"Invitation to a Tale," Unwound

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The perfect blue sky, the perfect field of flowers - sometimes it is over the rainbow where skies are bluest. It may be that the true answer to the mystery of the little house and barn, the field of sunflowers and the clear, blue sky are somewhere near where a house was dropped close to a certain brick road. Look carefully at today's photo. You will note a skulduggery has been perpetrated. Compare TODAY'S photograph with last Sunday's.  Somebody has swapped in the wrong sky. Don't you just hate when that happens?

But which is the real sky and which the fake? Regardless of which is fake, they beg the question, "What is photography?" 

If one can so easily swap out parts, what is the photographer's obligation to what really existed when the shutter was clicked? I'm not reporting the news or documenting a crime scene; how much license do I have? Or, looked at the other way, how much license must I be responsible for? Because my aim is evocation of feeling, am I obliged to always change the sky if the actual sky does not perfectly suit my intentions? Must I, in fact, go beyond changing the sky and assemble digital collage? And because the medium is so free, must I be a virtuoso in its manipulation?

The photographer is the creator of his own creative space.  Documenting a place and a moment is far less important to me than finding the expressive power of a composition, but I don't want to spend all my time at the computer.  I shoot because my subjects draw me outside to shoot them. Whatever inspiration or feeling I get comes from the place and the time at which I shoot. Stuck at the computer when photo weather is happening makes me fidget. So I try to find my images whole or very nearly so, images that capture visual reality and moment to convey an experience that is more than visual. Plausibility is usually essential. I like real textures and light that imply painterliness rather than painterly distortion of reality.

Perhaps, it's good to articulate such goals, but I'm more interested in the implications of these two distinct compositions. Last Sunday's composition asks us to look beyond the horizon. Perhaps this is part of the, "Once upon a time... " impulse I felt. One person thought it was "Oz-like." It made some people uneasy, perhaps in the way of Oz where the prettiness of bright poppies conceal danger, and things that seem dangerous and evil often turn out to be harmless.  

One friend wrote of last week's photo, "It gives the impression that the sunflowers are racing in a movement to plunge themselves into the gap." How much more slowly TODAY'S composition moves with a bush and a hill and few extra clouds to counter the pull of perspective and let us dally by the sunflowers.  How evenly we are led by the continuity of wall and hill. Maybe a bit too evenly for my taste.

Knowing that one photo has a stand-in sky, some viewers will probably guess that both skies have been faked.  Alas, too often, the necessary sky doesn't appear when everything else is in order, but if the right clouds had appeared, would you be surprised to learn the photo would have looked more like last Sunday's TODAY'S than this one? In reality there was no bush or hills as above, and, but for some nasty, power lines, the original photo leaves us perched almost as unsteadily on the top of the hill. It was that hilltop rush I chose to shoot.

In any case, though I find this one too comfortable, it pleases me at this moment, and I put it here to see how it will wear in a month or a year, but I prefer the bit of surreality of the previous TODAY'S, and I enjoy knowing that it really could happen that way but for a few power lines. I'm interested in knowing which one others prefer.

So where do I draw the line on "faking it"?  I'm not sure I know the answer yet.

Invitation to a Short Tale

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Once upon a time...

Somehow, the enigma of this photo, the field of sunflowers, the little house, alone at the top of the hill, is the invocation for a story whose characters and plot are lost. Two people I showed it to found it, "disturbing," but were unable to say what disturbed them.

I would be indebted to anyone who might be able to say what happened here, once upon a time. The next TODAY'S will not appear until next weekend, and I hope by then someone will have helped me unwind the tale.

Bog Hollow Melody

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The past week has taken me back to Bog Hollow (1), (2), (3), (4). Those of you nearby know that the weather has been producing daily, localized, drenching storms and the kinds of clouds that send landscape photographers scrambling for foreground. The two farms near bog hollow have lots of foreground as well as hilly pasture for the middle ground over which the storm clouds can sail the high ground like white galleons through my photographic images.

One of the farmsteads is deserted. The fields are hayed, but the buildings are silent. A circle of crumbling barns and sheds surround a farmyard of high grass and wildflowers going to seed; its a pleasant place to "settle into my viewfinder" and compose images. These last few days I've been arriving at Bog Hollow in the late afternoon and shooting until sunset. I reach here last, - this farmstead, the cloister of my sunset vigil, two mourning doves, the choir.

It is a hard heart that does not soften to the sad cooing of these creatures. Why does it touch us so? What is it in the core of human nature that makes this music powerful? Whatever the reason, it's reassuring to know such responses seem to be a part of us, built into our genetic makeup.

The other day my vigil led me to photographing one of these barns where the sunlight caught rusted wire screening and cast a shadow on a ruined, shed wall. I was composing the overlay of side-lit wire, shadow, and rotting wall. Inside me and out, the meadow was buzzing and doves were cooing, and I was absorbed in making images. When my attention turned fully on the doves, I realized one was just above my head, high up on a cupola. I'd photographed the cupola earlier with the dove as finial, but I'd been far off and instead of moving in on the dove, I'd turned to shooting wire screen and its shadows. What surprised me was that he was still there even though I was fewer than fifteen feet as the dove flies. I was just beneath him.

While the music of mourning doves is haunting, I've often thought the birds quite homely. They are utterly graceless on our patio pecking seed or flapping down to perch on the top of a silo, but in the evening light I was admiring the bluish bronze mottle of the mourning dove's coat and the brightness of his eye. Well, I had to photograph him; he demanded a portrait and posed until I complied. Then he flew off. Where in the scheme of things does the morning dove sit. I don't do birds, and I don't do portrits.

Here Comes the Sun #2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I don't do birds, not that there's anything wrong with doing birds, and their songs and antics are welcome off-stage accompaniment at shoots. Sometimes they come on stage for bit parts, but bird photography requires an entirely different stalk, and it is best left to birder photographers. Therefore, my long held goal of making a beautiful image of a heron with wings spread in the process of lifting off or settling onto water remains an unlikely prospect, even a delusional fantasy. I've already chronicled my misses in, "Where's Waldo."

I know where several herons live, and from time to time I pass their ponds and take a friendly shot at them. Today the LENSCAPES workshop class was near one such pond. Melissa had spotted the heron before I arrived. He was across the pond on the top of a bird box near the far shore, a long, gray, bony, stringless marionette. His long beak poked this way and that as he watched the pond. He was a bit too far, and the angle was wrong, so I began walking around the pond to find another clear shot. The one I found was almost 180 degrees from where I had first seen him. The band of trees was a natural blind, the light was good, and I poked my long lens through a gap... one, two, I was ready... CLICK. I had a premonition even as I clicked my one shot that I was about to miss the shot I wanted. I got the bony thing standing on his box in decent light, but the next moment the wings opened, he lifted away from the post, two giant wings lofting legs, body, and that incredible neck and beak, a creature of volume and beauty. Then he was gone. I guess I'm a landscape guy.

On the other hand, at the Sunflower Festival in Griswold I was not expecting three mischievous goldfinches to dance into my shoot. Their reckless greed for fresh sunflower seeds overcame their uncertainty about the man among the sunflowers. I already had my lens aimed to catch the lighted petals of the sunflowers when I noticed them darting about. One paused to measure the the risk, and I snapped him as he watched me. Then it was all a riot of little leaps and dives. They were down among the sunflowers, sometimes hanging upside down snatching sunflower seeds, and I tried to catch their feasting. Sometimes I got all three of the finches at their work. Golden finches contorting among golden sunflowers are a tough shoot to compose; in my shots the birds got lost among the petals. In that first shot, however, as the lead finch watched me, I got just enough of the catchlight in his eye to make the shot work.

Here Comes the Sun

AH SUNFLOWER!

Moved by
Heliotropism,
confined
within the pulvinus,
only a change
in turgor pressure.

Or is it
Consciousness
that frees the sunflower
to turn its head
and follow
the daily path of the sun?

How many
turgors
trigger ions
to make a hand withdraw from fire,
or a heart crave love,
or a spirit strive?

Our lives in the flux of
earth's teeming consciousness -
What is the beat of the sunflower's dance?
What is the mode of the mountain's song?
Where do our cadences begin?
How far off are they felt?

Gotham Recesses

NOTE: I always enjoy and look forward to the various notes that my perpetual nuisance dailies provoke. Yesterday's "Between Walls," brought a quick and immediate response. Several people thought literary, "a dark fairy tale," or, "could be the cover of a period romance novel!" Not surprisingly, some were theatrical, "Might be a great place to do Shakespeare!" and "Looks like the set for an opera!" Some were operatic in their delivery: "Maxfield Parrish--the sky color, the mood...." Of course some were short and to the point, "cool - what ISO?" However, it was my friend and main name man, Louie, who gave it the title I should have chosen, "Batmoon!" Thanks to all who took time to look, read, and write in.

For all those living near Warren, CT, there is an exhibition of my photos running through August at the Warren Public Library.

Also, this weekend only, the Jewish Community Center in Sherman, CT. will host the 42nd edition of The Sherman Art Show, an annual event that has been on hiatus. When I dropped off three works for the show I got a glimpse of some of the other beautiful work that will be on exhibit there. Here's a link: (http://www.americantowns.com/ct/sherman/events/sherman-art-show)

Between Walls

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

Danger

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: In a photograph, what separates the romantic ruin from the threatening ruin is interpretation. I believe in wandering. Yesterday I wandered in another century and wallowed in the tragedy of decay. That image was taken six minutes and thirty-nine seconds before this one. It was time enough to wander into a different cosmos.

What is the connection between the mood of a photographer and the mood of the image s/he creates? Often photographers describe a photograph as having caught what they felt as they shot it, and sometimes this happens. However, as I came off the hill where the last image was shot, the only mugger was the image in front of me; it grabbed me, but my mood changed little.

Well, yes, the smallpox hospital is a lonely place, and it makes me a bit uneasy, but that shapeless apprehension finds many different expressions. While I stood on the mound looking down into the Smallpox Hospital I was struck by the vividness of the red brick and the green vines and the way the sun transfixed them. From up on the knoll I could frame the romantic ruin a la Piranesi that I had hoped to find - nature springing fresh out of the fallen city. Then I came down off the hillock, and the same undirected anxiety found a different visual correlative and emotional content in the sign and the fence and the looming cornice, so near and yet so far from the teeming city.

Dr. Gotham

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: In 1850, before the construction of Mr. Renwick's most excellent smallpox hospital, our Resident Physician, William Kelly, complained that smallpox victims were cared for in "a pile of poor wooden out houses on the banks of the river." The hospital was built by the convicts in the penitentiary less than a mile up on the island. The island is very narrow and the jail is very wide. If you walk north you can hardly miss it. It's the largest building on the island.

The jail was the first building built here after the city bought the island and set it aside for charitable and correctional purposes. The jail provides a steady work force that quarries local stone for many of the other buildings here including our hospital, and they're building a river wall around the island with the same local stone. Now that our hospital is finished and a certain other building in Washington, D.C., Mr. Renwick is busy on a great new cathedral for our best citizens, and it will someday be the pride of our city. It will be much bigger and more beautiful than his famous Grace Church.

Sadly, in spite of godly works, the smallpox epidemic is spreading, and we have begun taking in paying patients at the Smallpox Hospital. A few years back those paying patients would only come here to gawk at the crazy people in the asylum. It's just past the jail. The famous English writer Charles Dickens went there a few years back. He visited the almshouse and jail as well. I don't think he was very fair, but he liked the great staircase at the asylum. If you're interested in what he thought when he visited us on the island, click here.

***********************
Click here for a look into the future at some amazing moving daguerreotypes of our island made by a man named Edison in 1903. He made them from a boat heading south in the east channel of the river, and they show the whole side of Blackwell's Island.

From the Tip of Hog Island Looking North

Photographer's Diary: How is it that as a child growing up in Manhattan I never got to Hog Island? I am standing near the southern tip of Hog Island looking north. Nearby the East River is flowing around me on both my right and left. Just behind my left shoulder and but a short row across the East River is the iconic UN Building where the world's business is being conducted. Hog Island abounds in paradoxes.

I never could keep those East River islands straight, but I knew there was an especially long one that stretched from up near Gracie Mansion down to near the UN that I saw whenever we rode down the FDR Drive. When I asked, sometimes they told me, "That's Welfare Island," and other times they said, "Roosevelt Island." Once they told me that it was Blackwell's Island and that there was an asylum there, and I conjured up visions worthy of Dickens.

Paradoxes!

To begin, I enjoy the heady mix of not being too sure at any moment whether I'm experiencing Hog, Blackwell's or one of the other incarnations of the place or if all the ghosts are coming at me at once.

Second, it is a place of serene quiet right in the center of one of the noisiest, busiest places in the world. Although the roar of the city surrounds me, here I can tune it out.

All around it people are moving and going places. Cars whizz up the FDR and across the towering bridge, subways tunnel through granite beneath, boats and barges pass on both sides, helicopters shuttle endlessly overhead, and yet getting here is very difficult, and there are more wheel chairs than automobiles here.

All around it New York City is building and changing, and there are new towers rising here too, but there are also some of New York's most remarkable vestiges of earlier times.

Gotham 2: The Blackwell's Island Bridge

Photographer's Diary: I debated for too long over the posting of this and the previous photo, an act of vanity hardly warranted by the unimportance of the endeavor. I plead guilty to having an unrelenting attraction to, even a morbid fascination with this bridge, the way it plunges headlong into the heart of Manhattan, the way it dwarfs the large apartment houses whose windows face onto the minute details of its tracery, the way it has outlasted the horse & wagon, streetcar world for which it was built and now unceasingly dumps twelve lanes of cars, trucks, buses, taxies, bicycles, and deafened pedestrains into the busiest part of the great city. In 1903 when work on it began, few could have imagined what demands future generations would put on the Blackwell's Island Bridge or how it would have to be repurposed. I suppose I'm also intrigued knowing that in 1900, before my grandparents were married, they lived inexpensively a few blocks from here. However, as a child, before I knew any of that, I recall seeing it on trips down the FDR Drive and being impressed by its looming greatness.

Why do I shilly-shally now at posting this photo? I suppose first it's because no photo can communicate all of those feelings, and though I've carefully studied the cityscape and set the angle and edges of my shot to maximize the bridge's impact, the photo seems a bit plain, the obvious shot.

Furthermore, it seems to have little of the "fall of the leaf" quality that I've elsewhere said is essential to a good photo. Of course, how can any photo of the city not capture the transient moment? A new building, not yet fully enclosed, rises in the background. Where are the window washers or masons whose rig is parked off a balcony near where a building is bandaged. What happened there? What has taken two identical, white, service trucks to stop on the bridge's lower deck just now? Is work underway there too? Does the freight train of clouds passing over the city follow an earlier storm, or do they portend one to come?

Maybe it's also that the philosophy of this blog is not so much to photograph interesting things, as to compose light into interesting photographs. And yet I've carefully come here late in the day and waited until the sun setting behind the Hudson River penetrated the valleys between New York's towers, cast long shadows on facing walls, and bounced around off windows in ways that help to open up space and lead the eye.

And so I've debated with myself for two days. In the end, I guess, I've posted this in spite of reservations because I have to, because I'm captive to this relic of old Gotham that still, a hundred years after its completion, seems to dominate where all around it everything else has given way to change.

Gotham 1: "Hello lamp-post, What cha knowin'?"

DENNIS O'NEIL: "Batman's Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Gotham is real. It's not like Superman's Metropolis off in Kansas. Gotham is much closer to home, and insinuates itself just when we least expect it. It is not mere evil, but grubs and maggots at work on the moribund remains and it laughs the joker's jeering laugh.

Sharing sparrows beneath the bridge, I wonder, how deep is the heart of dark Gotham? I think I've come to the right place despite a Samaritan who tried to send me to 14th Street. One should be able to see it here beneath this bridge or in the refuse near the water's edge. Here where the commotion of traffic never ceases, Gotham must be whispering. Or it is nearby, waiting for sunset, peering from the shadow where the alley meets the cornerstone. I look and try to snatch it in a photo. More sparrows. Must I look for it where the F train hurries beneath Blackwell's ghosts, or is it only a dark time thing, a couple of deals before dawn?

Beside me Con Edison still rumbles though they've made the emissions invisible,
and I think I hear Simon and Garfunkle dancing overhead,
and I'm still down here sharing sparrows.
Groovy!

Intruding on Rocks

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Every rock has stories,
Though we never crack them,
Custodial gulls hover and intrude.
And when they are alone,
Their forms ripe in the failing sun,
We ask our question,
As if the rocks would hatch or blossom or spawn,
But they just roll on.
Another cliffhanger.



©Emery Roth II, 2008

visit LENSCAPES PHOTO FIELD TRIPS & WORKSHOPS

Sunrise over Bass Harbor, 2008

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I didn't think this dewy morning would be photogenic. A sky unaccommodating, too hazy for photos and sun in the wrong place! I'd started photographing from across the harbor hoping the sun, still low, would add definition and color to the docks where I now stand, but all lay mute in a soupy, gray glare. I crossed to the Bernard side of the harbor expecting less. The best thing going was the surface of the water but the colors were bland. For lack of a better subject I shot at cloud forms mirrored in the harbor waters until the sun poked through. Blinding sun reflected in the windows of fishing boats - like a snagged line, a catch to the eye, that wouldn't let go.

Shooting the sun is much harder than shooting fog. Light like this is too much for the human eye. How do we shoot what's too bright to see? Turner knew the secret in Mortlake Terrace (1) (2), where the parapet wall disappears in the sun's bright glare. In fact, when it came to light, he always knew the secrets.

The photographer must violate the first commandment of photography, "Thou shalt not overexpose," but Turner gives us permission to overexpose. In a photo like this if I don't overexpose at all the shadow areas will be all murk. In fact, it is both over and under exposed. But how much of each is right? Where does one set the balance? Every case is different, and it's best to check results and bracket. One can also reduce the dynamic range with graduated ND filters, but if I'd done that I'd have missed the shot.

In the case of this image I thought the forms were too diffuse to unify into a composition and that the shadowed areas were bound to be too murky. As a result, I shot without full conviction and did not bracket. My interest was much more in composition which changed quickly as the sun rose and its reflection on the water moved past stationary objects. Well, almost stationary objects, the boats shifted ever so slightly around their moorings. It was an experiment.

I had shot this spot on the dock before, and I knew how to use the traps and decking. I positioned my tripod and left the ball head loose so I could recompose as sun, clouds, water, and boats all shifted within the stationary frame of traps and dock. From this position I would be able to catch the sun's arch as its reflection caught on various surfaces, grew and shrank in the harbor, while the frame anchored whatever was painted there. I could shoot both horizontals and verticals this way; the frame was adaptable.

At the time I remember thinking this shot was one too many, that if the shot worked at all, it would be in the previous exposure where the sun snagged on the windshield. I shot a few more anyway and in the next the sun is back on the water. Then all of a sudden the clouds were gone, the sun was up and the opportunity vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. Much later I chose this one where the side of the boat and the water explode with light. There would have been no time for bracketing, no time for readjusting graduated ND filters.

So how did I adjust the exposure? AT ISO 400, f14, 1/320th sec, I was also hunting for gulls. Well, one can always get lucky, but I believed I'd confined the overexposed areas to the hard core of brightness. A couple of test shots showed I was able to increase exposure a fair ways before the edges of the core began to bleed outward. My real worry was the underexposed area around the traps. I backed off from the bleeding core and entrusted the rest to Photoshop.

The photo is toned a good deal darker in the midrange than the scene appeared when I took it. This serves to give substance to sky and water and brings out the colors. I pushed the high end a little higher; it's the turner effect. Some will object, but it is the scene as I knew it might be.

My short lens is zoomed to 31mm.

Sandburg Fog

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: In response to yesterday's post Artie wondered if fog photos were harder to take than other photos. Those who read this regularly, know that I have a special love of fog images. My immediate response to the question was that fog pictures similar to yesterday's and today's were, at least technically, comparatively easy to take because the dynamic range from black to white was fairly compressed and could be encompassed easily within the limits of digital and film technologies. Of course that same limited dynamic range makes them harder to process and very hard to print well. Then I got to thinking...

I've always thought exposure for such pictures was not critical. Neal Parent advised slightly under exposing in the fog, and that may be right for shooting film. As it turns out, I made two exposures of yesterday's 44mm image, both at ISO 800. I'm not sure why I chose 800, perhaps it was windy, or perhaps I just forgot to turn it back after a previous shot. In any case, the two identical shots were two thirds of a stop apart, both f22, the first at 1/20th sec and the second at 1/30th sec. I made the finished image from the second, darker, of the two exposures because it was closer to the tones I imagined for the finished picture, because the first was almost glaringly bright, and because only the darker one had the headlights which I knew I didn't want to lose. ...and yet Artie has gotten me thinking...

I've read two distinct theories of shooting. Most experts simply advise getting the exposure right, by which they mean so the finished exposure is as close to the original as possible, at least for the critical areas of the shot; middle gray in the subject should be middle gray in the image. This is what I usually aim for. Another school of thought suggests bumping the exposure to the max, exposing as brightly as possible so long as no portion of the image exceeds the ability of the medium to record it, and adjust it back down later in Photoshop.

(Yesterday's TODAY'S)

Tonight I reprocessed both RAW exposures of yesterday's TODAY'S so as to maximize the dynamic range of each image. Spreading out of the black-to-white spectrum (the dynamic range) should make differences easy to see. What I found, surprised me. The darker image, though not taxing the range of the media, had less visual information. It was grainier and very slightly less detailed. The difference was especially noticeable along the left side of the image where the dock almost disappears into gray. Members could be recovered in the brighter image that were lost in the darker. In the darker areas on the extreme right, the darker image clotted up more, dock members were less fully formed.

But revealing detail was not my goal for the image. Indeed, I shoot in fog to lose detail. Though in this case it was true that I had worried: Would I have enough? It did seem to be a bit more crispness would not be to the detriment of the image, if not necessarily to its gain. However, color, not detail is what is critical to the success of yesterday's image. The color of the two boats must catch the eye and lead to the discovery of soft yellow and red in some of the lobster traps. If your monitor is well calibrated you will even be able to distinguish the slight green of the trees, the reddish tone of the sand and the blue of the water. The image is most beautiful to me when this is visible, even as the image approaches monochrome.

To test the validity of pushing the exposure as high as possible, I tried to process the lighter image to the darker tones I had chosen for the finished image. To my surprise, I learned this took much more reduction of contrast than I expected. In the process I noticed that the reducing contrast was taking a bit of bluish sheen from the water that was quite contrary to the flat, fog-bound image I saw in the harbor and wanted recorded in my picture. The brighter shot, brighter than the actual scene, exaggerated tonal range and in so doing upset color balances. Reducing contrast reduces detail both of edges and of gradients. By the time they looked alike, the unwanted sheen was off the water, but most of the advantage of the brighter image had been sacrificed. Only a few details showed definition missing in the chosen version. It was not enough to risk throwing out color balances especially in an image hard to process and very hard to print.

On the other hand, had I wanted a different finished effect, I had the ability to reveal detail missing in the darker version. My conclusion is bump the exposure up as a backup, but expose to the mark for safety.

Well, I've said precious little about today's image. Perhaps you can tell me what the gull is thinking about the scene in front of him.

The Silence of Fog

Still at the Underdocks

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

The underdocks, 
boater's crawl space, 
resting place of algae covered lures, 
snagged beyond reach.

The underdocks,
sea-green perch 
where gulls stalk the glossy rocks
and grumble and caw.

The underdocks,
where ropes grouse and whine
droop and coil
round creosote and slime.

The underdocks
crustacean garden of snails & starfish, 
wood lice & barnacles, 
shipworms & gribbles.

The underdocks,
mirror world of
of raftered halls where dead men call,
and ladders plunge to the abyss.

The underdocks,
Stygian green and glossy black
where waters slide
and slip and glide and leap and fall away.

© Emery Roth II, 2008

[150mm, f22, 1/30th sec, 400]
Underdocks, 2007

Wish You Were Here

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I debated a long time before posting this. Why is that? To me it is too easy and comfortable. It is the postcard view - Bass Harbor as seen from the Port of Bernard. It says, we had a good time visiting Bass Harbor and maybe ate lobster there, but not much more.

What continues to interest me about it, and the reason I'm posting it, is its power to draw the eye deep and the various "scapes" traversed in getting there. At first glance, three pink blossoms in the foreground are balanced by a corner of Bass Harbor where two boats lie at rest and reflect on the nearly still water. However much greater interest lies around the shore of Bernard with its odd complement of fishing piers - perhaps your eye has already jumped to the last of these as it basks in the light of sunset and reflects more tremulously. This must be seen at screen size or near. Something about this pier's simplicity and the neat row of traps with their red & white buoys kept drawing my camera every time I shot in Bernard. I would have liked to try it from the water.

Eventually, one moves across the jetty and the harbor inlet to the ferry terminal on the Bass Harbor side and the green, steel trusswork that supports the ferry boarding apparatus. The intricacy of its structure adds delicacy and helps make the small scale convincing. Beyond is an outer harbor where sailboats are moored, removed from the commercial fishing boats of the back harbor. The outer harbor is still bathed in sunlight and capped by the last of what were especially pretty clouds. A few of those earlier clouds would have been nice. Even in jpg and reduced resolution, however, the masts catching full sun invite the eye, and lead one to scan the opposite shore. An island? An arm of the mainland? I'm not sure. I had a great time; the lobster was fresh. Wish you were here.

I spent some time determining the right height at which to set the camera and where to place the horizon. As I recall, I pulled back a bit to assure that there would be clear gaps delineating each level of the harborscape.

In many ways this is the opposite of yesterday's posting. This was taken with a 22mm, (moderate wide angle) lens. It draws the eye deep instead of compressing toward a plane. In the end I confess to preferring yesterday's shot of the inner harbor with its risky cropping and weighted composition, and its traditional uprightness. Whatever else that one may have or lack, it has a bit of attitude.

[22mm, f14, 160th, ISO 400] For what it's worth, had I not reduced the aperture to f14, I would not have caught the gull. If I were not hoping for a bird, it would likely have been at f22 or f25.

Family Tradition

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The telephoto lens is a powerful tool for snatching bird images out of the sky and deer images out of the brush. Its optical effect is only to narrow the cone of vision and bring distant things close, but those who have spotted telephoto use in film, recognize how it also compresses space. A person running toward the zoomed video lens appears to run and run but to get nowhere. The runner's form does not increase in size as we have learned to expect.

In still pictures the telephoto can be used to present a similar paradox; something is apparently wrong with the perspective, but what exactly? We sense distortion. In fact, telephotos are much less prone to distortion than wide angle lenses. The exaggerated curve of the wide angle lens must distort to pull the very broad cone of vision onto the flat, narrow plane of the film. Tip the camera up or down and the distortion of the resulting video can almost produce nausea as from motion sickness. Directors have used this to suggest the surreal. In contrast, the telephoto lens provides a very accurate, perspective arrangement of the objects in front of us but makes us think we are closer to them than we are. If we shot with a wide angle lens and then cropped to the center section (where distortion is minimized) it would look much like what the telephoto lens sees. Is it true that as a wide angle lens can make us queasy, a telephoto reassures with its orderliness?

The essential fact here is that we don't see the way a telephoto lens sees. We are used to the particular cone of vision of the human eye. How different the world must look to the compound eye of an insect or to animals whose eyes are positioned on the sides of their head! However, their brains, like ours, have learned to resolve such vision into some continuous, distortion-free reality. The "compressed effect" of the photo above depends on how it differs from the reality our brain assembles from the data transmitted by the the eyes' lenses and recorded by the eyes' photoceptors. We look at the compressed image of the telephoto which our brain processes as if it was our normal field of vision and seen close up. Why, it wonder, is perspective not diminishing size and arranging space in the customary manner. The effect seems more like an architect's elevation than reality. Of course, one needn't understand what's happening to recognize (and if you're like me, to enjoy & try to exploit) its capacity for composition and expression.

I call these images, "compressions." I began shooting them when I started photographing barns. This image of the port of Bass Harbor might be a companion to "Wharves at Dusk," taken three miles down the road at Southwest Harbor. I like the sense of artifice they give to photo reality and the emphasis they place on the flat, rectangular surface. Deep perspectives draw us into picture space - lead or focus the eye toward the vanishing points. In so doing, they naturally make some things more important than others. In compressions, as in Medieval art, importance is size-based, and the effect is more of simultaneity. The transactions occurring inside the little, red country store are no more important than the dramas that might be unfolding behind any of the windows in the homes or warehouses; life inside the boats is more important because larger, but life goes on everywhere across the image, though hidden from view. Such images ask me to wonder about the lives lived behind these facades. Do they also add a sense of universality to the image? Do they place extra emphasis on color and form? Is it their suggestion of folk art? I'm still trying to understand why they have a special appeal for me.

Similar view - 2007.

[110mm, f14, 1/500 sec, ISO 400] The only reason for the high shudder speed was wind and floor thump as people crossed the small deck from which I shot. It could easily been cut in half and either the f-stop or ISO adjusted accordingly.]

Bass Harbor Boogie-Woogie

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: No cry of, "Eureka!," as a modern day Archimedes slides the green boat from its Platonic universe and zooms me into the present, but the spirit of Leger still rules over the boogie man's reflection in the water below.


PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: ...and I like the way he stirs my paint.


PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: As boogie-woogies go, Bass Harbor's is clearly fog-bound. It's probably at its most active when a seagull finds a bit of food that needs cracking and "throws" it repeatedly against rock.

The shutter speed should have been doubled to freeze the seagull, but the pose is so good, the reflection off the port side wing so strong, that I much prefer it to a stilled gull in a less revealing pose. Besides, I was delighted to catch the gull right where I needed him.

I think I need to do a trip just for gulls. Many times gulls glided frustratingly through images when I wasn't ready for them. The alternative is get set and be prepared to wait 30 minutes by which time the light may have changed. Yes, there's always Photoshop.

As always, vertical images come out too small for computer screens. However, if you can zoom in on the pilings, I think even the reduced resolution jpg image of this post reveals clearly a menagerie of sea life temporarily marooned until the tide comes in. Had I known this texture would be revealed so sharply, I would have tried for closer images.

At ISO 400, f10, and 1/125 sec. this probably should have been also shot at ISO 800, 1/250th sec. Yeah, right! Shoot it twice! ...and I can bet the community on the piling would not have been as sharp.

#2 Bass Harbor Blues

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Taken four minutes earlier, the Platonic melody anchors this shot, and low tide elongates the lobster dock into a blues riff. Behind the fog, the port of Bernard, across Bass Harbor, is barely visible.

ISO 400, f10, 1/80th, 34mm

#1 Bass Harbor Melody

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Sometimes it seems almost like a set-up, pure color and form in the process of abandoning their material selves and finding some sort of Platonic identity. Almost a miracle to find it midst the chaos of Bass Harbor.

Special thanks to Sandy & Esther at the Inn at Southwest Harbor for a year ago pointing me this way.

Wharves at Dusk

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Eleven minutes after yesterday's TODAY'S I turned 90 degree left, extended my long lens out to 230mm, and took this photograph. I had earlier decided that the evening was done for photography, and I was engaged in conversation with another photographer. Small world! She and her husband live almost next door in Watertown, Connecticut. When we stopped talking, I made four more exposures. I'm not sure why.

The time was 8:21, the exact time of sunset although the sun had disappeared behind hills some time earlier. I'd tried shooting these wharves a number of times before. Those shots were in the clarifying, low, sidelight of sunset. Golden light! I had had high hopes for those shots, but none of them had pleased me much, and I wasn't expecting much from these.

Sometimes it is the even light of an overcast sky or just after sunset that allows the forms to speak for themselves through an evenness of tonality. Here the soothing blues and greens set the tone, and the evenly spaced accents of red give it life. The other shots... a little too far left and a little too far right... don't end properly. They might have been cropped into a satisfying whole, but somehow this one is already self-contained. A few harbor lights have come on as the last of the sail boats return to port. It is a quiet, Saturday evening on the wharves in Southwest Harbor. [ISO 400, f14, 1/6th second. 230mm]

Southwest Harbor, Gunmetal & Silk

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Why am I back here? The story of the shot I missed two summers ago is hinted at through the series of TODAY'S that concludes with a photo taken from this same spot almost a year ago.

Well, I'm here to "debrief," and process whatever energies or ideas have been generated by the workshop I just took - to use it as a springboard and a guide to new photographs. In this case it includes the intimidating example in Neal Parent's photos - his determination to push the edges of his art, to grab at experiences almost beyond photography.

I'm here also for the ever-changing water and sky and the fishing villages and this magical bay that catches light like no other. I'm here because it has always felt right to immediately take the experience of a workshop into a setting very different from my usual shoots, and because last summer I only began to explore what is here; I'm here with keen anticipation and eager to begin. I'm also here because these annual jaunts set a marker for reexamining my photography and seeing what a year has wrought.

The bay has not yet produced that frothy whipped cream head that I saw & failed to capture on my first serendipitous visit. This year the bay did not quiet until after the sun was nearly set, so no masts gleam against the water, nor is the bay so pink as I've seen it. I should be disappointed - another summer without catching the shot I'm after. However, the slight agitation still simmering on the surface of the bay is all gunmetal and silk. Lights on the dock are coming on, and this is the last of the evening's light. What a palette of colors! I'm certain I would have passed it by a year ago. As I processed the image I tried a dozen different ways to make a more conventionally "pretty" image, to unmuddy it, but no matter what I did, some vital quality in the light as caught by the camera was lost. If you can blow this up to full screen size, turn down your lights and spend a moment looking at the colors... That's what brings me here.

ISO 400, f14, 1/60th, 102mm

Sea Breeze

HERBERT KAUFMAN: "Dreamers are the architects of greatness, hearing the voice of destiny calling from the unknown they peer beyond the mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn time."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I never expected it. I knew shooting aboard the Wanderbird would be refreshing, even revitalizing, but not that shooting from the boat would be so totally different than shooting on land. At sea, especially, I am a total novice with much to learn.

A few hours out of Belfast, Maine, we found ourselves in a large bay or basin encircled by small islands. Through the mists on the far horizon the sails of a tall ship appeared, and I mounted my long lens to have a better look. It was a schooner, two masts with large orange sails. Just then Captain Rick announced a change in plans; we would drop anchor and spend the night here. Seven windjammers were heading into the bay that would tie up together and also spend the night. We scrambled for good spots to shoot as the show began.

I set up on the aft deck and started framing images. This was the wrong moment for my tripod to malfunction. Every time I got my image framed, my heavy, long lens would dip, and I'd have to reframe the shot. My expensive ball head was never subject to such slippage, and nothing I could do would make it right.

First lesson: The longer the lens, the more useless a tripod is aboard a boat. I tossed the tripod almost overboard and reconsidered camera settings. Shooting hand held, in spite of bright sea and sky, required compromises. The shot above was taken with my short lens zoomed out to 70mm. To hand hold, the rule of thumb would indicate I needed a shutter speed of at least 1/70th of a second, but if I planned any sort of enlargement later I wanted to get as close to 1/250th as possible. I dialed my camera up to ISO 800 (after that graininess gets excessive) and settled on f16 at 1/200th. How nice to discover my hands as a forgiving counterbalance to the roll of the boat!

Lesson two: It's not just the mechanics of shooting that are different; the nature of composition changes as well. On land I can wander where I choose and position myself to catch the best light. I am captain. When I see a shot, I know to look around for supporting characters for my composition, and to shift forward, backward, right, left to get light and relationships right. Aboard a boat my movement is constrained and most of the supporting characters must be found among the rails, ropes, masts and sails of my own vessel. Even after the shot is set up, the tossing of the boat makes every shot an action shot, and I often snapped five or six times in the hope that one exposure would get the margins right and the horizon level.

Lesson three: At sea the horizon dominates, seascapes can be sparse. It's not that on land one is never faced with large areas of empty sky or a deep foreground with little of interest, but at sea as soon as the lens is pointed away from one's own ship such situations are common, and one must contend with long low stretches of shoreline or a limitless horizon. On land I like to fill the frame of my camera, and I avoid cropping later if possible; at sea I often need to see in cinemascope.

Lesson four: Even when cropping to a panorama, sea and sky can become flat, unvaried slabs. On land, unless an event marked the moment, I'd return when the weather offered more to work with. There was no way I would be back aboard the Wanderbird or similar craft any time soon, and so what the weather didn't provide must be invented in Photoshop. While I have no philosophical objection to such manipulations, I like to keep my shots as natural looking as possible.

Lesson five: The jokes they make everywhere about the weather are true in Maine. Inland, I time my shoots to weather events. Along the coast I've learned to stand and wait, and this is even truer at sea. When the boat is moving the weather can be even more fleeting. As ocean weather hits land, clouds form and clouds melt, and one must watch closely to see what they're doing. Later in the week while shooting at Seawall, I waited for a line of wispy cloud to pass only to realize twenty minutes later that the moisture was condensing as it hit cooler shoreline temperatures and new clouds were piling up at the shore line like fresh taffy. Everything was changing, but the view was staying the same. I've learned to watch closely to see what is really happening.

Lesson six: The expressive beauty of the Maine coast viewed from a small boat fits my lens... How could it not? ...and I plan to go back.

Maine Lobstermen

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Upon Returning from a Week in Maine

Thanks to those who inquired about my absence. I remain alive and well. My annual summer jaunt to the coast of Maine has proven to be more than refreshing. A workshop aboard a converted fishing boat, "The Wanderbird," with photographer, Neal Parent, is a privilege and an adventure. His maritime photography is the finest I've seen. I especially love his ability to catch the ocean's fury, but his photos have many moods. My regret is that I didn't have longer to spend with the beautiful prints in his gallery in Belfast, Maine. I'll be back.

That Neal was also my roommate might have been privilege had it been possible for both of us to be physically present in the room at the same time without one of us either bunked or in the tiny privy. However, on this tiny boat, 11 workshop participants total, there was plenty of time outside the privy to work and talk with Neal and his daughter Lee, a Photoshop pro. A computer projector is planned for the next outing, I'm told, but we managed okay passing laptops and in demos from Lee and Neal once black trash bags were taped over the coach house windows. Even the boat was an adventure, and looking back I should probably have spent more time photographing it. Lee gathered a wonderful collection of texture shots while I sat watching the horizon, but I'm a novice at sea.

As you may guess, this was not a luxury cruise though we were fed and cared for luxuriously. The Wanderbird is the project and passion of mariners Rick and Karen Miles. It is a 1963 North Sea fishing trawler converted according to Rick and Karen's specifications for its current use. Our cabins lie approximately where the fresh fish were once tossed. A twisting ladder of Karen's design (by winter she is a furniture maker) leads to the coach house where we met for workshops and meals. Rick, Karen and a crew of three sleep in a salon, aft. Details, photos, and more are on their web site. The Wanderbird also carries two aging black labs (one blind from birth), an aging and affectionate cat named Hector and, of course, a parrot. The parrot assists Captain Rick in the wheel house above the galley, while the dogs and cat patrol the deck but are trained never to enter the coach house.

We had spent the night anchored off an uninhabited island, just rock and brush, where the Audubon Society is protecting reintroduced puffins. We had sailed three hours the previous day to get there. I hadn't yet had coffee at 7AM when I came out on deck just as these lobstermen had arrived to tend their traps. The pattern of their work and the gulls' dives were observable before the lobster fisherman reached the trap beside our boat, but I had just enough time to get my settings right (f10, 1/800th, ISO 400). Well, I probably could have halved the shutter speed for a bit more depth of field or an ISO of 200, but it would have made little difference. I got off twelve shots, but in only one did everything come together so perfectly. You can almost count the scales in the tail of the lobster, and I much prefer mist to soft focus. I receive such photos as gifts of the gods. Someone recently tried to convince me that good photos must always pass the B&W test. Nonsense! Were the lobsterman's hip waders any color but orange, the photo would be that much weaker.

You've undoubtedly noted that the photo above carries a new copyrighting watermark that proudly announces a new father-daughter venture. Melissa and I have entered into a business partnership, Lenscapes, LLC. You can preview the web site and learn about Melissa's portrait work and our digital field trips at the url below. Is it a coincidence that I met Neal and his daughter Lee co-teaching just as my daughter and I begin a similar venture?

Lenscapes Photography: http://www.lenscapes-photo.com/

Milltown

ARISTOTLE: “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”


PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Like the previous photo, this one also tries to embrace a significant portion of the Collinsville mill site. However, this one does so from a bit of a distance and through a long lens. In that way it brings together a variety of forms that most people passing would not see as related and heaps them on top of each other. The resulting image is, for me, less about Collinsville and more about industrial New England. For that, I prefer it.

The spot from which this was shot is very particular. It was taken just where the old railroad came down off the bridge over the Farmington River. I made a number of experiments moving right, left, up, and down. There were some interesting options that included the railing of the old bridge, but the balances and echoing forms clicked just here. Similarly, it is only late in the day that the sun penetrates the buildings to make the windows come alive. Now the leaves are on the trees, they are no longer scarecrows, and the force of the industrial forms is softened. Photos can be quite specific in these ways. I'll continue to visit this spot through the seasons ahead, and maybe I'll see something new or something better. It's sometimes hard for me to know when a shot will be superseded, but for now this one seems to have achieved my goals. The wanderings of the sun and it's effect on the land are hard to predict until they have been seen.

Statistics: ISO 400, 1/30 at f25, lens zoomed to 165mm

Collinsville

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I think it may have been photographer John Shaw who wrote that the best shooting often happens at the transitions: night to day. summer to fall, fair to foul. Spring has been fully unfurled for at least a week now; the transition is over here in Connecticut. The fragile textures of first budding are gone, red leaves have reached their full green, and I have lost the urge to catch every moment of the unfurling. It is an excellent time to revisit past photos.

In mid March I posted five shots of the factories at Collinsville. My preference then was for shots that abstracted elements rather than shots which sought to embrace some significant portion of the whole. I confess that I prefer the open-endedness and suggestiveness of those shots to the directness of this. That doesn't lessen the difficulty in this of positioning my lens to properly overlay foreground on background. I remember the odd way I was compelled to position my tripod and subsequently my head to get it all composed. Never-the-less, I was pleased to give this commonly photographed face of the factories a bit of a twist by shooting through the structure that protects the old engines that used to power some of the locks, and I was delighted when the wind calmed enough to let the water reflect the facades crisply. In retrospect, I've decided to post this one too. I'm happy to think some of you will even prefer it.

You can view the earlier shots at the following links:
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Water Power
In Time
Concourses of Time
Namelessness

Photo blog: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/

Water Music

GARL RIZBUTH: "Nature is always repainting. The photographer must find the canvas. Even more so than painting, photography is an art of edges"

Colorfield #2

JOHN B. WELLER: "Somewhere stored in my memory is a physical description of most objects I could encounter in the outdoors. When I photograph, I consciously try to wipe that slate clean. I don't see sand; I see abstract patterns of light. The best photographs are said to have a design. Essentially this means if you were to forget the identities of the subjects, the patterns of light and shadow, color, texture and form - [the design] would still communicate the spirit of the piece."

Be sure to click the picture to see it enlarged.

Have you visited, "Dandelion's Revenge"?

Cornfield in Dandelions

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: This field of dandelions by Angevine Farm was so dazzling I stopped my car and went back to catch these shots before continuing to my destination. By the time I passed this way in the afternoon, the farmer was on his tractor, turning the soil to prepare the way for the new corn crop.

COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD: The dandelion: a wild and feral plant with a long, fleshy root; an apomictic home wrecker that flaunts its shameless yellow flowers then spews its seed to sully every honest lawn. The teeth of the lion also make their way under the pseudonyms, "monk's head," "priest's crown," and "blowball."

The following is quoted from the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticide web page:

"Dandelions can be beneficial to a garden ecosystem as well as to human health. Dandelions attract beneficial ladybugs and provide early spring pollen for their food. In a study done at the University of Wisconsin, experimental plots with dandelions had more ladybugs than dandelion free plots, and fewer pest aphids, a favorite food of the ladybugs. Dandelions long roots aerate the soil and enable the plant to accumulate minerals, which are added to the soil when the plant dies. Not only are dandelions good for your soil, they are good for your health. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a serving of uncooked dandelion leaves contains 280 percent of an adult's daily requirement of beta carotene as well as more than half the requirement of vitamin C. Dandelions are also rich in vitamin A. Dandelions are also used as herbal remedies. The white sap from the stem and root is used as a topical remedy for warts. The whole plant is used as a diuretic and liver stimulant."

Colorfield

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: From east to west the year flows out, a wave upon the shore. On May 9th the dandelions roared, even before the grass was emerald. "Weeds!" they're called because of their crabbed doggedness. Despised by golfers and greenskeepers. To me they are a color field of bliss, a visual hosanna tossed by spring winds against the abyss of the unconscious.

Hiddenhurst from the Top of Hiddenhurst Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: This photo reverses the view shown in the last photo. Behind these barns the land slopes down to a stream and then back up across the fields of Sunset Ridge that Kevin was plowing in the last photograph. We are looking north toward Massachusetts where the foothills of the Berkshires become the Berkshire Mountains. While I was eager to show a reverse view, my goal is never to document the landscape, but to create images that capture my own feelings about a place. Sometimes I'm so sure of myself that others' opinions, while interesting, probably won't sway me. However, I wondered if this shot was up to the level I have strived for in past shots, and I'm interested in the honest thoughts of all who view this.

HIddenhurst from Sunset Ridge

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The previous image was of Hiddenhurst from Wheeler-Collins Farm to the northwest. That's at least one or two hills, depending on where you count hills, to the right of this image. I never pass Sunset Ridge Farm when Kevin isn't busy around the barns or at work in the fields. On this evening he was in the middle of raking hay.

As he reached us he stopped his tractor for moment of talk. I made the mistake of admiring the stripes painted on the hillside by the newly cut grass, and he observed we must be waiting for the light to shift. There were distant beams that might pass our way. As Kevin drove off, the first bit of the pattern was gone. A few minutes later we heard his tractor power down at the end of the row to wait with us as two darts of light slowly moved across the hills, lest he disturb another blade of grass in the great design.

The beams were in no hurry. The silence around the bird chatter grew deafening as we waited for the clouds to carry the sun into position. Kevin's pause was a gesture of friendship that I will treasure, and the shot I got with the sunlight on Hiddenhurst with a secondary beam on the remaining unraked grass rows in the foreground was good. However, waiting there, Kevin parked at the end of the hay row and us standing, ready to shoot, at the beginning, I knew we would miss the best shot. I wanted to tell him to start his tractor and drive it down the grass row and through the beam of light as it reaches the hill. Sadly, by the time the tractor snatched the next stripe of cut hay, the spotlight had moved on to another hill.

The hills in the background of this shot mark the southern edge of a historic farming district that probably supplied the Sheffield Company with the milk I drank as a child growing up in New York City. Sheffield is long gone and most of the dairy industry with it. Also gone is the train line that carried the milk to Sheffield's New York City plant near Columbia University.

However, most of the large tracts of land in the historic district remain intact with the original 18th and 19th century farm houses and various barns. Most of the land still serves some sort of farming. There's an organic farm with a market on the main highway. I've photographed the Highland Cattle at Wheeler-Collins Farm. Across the highway is a farm raising sheep, and everywhere they're growing corn. Unfortunately, Sunset Ridge is the only farm with a large dairy herd.

The area is easily 4 or 5 times the size of the Great Hollow with that feeling of vast space already mentioned. Hiddenhurst falls as close to dead center as one can imagine. What must it have been like back when the Hidden brothers raced their stallions on the hill over there? Did the bovine herds on neighboring hills stroll to the pasture fence to watch the thoroughbreds?

Hiddenhurst from Wheeler-Collins Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Standing amid the tall grasses of the Wheeler-Collins Farm I watched as the clouds rolled over the valley from the north-west, past Wheeler-Collins and then to the south-east where Hiddenhurst stood. Wheeler-Collins is the farm where the previously posted photo on "Threesomeness," was shot.

The cloud cover was solid and the broad valley looked flat and unappealing, so I did what I've learned to do in such situations; I waited. When a first beam of light came into view I crossed my fingers that it would eventually move toward Hiddenhurst. Then a second beam followed it at a short distance. What would be the chances that both would slide into position to clarify my shot? They moved toward me at the speed of a passing car, and then the light was on me for less than a minute, and then I was back in shadow again, but the trajectory looked good. I watched the first beam pick out a foreground tree from a row of trees behind it, and then the second beam came my way. Yes, everything was aligned, and I watched as the two beams subsequently revealed and concealed each level of the scene. I snapped many shots, but I knew that I had found the right moment when that second beam caught the foreground tree again at the very same moment the first beam was shining on Hiddenhurst.

So, what is the story of Hiddenhurst? Well, the truth is it was built by millionaire paint manufacturers from New York, Edwin and Thomas Hidden in 1903 for the breeding and training of their race horses. Here is how Amenia Historian Arlene Pettersson explained it to me:

They did build this place specifically to raise and train their driving and harness racing horses. There was a 1/4 mile track which encircled a magnificent stable which housed the horses and an indoor arena which was very unusual at the time. The price for the barn was $100,000 (or that may have been the price for the entire construction but I don't know for sure-I kind of lean toward it being the cost for the whole place because the house itself sold for $45,000 in the 1940's. ) Anyway when Thomas Hidden died he left no will, and the estate went to his three nieces (this was in 1918), Frances Hidden, Maria Watson Hidden and Sarah Hidden. I didn't do a detailed search, but the house and estate changed hands a few times after that. It went at one point to the Sheffield Dairy which was a big milk operation around the corner and then to the Fitzgeralds. They changed the name to FITZLAND FARM when they got it in 1945. It was shortly after that the great stable described above and two silos caught fire and burned to the ground.

So it is not entirely clear to me what the barns in the picture are. They have the form of dairy barns. The current owner tells me that he, "renovated the old barn." Arlene thinks they were all destroyed. One doesn't install three giant harvester silos like those unless one has a major cattle operation, and three clay tile silos suggest cattle farming must have spanned a considerable period of time. Nothing on the barns looks especially old, but they do play well to theater lights. While their history may be a bit atypical for this dairy region, it is only their flamboyant setting atop their hurst that sets them apart from the many dairy farms still standing in the region.

The silo in the previous TODAY'S is the one on the far left of the barns, partly hidden by the tree in the center of the picture.

Hiddenhurst

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: They called it "Hiddenhurst." Until yesterday I had no idea why. A "hurst," I found out, is a hillock. This is a land of hillocks, hillocks and dairy farms, but few of them claim to be hursts. No self-respecting Holstein would graze a hurst, nor did I know why this one claimed to be hidden. It's plainly visible from every hillock and hurst for miles up and down the Harlem Valley.

When one stands on almost any hillock around here one can look across to at least one or two other farms, but, although they are oriented to maximize sunshine, they all shyly hug their backs to a hillockside to block the winds. Only Hiddenhurst struts atop its hurst, hardly hidden. Until yesterday I had no idea why they called it Hiddenhurst.

Threesomeness

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: It takes a bit more gas to get across the border into New York, but that's where the skies are biggest; during spring showers, it's the place to be to shoot the sky or to catch the hillsides transform under theater lights beaming between the clouds. Cool weather and alternating periods of sun and rain have sent the grass soaring by inches per day. The roll and the sway of the sweetgrass hills is intoxicating. Saturday, when I walked here, it was waist high, and I was inside the roll and sway of these sweetgrass hills. On Sunday the farmer had begun mowing. Elsewhere tiny buttons of corn had begun popping up in long rows, and I was here again, having driven a few extra miles to catch, maybe, a small miracle. Everything moves to the turning of the great wheels.

WILLIAM BLAKE:

Ah! Sun-Flower

Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done:

Where the Youth pined away with desire
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Theater Lights #3: Waiting for the Grass to Grow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I'm coming to believe that theater lights must be tended and harvested like a precious crop. They come in many moods. When the clouds are dense, and there are few holes for the sun to poke through, I stand and wait, uncertain and guessing where the stage will next be set and what my composition might be; waiting for the shafts of sunlight that will add a transitory note to the harmony, a moment of expectation or hesitation, that sense that I have caught the leaf falling.

Theater Lights #2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - The Bearded Barn holds the stage beside a full cast of supporting characters. Here they are, arranged as if ready to take a bow. This is a prime stage for future "theater lights" shoots which raises the issue of potential redundancy. I like to think of the photos that make it to TODAY'S as likely "keepers." Is this shot merely an opening bow for a more spectacular performance yet to come, or will it hold its own when set beside future acts?