Housatonic Winter Tint

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL (Written while walking early yesterday in the cold beside Lake Waramaug. The picture was made at a different time and place.)

Strange

Passengers:

The first stirred branches, 

lifting a mist of crystal snow 

that sailed due east, 

a spectral galleon over the water.

Another careened 

among the white pines, 

unsure which way to turn and 

trailing a whirling, white mantilla. 

Where do they come from?

Where do they go?

Who is the conjurer?

A third bore down

along the shore

and a sandstorm of snow

skated on ice

through a stillness made immense

by an endless sky of slate 

and the banter of treetop crows 

on a far-off, faded shore.

Footings

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - When is a photograph not a photograph? One photographer says it's no longer a photo when what is depicted no longer connects to a specific, real moment and place. Another questions photos where the finish calls attention to itself; the viewer begins asking, "What's going on here?" I suspect this image fails both tests.

Revolution

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Spotted in an old barn in Cornwall, I was struck by the momentary confluence. That was the orbit of my eye. All my picture thoughts revolved on that axis, and by the time I set up and took this shot, it was time to leave. In the rush, I have no notes on what the machine on the left does, nor a photograph of the mechanism, but my recollection is that it had something to do with separating seed from chaff.

Frosted

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Tunnel of winter and its ecstatic tracery.

NOTE: The Litchfield Hills Film Festival will be the beneficiary at, "Eight by Ten Concealed: A Secret Sale of Images," Saturday, March 5 at the Festival's Pop-up Gallery, 77 Railroad Street, New Milford, CT., unveiling at 5 PM, reception until 7 PM.  

Three of my photos and those of many other photographers will be included in the exhibition and secret sale. 

Tickets to the event are $15 - advance sales at hillsfilmfestival.org or call 860 799-7331 or pay at the door.

Drift

BLAISE PASCAL: "Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Short days, autumn churn.

The Jester

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Be careful what you wish for, you early, chilly birds. Spring is a sweety but summer is a joker who arrives with the solstice and ever-waning days.

Springing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: They are very early birds, indeed, who write to me when the ground is, not merely frozen, but buried under more than three feet of packed snow and ice in order to ask, might I please start photographing spring. Often they write on Groundhog's Day. It is not the southerners, blood thinned by tropical winters, who write. Some of them welcome reminders of New England winters. Rather, it is northerners, bred and conditioned to a robust tolerance of the cold, who squeal early about the chill. Under normal circumstances they'd have no spring worm from me, but they have my sympathies, and, as I've been drawing images from past seasons for awhile, there's no harm in offering this image of a first lily reaching up from pond bottom in cool spring waters.

...but be careful, you chilly birds, what you wish for...

Classic III

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Three-bay, "English" style barn, set among fields and stone fences - Classic, old New England - In the distance, sleigh bells.

Winter Dance

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Winter Dances

So many ways that snow falls! 

Sifted meal piling in a bowl 

Or cross-blown and cheek-stinging 

'Til every tree trunk is skunk-tailed down the side. 

There's raucus, chattering snow that clings as ice

And snow that clumps and thunders softly 

And weighs branches low. 

But last through yawning space, unhurriedly slow, 

Fall silent, gaping flakes of settling down, 

And the tired earth is quilted and quelled,

And ragged meadows dance a brittle dance.