. The frozen branches of the apple trees need not fence with my long tripod legs. It's not just that the 50mm and 105mm primes are a bit sharper; it's that they force me to get physically closer. This image, shot with the 105mm macro lens, is actually made up of two shots focused at different places. I made an exposure bringing the third stalactite and tail into focus, but I like the f9 softness of the receding background shown here.

10. Even when presented with a cornucopia of photographic options, it's better to make one good image than reach for dozens and find later that none was brought to completion. I must write that over 100 times and make 100 fewer images.

Pop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Now is the unloosening,
The chill grip
That snaps the chord,
Silent ministry of ice.

From the cadence of the clutch,
Shoulder to shoulder and swelling to full blush,
Unstrung at that trice.
Bitter ministry of ice.

Through scolding sun,
The mushroomy smell of rain,
Even wind's terrifying embrace.
Oh, mysterious ministries of ice!

Time Suspended

ANON.: "To stop the flow of the river, float with its current."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Taking Stock of Ice Storm Lessons, continued:

5. (Lesson 5 is worth restating in another way.) I can only be in one place at one time. If I start thinking about a place further down the trail while I'm shooting here, I'm really not any place at all. So, if time is limited, and nothing suggests the place down the trail will be better, I try be totally here.

6. Sometimes fragile conditions DO last. The air stayed frigid, and Friday the sky was nearly cloudless and cerulean; the iced orchard seemed alive. By good fortune, there had been just enough direct sun on Thursday that in reviewing the photos I was reminded of lesson 7.

7. Ah, specular highlights! Sometimes, no matter how into the shoot my head may be, I may not fully appreciate that the camera sees differently. Specular highlights are bright spots of light reflected off shiny objects. The camera records them differently than the eye sees them. The word specular is to indicate that the light is perfectly reflected (or refracted) from the light source to the viewer. If the reflecting lens is small and perfectly reflective, and the light source is distant, the specular highlight will be very bright and concentrated. A background of trees full of ice crystals and water drops provided billions of tiny, perfect lenses focusing the bright, distant light of the sun at my lens. To my eyes, these were a texture of tiny dots. However, inside the camera's eye such small, bright light rays take on the shape of the shutter. Furthermore, there size balloons larger, the further they fall outside the optimum focal range, and passing by edges or through lenses diffraction may break down the spectrum making them different colors. Reviewing Thursday's shoot reminded me of all this, so I was ready to make use of the effects on Friday. The picture above and some others use these specular highlights to provide a background to the subject, but there are many other ways to use specular highlights. I've been reading further since and looking at photographs that feature them. Here is a subject to master.

Glacial Chill

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "I — this thought which is called I, — is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The last three days have been a scramble, a possibly photo-worthy bit of weather. It is the kind of scramble from which lessons should be learned. Time to take stock of things I've learned and learned again - part 1:

1.  What looks like a weak dusting of sleet down in my valley can be a whole other thing across the hilltops. Valley sleet coated the ground while the hilltops became a crystal wonderland. Because I didn't see it out my window, I almost missed it.
2.  I'd never shot an ice storm.  I didn't know that I'd never shot an ice storm, and I hadn't thought much about how to shoot an ice storm, but there I was in an ice storm. The entire orchard was encrusted. Most of Thursday the light was even and diffused, and there were often lovely skyscapes if I could only get the trees into the right position or the sky into the right position. And then occasionally the sun would break through and the crystalized trees would glisten. Sometimes the glistening lasted as long as 30 seconds, but where does one stand? At such moments every step changed the landscape, so completely was it refracted through the ice, ...and then the sun was back in hiding.  Making it worse was my mounting panic that the ice would melt before I had a chance to discover this new world. The only way to begin is to begin.
3. One of my first thoughts was, "At what scale does the event make visual impact?"  Everything from grass blades to finger-size limbs was encased in ice. Larger limbs were saddled in ice. It was a medium-size ice storm, not a limb-breaker. Observed up close the ice made lenses like snakes slithering along branches and tendrils. It encased seed pods, and dolloped growth nodes. The lenses changed as the light changed.  Observed far off the strongest effect was in places where closely packed limbs, delicately etched with ice, appeared as glistening textures.  Light was even more transformational here.  In the middle were orchard-scapes of various scopes where ice-encrusted boughs reflected light as if they were on freshly painted canvas, still wet and glistening.  I find it very difficult to scope at three scales simultaneously. The only way to begin is to choose.
4.  I also tried to assess how quickly the weather was changing? It wasn't only that it might get warm and melt the ice, but that the clouds were moving quickly. Shooting from a tripod requires set-up time. Shooting at the clouds requires 3 or 4 photographs at different exposure settings for HDR. Once I set my tripod, how long do I sit and wait for the sun to peek back through, and when do I turn to what's looking good right now?  Were sun-producing breaks becoming more frequent or were they disappearing? I tried to do it all; I shot hand-held; By leaving the tripod ballasted and in place I preserved a second angle, a likely composition should the sun return.  Alas, there were so many settings to undo when I rushed back to the tripod, that I missed the shot.
5. The first plan isn't always the best. However a bird in hand is worth two across the orchard. In the end, it's always a crap shoot.

Collinsville Company 1826-1966

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go well."

Cathedral of Mt. Tom

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I've caught myself more than once in the past few years. While visiting a museum for quite different purposes, I sneak off to look over the local collection of Hudson River School paintings. I sympathize with their plight. When is a hill more than hill and when is a picture more than a picture post card? I look at the collection for the broad landscapes. How are they set up? How do they lead the eye? How do they handle tonalities?

Only a very few possess a transcendental vision that strikes me with any force. On the other hand, most of the landscapes of the German painter Casper David Friedrich have grabbed me immediately and become instantly memorable. Their surreal quality makes clear that they are never about a particular place or time. Rather, each is a mindscape for a state of emotion or contemplation.

Friedrich advised: "Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards."

Of course Friedrich was a genius and ended life insane.

Beyond Memories

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: NOT MEMORIES

Perhaps not actual childhood
memories, though many of us had
bicycles like that one.

I frequently pedaled mine up
the road to where Mr. Chisholm had his cows,
to where we'd found amid a pasture,

in a hurst and thicket of brambles,
the monument to Major Thomas Thomas,

to where the road turned
to dirt and the fragrance
of horse sweat

and by then the sun warmed the air,
and I smelled the sweet grass,
and pedaled home to breakfast.

But it's not the memories,
but their confluence.

Porch & Blacksmith's Shop in Fog

WILLIAM BLAKE: "We see through, not with, the eye."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The escape back to autumn must be brief. The fog wasn't. It lasted all day Dec. 27th, and I visited and shot five distinct sites. Because I knew four of the sites well, I didn't waste time exploring unlikely locations. Because I make a practice of repeatedly returning to sites, I'm learning that the important things are the ones that change, and I must always look with open eyes.

I shot this with a grainy ISO of 640 to add a bit of coarseness. Processing required numerous localized contrast and gamma adjustments to give various objects the required visual weight. For me, part of the pleasure is in being able to zoom in and explore the way the vines tumble over the railings. Click on the image to get a bit closer look.

SPECIAL THANKS to Louie Middleman for suggesting the quotation from a poet we both studied when we lived in the same student digs back in Squirrel Hill, PA. Also thanks to all of you who write in periodically with a thought or a comment. These are always welcome. Happy New Year. We deserve it.

Composition in Barn Board & Autumn Leaves

BROOKS JENSEN: "For years I've noticed that I see some of my best photographs when I'm really tired. I believe this has something to do with the natural quieting of my thoughts and the cessation of the tendency to intellectualize about my images. Thinking non-thinking is the key. When I quiet my mind, it's as though I hear and see better. When I insist on thinking, my pictures look contrived."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Old barns are a palette upon which the season's paint themselves. I've been wanting to post this particular shot since I took it several months ago. It pairs nicely with the last blog entry, not only because the literal subject is the blacksmith's shop, but because it seeks to minimize depth cues and put a bit more emphasis on the flat rectangular surface. How different the effect of this surface of very 3D leaf textures from the softened flatness cast by the fog! What do I think it's about? Lines and colors and textures and time.

(60mm, ISO 400, f22, 1/100th)

Upon Brume

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: So why do I keep returning to old barns? I suppose the most honest answer is, because they're there. I believe in shooting close to home. Or better yet, because they're still there, and I sense about them, husks that they are, deep and venerable roots. Spirits inhabit these yet, and sometimes they can be caught lurking.

This is the blacksmith's shop at Skiff Mt. I've described it before. As it turns out, smithing was a specialty of the great grandfather of the current generation. This was his shop first, and his children learned forging from him. I'm struck by how the arc of a life continues to shape the present and how it may be transformed over time.

There's that, but there's also the purely visual, the look of old wood as the paint wears and the wood ages, how it catches light or hums softly when there's little light. In photographs it can appear especially painterly. In all likelihood, some of this is wood cut around these fields and hewn on these grounds. The patterns on it's surface tell the story of seasons, of drought and flood, before there was a farm or a blacksmith.

On this particular afternoon there was also the steady patter of the rain gutters. If only I could, I'd paint all that.

Barnyard Thaw

RIED CALLANAN: "As you progress through your photographic career and experience, you learn that oftentimes you photograph from your dreams and your memories and your intuition and your background. It's not just the perception through your eyes."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Three years of wandering and regular photographing has bred practices and habits worth reflecting on. Why do I regularly return to the same sites?

The snow before the holiday was accompanied by bitter cold, but by Wednesday (Christmas Eve) temperatures had moderated. It was in the bitter cold that I took yesterday's photograph. Although I have shot Skiff Mountain Farm many times, I never saw that angle until I saw it then. What first drew me was the foreground splash of berry brambles against the cracked, aged barn-wood. The big gash in the wall was a feature to be carefully placed. The low sun caught every bit of detail in the wood and the brambles. However, in spite of frequent visits here, I'd never before seen the intriguingly twisted passageway through the barnyard just behind the brambles. How simply and elegantly it let me balance the composition. I'd never seen it that way. Under recent snow and the cold sunlight of the solstice, it was obvious. How had I missed it?

Well, for one thing, I'd never seen it under snow. There are close to two stops of difference between the ground covered by snow and the ground with its usual covering of grass and hardened soil. Under snow, earth and sky unite. I'm reminded of the first thing Freeman Patterson said in his first workshop three summers ago. "It's all about composing tonalities. Learn to see tonalities." Had snow suddenly made it a composition? I spent a long time adjusting placement, height, angle, and zoom to include or exclude various details and to shift the viewer's path through the composition. In fact, there seemed too many good options.

Then this weekend temperatures climbed as high as sixty and the world turned spongy. Naturally, having found the angle in winter's deep freeze, when I was back there Saturday I wanted to see it in thaw. Thick, even fog muffled almost everything as snow condensed to vapor. The density of the fog changed often, but visibility was rarely above 100 feet, often far less. The white snow was off the dark roof of the barns, but snow still led the eye along the ground. The scene composed itself differently. It did so instantly as I looked through the viewfinder. The barns, smothered in fog, loomed somewhat massively, and the snarl of berry brambles were no longer outlined by the setting sun, but made quiet and hung with drops of melting snow.

Looking at the two photographs side by side reminds me of a series of quick decisions I made in standing, zooming, and framing this photograph that were quite different than those I made in the freeze photo, I didn't study this one intently as I had the first, and I made just five quick shots. I was especially aware of wanting to spread out the opposing face of the heifer barn on the right where earlier I had kept trying to pinch it. It was not merely to make more background to the water droplets, but to enhance the broad shape. Shooting it this way was a bit like suddenly hearing the right chord struck on the piano. Very curious, my certainty about this shot and the urge to improvise infinite variations to the earlier one!

Barnyard Freeze

ALBERT CAMUS: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - The wanderer never knows where his path will lead. Yes, I believe in wandering.

I've been thinking a good deal about, among other things, how my shooting process has evolved over the past three years. Many friends who shoot "art landscapes," troll by automobile in search of good shots. From time to time I've done that as well. They drive until something photogenic appears, stop for a few minutes to shoot, and then move on. The more I shoot, the less satisfactory I find this method. The issue for me is less about finding good things to shoot. I believe good photographs can be made anywhere, though I certainly have my preferences for subject matter. The more fundamental issue is attaining the concentration to shoot well.

I return to the same places often, though I also try to expand the kinds of places I shoot. The process of returning is consistent with the notion of wandering, since the same place is different every time, and I often find new things that delight me in places I know well. It may be that in becoming familiar with the unchanging forms of a place I become more sensitive to the nuances of the moment. However, the essential trick, wherever I am, is in putting aside expectation - becoming a true wanderer - developing a wanderer's concentration to see and feel what truly engages me.

I've watched the pianist Alfred Brendel in concert. He walks onto the stage without acknowledging the audience, sits quickly, hangs his head as if continuing a meditation begun backstage. I sense this as the gathering of his focus and energy around the sounds he is about to make so that when he releases that first note he is the sound guiding the shape, flow, and accent of every detail of the music. The thought of maintaining that concentration through the bubbling and rushing river of a Schubert sonata for 30 or 40 minutes is beyond my comprehension. Fortunately, for my quite human limitations, the photographer must only seize the stream's energy once in the process of honing the composition. On the other hand, more than the turns of a physical path or road, it may be the twisting course of this stream of engagement that guides the wanderer on his journey.

I've found it's essential to leave the car. I've driven roads repeatedly and seen nothing to shoot until I finally went back and walked there. The car seals me off from all but the visual, and even the visual is greatly circumscribed. All of my senses need to dance if my pictures are to reach beyond the visual. As I begin my walk, I usually leave the camera in my backpack and shoulder my tripod like a rifle. If I have a destination and route in mind it will give way to fancy, but even as I wander from the preset trail, I won't take out my camera until something of the moment overpowers the natural wish to continue. Sometimes I never take my camera out, and I end the day with nothing more than a healthy walk. On the other hand, if the impulse to stop takes over, I may shoot at the same spot for ten minutes or an hour or more. If I stay put it means I'm wandering. Then, one shot leads to another. The more familiar I am with the site, the better I will be able to judge when to move on or where to move next to "follow the stream."

Occasionally my concentration is suddenly broken. It is a feeling akin to descending the stairs to find suddenly one step fewer than expected, and no chance to turn and climb back. However, unlike walking, where destination is the usual goal, wandering is its own reward.

New England Farmhouse

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea:

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.



Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar,

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known.

-Tolkien

Orchard Solstice

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Strangely familiar yet incongruent, this dance in the orchard at the solstice. A little sugarplum fairy music please, but grotesque and arthritic. I have been enveloped in gray since Friday - this dance in the orchard taken Saturday morning - and today not feeling quite in sync with the storm - worries about bad roads and icy sliding.

I posted Thursday's TODAY'S and went to bed. Despite doubts I had about the weather forecast, I was back on the same, high hill overlooking Twin Elm Farm by 11:15 on Friday, but the lighting guy had put the big diffuser on everything and gone home.

It's decent exercise reaching the top, and I lost track of time shooting my way up. The weatherman said the storm would arrive at noon on Friday. I was bored and ready to give up when I checked my watch. He must have been giving the Twin Elm microcast? I looked at my watch at 12:04 and when I looked up I knew the white glow over the most distant hills was not strange fog but the front line of the snow. If there was an event to be photographed, I was in place, and it was chugging up Oblong Valley. I'm still deciding if there was an event.

The first thing I did was forget everything I learned last winter about photographing in snow. Shutter speed is critical - 1/30th to 1/50th in light to medium wind will keep the flakes from unflaking too much. Only against dark backgrounds will smaller, distant flakes make visible texture. Did I forget or just not switch on a very different mind set?

Gloves - right glove off will speed work if the digits don't go numb. If that doesn't work it's glove liner weather. Some good news: I've finally mastered working with the camera "raincoat." Essential equipment.

The new screen loupe fills with snow - keep it pocketed.

But in the end the approaching snow did look like fog - very even fog that fell like a scrim instead of swirling like a serpent. It shaded the deep hills behind Twin Elm nicely, emphasizing the narrow valley between them. I considered finishing and posting that shot, but it wasn't right - too muted and bland.

I kept shooting, but the hills were buried in white-out long before the pasture was white. On the way home the roads were icy and they were predicting a second storm to arrive Sunday. How to get in sync?

Saturday's photos were the best of the weekend, but the work was effortful, and the snow was back fiercely on Sunday morning right through, "Meet the Press."

The solid gray continued throughout the day until an hour before sunset. Then, without warning, the lighting guy was back with a bit of razzle dazzle. It would have been a sunset to shoot from some high hill or from the orchard, but the roads were slick, and I was engaged in a dusk shot in the valley. Sometimes it's tough to get in sync with a storm.

Folded into the Batter

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The last time I was here, autumn leaves still consumed Twin Elm farmstead. I've been sticking close to home since mid-November, shooting mostly at Misty Morning Farm and the nearby orchards. I headed this way because we had some blue sky, promising clouds, and we have reached the solstice. Daylight is hovering at 9 hours and 10 minutes and the setting sun has the best angle for lighting this farmstead.

One never knows what one will get, and I went with no preconceived plans. The clouds never panned out, but with the leaves off the trees and the soft, low light of sunset sculpting the scene, the farmstead lounged out in the valley to have its portrait made, "Olympia." If it also tells a story that seems uniquely New England, I'm satisfied.

Tomorrow they are predicting 5 to 10 inches of snow. I've checked the weather maps and I think we will be between heavy storms both north and south. If snow doesn't stick me in the neighborhood, I may head back to Twin Elm. I'll need to be up on the hill before the snow gets deep.

Fireflies

GARL RIZBUTH: "The chief aim of art is to communicate something intangible and of the spirit directly, completely, and precisely to other people, often across gulfs of space and time."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Do kids still remember fireflies? Everyone who grew up in the Northeast back in the fifties and could get away from the city remembers them. They were more numerous than stars, and even a little kid could catch dozens in a half hour. I still live in the Northeast, but I only see a few each summer now, and often they don't look well with their lights stuck in the half position. That's the way they looked when I was a kid and I woke the next morning and looked in the jar, listless and short-circuited.

This is another image rediscovered when reviewing the October Orchard shoots. It caught my attention originally too, but I put it aside for some technical issues that don't bother me at all now. How easily it came as I walked among the peach trees! - the grass so perfectly lit, the composition, everything was just there.  I made just two exposures, two distinct compositions, and I like the other almost as much as this. Because they came so easily, seemed so obvious, I moved on.  Perhaps these are fireflies of the daytime. I'm disappointed only in that the technical problems seem to be a bit exaggerated in this reduced jpg version.

Click here for Firefly Information.

Orchard Psalm

Owls 'n' Elves

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Act I, scene 1; action: After leaving the October orchard I hiked back down the hill to my car which I had left near Misty Morning Farm. I wasn't expecting to find the proscenium framed with swags and the stage set, as if awaiting players. Jane wanted to call this, "Pyramis and Thisbe." I prefer, "Owls 'n' Elves." I recall someone said, "The play's the thing." Since the viewer must supply the play, the title is also yours to invent. I stick with, "Owls 'n' Elves."

This photo had little processing. Here is a case where the use of HDR would spoil the mystery. I could have revealed considerably more of the dark forest, even from my single image. I chose to raise shadow tones only very slightly. If our monitors are similarly calibrated, when you look beneath the background arch on the left, you should be just barely able to distinguish the suggestion of deep forest. Even now I wonder if I shouldn't reveal a bit more shadow detail. If this photo had included sky, it would have needed HDR to encompass the full tonal spectrum.

But hush! Somewhere, in the darkness at the back, the first player has just entered left. Let the play begin. ...

Orchard Orbits

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!"

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: In contrast to yesterday's image, this one, I thought, suggested destination. Then again, the serpentine vine climbing up from the shadows leads in a different direction, and I thought of calling this, "Genesis," but I'd rather not push such a strong meaning onto the image. Perhaps it is presumptuous to suggest beginning or end; it is enough simply to recognize the wheeling shadows of the orchard as it orbits through space.

Peach Orchard, October 6th #2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: We are again in October's orchard wonderland. This photo more than others seems to me to suggest the start of the journey. We stand as if in a shadowed vestibule ready to enter a garden of delights. Two trees invite us in and motion us on to the sunlit area behind where more trees await. But stand a moment and let your eye explore the path.

This is a single exposure with minimal processing.

Autumn Bower

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The shady place on the bright day is the photographer's nightmare. As shooting nightmares go, this is a pretty bad one, and I post it as much for technical issues as for any aesthetic qualities it may or may not have. I had timed my shoot to be in the orchard when the low sun lit up the red and yellow vines. Shooting from a distance as in yesterday's image could be handled with a single exposure. I didn't care if detail was lost in the dark boughs of the distant trees. It was their overall gawky form I needed.

In contrast, this close-up only works if we can see the leafy vines covering the shadowed side of the boughs. Standing there I saw those vines clearly. My photograph could not encompass that range. Setting the exposure to preserve the bright leaves left the shadowed area in black gunk. Fortunately, back in October, looking ahead to taking up HDR, I made a number of images in bracketed sets.

However, processing this set of images for HDR created new problems. There was a constant wind that vibrated leaves and branches of a certain length. When I processed my images for HDR the software was unable to resolve some of this movement. Along the left foreground especially, leaves that were frozen in the individual pre-HDR images appeared multiple times in the combined HDR. You can see a bit of this remaining about 1/8th of the way across the bottom from the left corner and in the far right corner.

Even more damaging was the way HDR processing spoiled a key detail of the shot. In very bright sections the original photos showed crisp veins in leaves rendered translucent by the bright sun. In the HDR version these details were smudged unacceptably.

HDR created a few less significant problems as well. In the right corner and in shadowed areas there is more noise than I expected. This is a result of not making a high enough exposure to get the darkest tones of the image into the mid-range tonalities. I've since read that it's advisable for the left third of the histogram to be blank in the highest exposure to get the dark tones well exposed.

To resolve the problems in the photo above, I found it was possible to combine an HDR and an ordinary image, making use of the parts of each that showed details best. Most of the image is a regular, unprocessed image. I chose one that handled bright areas well. The HDR version is the source of dark areas and good transitions to the lighter areas. Using an eraser with a soft, gradient edge I removed sections of the top, non-HDR image to expose the underlying HDR. The areas of the HDR exposed are along the shadowed areas and some sections where shadow and light mingle.

It's very easy to use HDR to stretch tonalities in very extreme and unnatural ways, and it can be useful for creating surreal or expressionistic distortions. My aim here, however, was only to open up the shadows and restore what was missing. I could have brightened the shadow considerably, but chose only small adjustments. Too much HDR and highs and lows are saturated but compressed. To me such images scream "HDR."

Peach Orchard, October 6th

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: It seems a world away now. I have to look back and remind myself. Just two months ago was there really a Van Gogh (or even Jackson Pollock) galaxy of light and color in these orchards to be snapped? I hadn't expected it - the pyrotechnics - this peach orchard garlanded in poison ivy and stung by the setting sun.

This peach orchard lies on the north side of of Baldwin Hill. The land slopes so gently that it's hard to find the top, but once there I can look northeast to Mt. Tom, the next big hill. Mt. Tom is a tall cone of rock. Baldwin Hill is a broad, fertile dome. Much of it is planted with old orchards. The apple orchards are at the top and descend down the eastern slope, but there is an open view southwest as well, thus the shots of the apple orchard backed by setting sun. The land has been farmed there since the mid 1700s, and the same family still runs the orchards.

In early October I was pretty much splitting my time between shooting here and at Hilltop Pond. The first of those pond photos were taken about when this was shot (1), (2), (3), (4).

Apple Orchard Friday

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I've been working with high dynamic range processing (HDR) for almost a week. HDR isn't new, but it's new for me, and it is changing the way I look and see as a photographer. Whether HDR leads to more literal representation of what I see is my personal choice, but it does permit greater fidelity between the world seen and the world photographed.

I shot this image on Friday. Last Sunday I would have passed it by. There are more than 8 stops of information in this image from the darkest pixels to the lightest, far more than film or digital cameras can record in one image. (Five clean stops of light is about the best one can expect from current DSLRs. After that the top starts losing saturation and the bottom gets noisy.) As one brightens this exposure, the sky loses all detail long before the foreground tree gets any. Nor is it just that detail is lost. Even in situations where the dynamic range is less extreme, over-exposed sky quickly bleeds into dark areas. This would spoil the crisp texture of branches in this shot.

To make this image I shot multiple images at shutter speeds ranging from 1/20th of a second to 1/5000th of a second. My goal was shots that encompassed the darkest and lightest tones and filled out a fair sampling of the middle. The software suggests shooting two stops above and two stops below the correct exposure. In fact, this picture required more to encompass the intensity of the setting sun. I checked the trailing lines at both ends of the histogram until I saw they had ended in all three primary colors.

I've found orchards, unless on or surrounded by some pretty steep hills, to be especially difficult to shoot. I photographed in the neighboring peach orchard through much of the fall. The grotesque contortions of the branches, the trees' neat rows, the foliage, fruit and flower all appeal to my photographic tastes, and, except when the winter wind blows, they are beautiful places to walk. At the orchards on the top of Baldwin Hill especially, the dance of the fruit trees wants to whirl in partnership with the sky, and often the best skies lie close to the sun. Until this week, I looked at such scenes with the knowledge that my image would be mostly silhouette. Knowing I can put detail into the shadows lets my camera enter new worlds.

Apple Orchard Sunday 2

S.T. COLERIDGE: "Those [winds] which mould yon clouds in lazy flakes."

Apple Orchard Sunday

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I walked today, but the lighting guy had closed up shop and gone home. Sometimes it's like that. The last good shooting day for me was Sunday. Although the sun broke through only occasionally and weakly, the clouds provided interest, and after using up the last of the subeams at Misty Morning Farm, I threw myself recklessly into the orchards on top of Baldwin Hill. Of many experiments, the husky alto of this music seemed to suit the moment.

TECHNICAL - Some time ago several friends recommended high dynamic range (HDR) processing. After shooting this I began fooling with the software. To use it, one needs images shot at different exposures. This image is about as good as modern cameras can record in the situation above. Where the sun breaks through the image is overexposed, burnt out, the pixels have been blown away. At the same time, where the trees are in silhouette the image is underexposed, there is not enough light, detail has been lost.

I've been preparing to shoot HDR for some time, taking three images to preserve detail at both ends of the histogram. I wish I'd shot this for HDR to see what I could have done with the finished image. On another occasion I might have chosen not to shoot in such unpromising light, but somehow, on Sunday this silhouette seemed right, and I'm not sure HDR could have gotten closer to the mood.

This is best viewed full screen. In fact, zoom in and you'll see the exposure was carefully calibrated to preserve much of the shadow detail.

Misty Morning Vegetable Garden, Nov. 29, 2008

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Saturday was a dark day with mighty clouds that hovered but never pounced. The bite of winter was in the air, and the dark season had digested most of the landscape. I set out more to walk and get my daily exercise than to photograph, but as I reached the bottom of the pasture below Misty Morning Farm, the landscape began to awaken. The swampy lowland between Misty Morning Farm and Dyer Farm offered welcome colors and textures though no shots yet. Even occasional, "theater lights," didn't make a picture, but on another day the pond behind these swamps might offer eye-catching reflections. I made note.

I'd never been to the bottom of this meadow, though I'd considered it last winter when it was covered in snow. The rewards seemed not promising enough then to justify the difficult trudge in snowshoes to the bottom and back; the hill is so steep that I thought the barns, set back at the top, would be hidden when I got to the bottom. Even in the spring it was too soft to walk comfortably. Now that the ground was frozen, I was scoping it to plan if/how I might shoot it when the snow returned. In fact, the barns were out of sight from the bottom, but there were other opportunities further up where rooftops and gables came into view, and I slowly wound my way back to the top exploring all the angles.

When I'd had enough I headed out for the rest of my hike. On the way, I passed the vegetable garden. The last time I was here colorful baskets full with tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and squash lay beside rows of old leaves, stained and sunbeaten but green. The last of the Misty Morning's bounty was being harvested.

Gotham Lights

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: There are so many ways of inhabiting the past, in New York City especially, so many doorways to slip through, and a moment later I find myself in another time. I'm still pulling from photos created earlier this summer. This one was snapped quickly on a hurried walk crosstown in Manhattan. I was with my daughter and it was beginning to rain, so this journey was especially quick. She almost didn't have to stop as I snapped two images while only half hoping the results would turn out. I don't recall setting up my tripod on the busy sidewalk, so my hunch is the shot is hand held, and the EXIF data tells me I shot it at 1/13th of a second. Amazingly, I see only a tiny bit of vertical movement, and it adds to the effect. Zoom in. Look around. If you've brought a few matches, sit back and light up your Meerschaum.

Today's attack in Mumbai makes escape to another time seem especially appealing. Keep steady. Keep faith.

Spider Galaxy

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:  

The sheet web spider lives, we say, upside down.
He hangs beneath, injects with poison, those who land above.
He pulls them down to devour them raw.
But who is to say which one of us is right?

Buy the Sea

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The change in the weather has kept me in, and I've been looking through images from old shoots that I'd marked for possible publication on TODAY'S. I have culling process, but good shots sometimes get left behind. I wanted to see what was there. I'm sure some of you may be looking at this and getting ready to write that I should discontinue this excavation immediately.

None the less, I persist. I like this especially now that I've forgotten where it was taken and what those are? I could look up the shoot, and it would say, but I've decided I don't want to know. My best thought on the matter is that it was in some musty, wharf shop in a remote fishing village up the coast of Maine or maybe Nova Scotia, or perhaps its from the trip to Holland I wanted to take but didn't.

Why do I like it? It's the colors and shapes, the textures, the balance, its tensions, the patina of age, a bit of mystery, unspecified ironies, elves. It's probably curable.

Water Color

CORRESPONDENCE: In response to yesterday's post about viewing images on your computer, thanks Larry and Melissa for these suggestions:

Larry: "For viewing your pictures, I use either ACDSee or IrfanView. But, just for spaces sake, I convert them to jpgs via Vue Print Pro."
He confirms that both programs let you see your image full screen and with all the menus and scroll bars gone?

Melissa: "Using Firefox 3 and TURNING ON COLOR MANAGEMENT is a huge improvement on a PC especially (but MAC too) when viewing photos. http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html is one site that gives some info."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I carry so many things now; perhaps I should carry my own duck.

Absence of Duck

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Yesterday I received a note asking, "How would you like your pictures to be viewed?" At first it seemed a funny question, and I wasn't at all sure what my correspondent meant. As it turns out, he'd spent considerable time with several of my images and was asking about taming his monitor to see them better. He was really asking what software I used. His question is well-timed since this image won't look like much against normal bright clutter of most computer screens. Since the question of proper viewing is so important here, I thought I'd share the suggestions I offered him.

Alas, he's Windows and I'm now firmly Mac, so if anyone has any WIN suggestions or additional tips, send them to me, and I'll pass them along. These suggestions are not for the photographers in the group, who probably have solved much of this, but for general viewers. Easiest and most important suggestions are offered first:

1. Check the lighting around your screen. Often it is a compromise designed for the various things you do around your computer. Desk lights and nearby windows sometimes glare and distract. Pull down the shade. This fix is free.
2. Some image viewers permit resizing photos to fit the screen. A photos composition can rarely be digested in pieces, and any good photo has good reasons why it begins and ends where it does. More on these viewers in a moment.
3. Do anything you can to clear away screen clutter. Most people don't realize how distracting all those scroll bars and menus are until they find software that lets them view an image against a solid background, preferably, I think, a dark one. Macintosh includes "Preview" "iPhoto," and "Mail," all of which accomplish both #1 and #2 in the various contexts in which one works with images. "Mail" is especially nice in letting one view any emailed image full screen.
4. Although it's essential to see images whole, some photos reward zooming in. The jpg images sent have limited zoomability, but you'll often find surprises you missed before you zoomed. Did you notice the abundant water drops on these birches? Zoom in and they are an important part of the image that you would have enjoyed in a good print.
5. There is a standard for monitor color. Calibration to that standard is the toughest issue to solve. Doing it properly requires expensive hardware and a bit of know-how. I use a Huey (WIN and Mac available) which not only calibrates my monitor but resets but resets it every time room lighting changes. Most importantly it gives me images where true whites and grays have no tint. Most won't want to spend for Huey. However, there are some web sites that offer free tools. Spyder, another maker of calibration hardware has some free virtual tools at their web site that will let you see how far off you are and tell you how to make some no cost fixes. (Another calibration site)

Fen Suck'd Fogs