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

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: When I was back at Hilltop Pond last week, the color had mostly blown away or crisped to brown. Low clouds floated over the hills and a thin mist rose from the still water. However, this shot seemed to me to come from someplace even darker. It could easily be the blackness of the words Shakespeare chooses in next quatrain of sonnet 73 to image darkness overtaking "twilight..."

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

How smoothly those words slide from the tongue! However, the words that came to mind and that title this image are from the curses Lear hurls at his daughters before he rushes out into the storm. Although I seek no such vengeance on anyone (at least none who aren't in office), I am amused at how observant of natural processes is this furious invocation of deities that Shakespeare puts in Lear's enraged speech.

When Yellow Leaves

...or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
-Shakespeare (from Sonnet 73)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 has always seemed to me one of the most haunting and sublime songs in the English language - the futile rage that concludes the first quatrain, the black hush in which the second ends, and the just resignation to ongoing process of the third. The sonnet returns to me each fall about this time, and on days like this its polyphonic strains are a likely accompaniment as I shoot. I believe it is much more important that I find the tempos and harmonics of a place than find the shots. If I'm properly tuned, the shots appear.

Polarities 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Polarities 1 and Polarities 2 were taken 22 minutes apart. I did not intend to make them a mirrored pair, and I think the differences between them add to their interest. They are seen to best effect either placed side by side or flipped as in a slide show.

In fact, Polarities 2 was shot first, and I made many exposures, enjoying the rich color and experimenting with how the eye is caught at the lower right corner. Of course, changing where the corner sits changes everything. Soft, low clouds diffused the light and made the yellows and reds of the underbrush by the pond more intense. How rich it seemed now that all else was brown and bare beside the still water!

I could have gone on enjoying that heady brew, but I was beginning to repeat and needed to break the spell. I changed my focus and moved in close. What could I find along the shore in the still water? -leaves floating and submerged? -tall swamp grasses? -their glassy reflections? When I turned back I was on the other side of the weeping birch tree, looking into the narrow end of the pond, and had entered the universe of Polarities 1.

Polarities 1

Aphorism IV: "Everything is dual; everything has an opposing point; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes bond; all truths are but half truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."

Undulations 1

APHORISM III: "Nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Back in Connecticut, no sooner was the parade history than rain came and took down all the leaves but the oaks'. Once the rain ended, the first days of shooting were wrapped in forlorn gray sky. It took me back to Hilltop Pond where even the birds had become silent. While I might have wanted to catch more of the earlier blaze, there are many moods found here.

Even though I had another week's worth of parade photos that I thought worth adding to TODAY'S, I've decided it's time to move on. Anyone wishing to see all of the selected parade shots can do so at the official parade site. The parade site also sells all of the shots posted there. 100% of profit goes to support the parade.

Wry Bones

FREEMAN PATTERSON: "The camera always points both ways. In expressing your subject you also express yourself."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NY Halloween #11: When I was a little child I remember tickling the downey hair on my arm until I could barely stand the painful thrill of it. The parade's view of the brutishness and tenderness of mortality feels a bit like that.

Spirits

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NY Halloween #10: In 1968 my wife and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It took all day. When we got to the campground at the bottom we were welcomed into a community of 30 or 40 campers and invited to toss whatever we had brought to eat into a giant stew pot. The result was tastier than I would have expected, and I don't recall either of us finishing dinner hungry. That stew was very much like this parade, a mongrel mix made of contributions from countless individuals. It is a small-town parade of mountainous proportions. The infinite variety of genius that spills up 6th Avenue is thrilling.

I have now tossed my photos into the Halloween stew and have been given a gallery at the parade web site. Once at the parade web site, do a text search on my name, or go directly here.

Sparkle

Finding Elvis

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NY Halloween #8: ...and when we find our inner Elvis, what have we become, and where is Elvis?

Masks

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NYC Halloween #7: They are ready and waiting, looking up as the parade prepares, regarding the operations and silently commenting, secretly ogling? By what process do they become us, do we become them? How does it happen that a parade becomes a living thing with a spirit and life of it's own? In how many ways is that thing us?

Points of View

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NYC Halloween #6: What impressed me most was the innocence of this naughtiness. While we voyeuristic photographers gaped, the girls carefully and thoughtfully, over three hours applied the paint. It appeared that the finished designs were guided and detailed by two professional body painters. Periodically the girls would pose, talk, change partners, and continue painting until the finished designs began to emerge. One design especially made me laugh - ideal use of the medium! There are some excellent photos of the girls finished and marching on the parade web site. I recommend these.

Looking over my results from the shoot, I'm keenly aware of the difference between photographing the event and making photographs. I hope this image is about the frenzy and excitement of the moment and perhaps about something else as well.

Behind the Mask 2

TODAY'S PHOTO - NYC Halloween #5: HHalloween isn't Halloween without its portion of naughtyness. and the most famous naughtiness of New York City's Halloween parade through Greenwich Village is its bit of nudity. A half dozen girls, elaborately body-painted, parade topless. What a surprise to find that for three or more hours before the parade the girls apply each other's "costume" publicly! In its own way, this image, too, is a portrait.

The Stoop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NYC Halloween #4: People begin assembling to march in the parade around 6 PM, though some people come much earlier, and many people aren't marching until 8 or 8:30 PM.

I'm not sure if I caught a serendipitous moment or a well-planned tableau. Even the lighting is right. Whatever the truth, we get to make up the tale.

How different the tale might have been had I stooped!

Behind the Mask

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NYC Halloween #3: Masks are funny things. They're usually created to conceal identity, but the parade portraits I liked best were those that seemed to reach behind the costume and mask to suggest something real in the person's identity. Sometimes this may be the result of the artistry of the costume or of the "actor" wearing it. At other times it may be something accidentally revealed in the shot. Of course, in any picture it is up to the viewer to contemplate the spectral boundaries of reality and illusion.

In selecting portraits to post, I've most often sought those that reach behind to find something more ...or perhaps less.

********

Visit Bob Lejeune's blog at http://boblejeune.blogspot.com/ for more photos from our parade adventure.

At http://www.halloween-nyc.com/parade_pictures.html you will find publicly posted photos from the parade.

Street Warriors

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - NYC Halloween #2: As I was moving through the crowd, snapping photos and trying to reunite with Bob, a trio of rogues appeared. I took just two shots, one in which this fellow sneers down with his arm around a male sidekick in top hat and gotham eyes. It is an ordinary shot, decent, but nothing to single out. Just then he turned to draw the lady into the shot and she hung in this pose for a moment. I'm not sure what made me compose it as I did, but I knew instantly it was what I wanted to do. Sometimes ones pull to a given composition is that immediate, that visceral. Could I have recomposed and shot something more conventional? I think she stayed this way for a second more, but I moved on. It was 6:03 PM, the sun had been down for ten minutes, and I'd hiked my ISO to 1600 and was resisting flash, so the image is grainy, but even that adds to the effect.

Masked for Halloween

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - "Notes for Next Year": Friday night at the halloween parade in NYC was challenging and fun, and using my camera off the tripod with my new, "walk-around" lens and in a different kind of shooting situation was instructional. This is great people shooting; everyone there wants to be in pictures. If the weather is anywhere near what it was yesterday, I want to go back next year. When I do, I want to remember some of the things I did right and some I did wrong:

1. TIMING - PARADE STAGING: We made the right decisions about when to arrive and where to go. The staging of the parade is better shooting than the parade. We arrived near Spring Street and Broadway around 2:30 PM. My first shot is time stamped 2:46:26. We were in no rush to get to the site of the parade and spent 20 minutes dawdling and casually photographing street life and beautiful light. We were headed for the parade, gathering site at Spring St. and 6th Ave. A block away, on Sullivan St., we saw floats and a lady in a truck showed us the plan for float parking. There were many areas set aside for floats and parade vehicles on Varick St (an ave west of 6th), but we never got to any of these.

After photographing ranks of police (3:30 pm) getting their marching orders, a fellow-photographer pointed us (no pun intended) toward the topless girls. They were on Spring St. Once on Spring St. we first encountered the giant skeletons and the ghosts' ball. An Alberich-like dwarf was helping a few people get used to wearing the shoulder braces. There were maybe a dozen photographers exploring, parade participants relaxing and preparing, and the first costumed marchers were happy to be photographed.

The topless girls were at the Varick St. end of the block and it took 10 minutes to reach them. They were painting each other and getting painted by two body paint pros. This is the best show going. I shot the first topless photo at 3:41:01.

Essential to getting inside the restricted staging area without prior registration was arriving early and having an intimidating looking camera. As we had gotten in early, we were never questioned, but I almost got locked out when I started to stray outside the barricades. My big lens got me back in. The key is arrive early and be prepared to stay.

2. PEOPLE: I should have been more aggressive in engaging participants in conversation and posing them where I wanted them to stand. This was the same mistake I made at the 4th of July parade I shot. It is a sign of my inexperience with street shooting.

3. TECHNIQUE: My new 18-200mm street lens is a good deal heavier than my previous street lens, and I quickly found that my best planning in how to shoot was being undermined by my handling of the camera; the new lens changed the balance of the camera and tangled my thumbs. I had a terrible time setting exposure and then realized that I had somehow fumbled and changed camera settings without realizing it. Throughout the evening I experienced accidental changes to exposure compensation, shutter speed, and I frequently switched the mode off of shutter priority without realizing it. Practice, practice! Check metering often!

The side street is very contrasty and at a slower pace would call for spot metering. However, things change so fast that I found myself shifting positions constantly. As the girls moved, I moved. At any given minute at least 3 others were shooting the girls. Sometimes the girls were lit brightly, and sometime they were in shadow. We needed a diffuser on the sky, but the bright light also brought out the crustiness of the body paint. Quite honestly, it never occurred to me that I would be better in matrix metering. Lesson learned, switch to matrix metering.

To make matters worse, I find I have a habit of hitting the dial on the back of the camera with my thumb and sometimes with my nose. As a result, the focus point was never where I expect to find it, and I lost precious time finding and moving it to meter and focus properly. VERY IMPORTANT: Turn the lock on to keep this from happening.

4. PARADE SHOOTING STRATEGY: We made the wrong decision about shooting the parade. As the parade was forming we decided to leave and were shocked to find 6th Avenue packed with spectators behind barricades looking in at us. What a rush suddenly to see thousands of faces looking in to where we were. Next to the staging area were corrals where the hoards of marchers gathered and from which they were systematically released at intervals to march between bands and floats. We were about to leave the staging area, join the spectators, and head uptown to see what the passing parade looked like, when we found a gap that let us into one of the corrals to march with the parade. Doing so turned out to be a mistake. Once inside, the police would not let anyone exit. We were locked in the corral for the next 40 minutes. When we did find a gap to escape, we discovered we had just moved into a neighboring corral. No sooner were we there than the police released everyone in the first corral into the parade, and we contemplated another 40 minute wait until we might be released. Finally my companion, Bob Lejeune, found a policeman who took pity and let us rejoin the multitudes of spectators.

Once on civilian territory we found as many costumed celebrants wandering Greenwich Village as in the parade. There was partying everywhere. A better strategy for shooting post-staging would be to shoot the partying. I would find locations with good ambient light and let the party pass while shooting from stationary positions.

5. THOUGHTS ON COMPOSITION: After reviewing shots, I always see opportunities missed. a) I need to constantly remind myself to watch backgrounds. This is always tough in fast-paced, street shooting. It is tougher on east-west streets like Spring St. where the setting sun created bright light and deep shadows everywhere. b) Always watch for chances to include the grand old buildings of the area. Often this means getting low to shoot upward. c) The giant puppet skeletons, ghosts, and other props that are raised on the shoulders of marchers often look best when the shots include at least the shoulders and heads of those marchers. Usually it is a mistake to focus only on the puppets as the supporters provide scale. Where the marchers can't be used for scale, these puppets must be shot against buildings or other objects that give them scale. Lacking this, they are not especially impressive. d) While there are many opportunities for portraits of people, the parade is as much about the city as it is about people. It is important to look around often for chances to shoot the city with the parade passing through it.

Edge of Sunlight

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
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?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Wm. Shakespeare - Sonnet 65

Skarf Mt. Blacksmith Shop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: An old, dry husk, the blacksmith's shop is pealing apart. Gaps in the wall expose dusty benches and the forge. An account book lies open near a window that's lost its glass, and tools rest near unfinished work, as if the smith might appear at any moment from a long lunch and fire up the cold hearth.

Who was this smith? Was he a lone individual or was smithing a family trade passed through generation? Signs of his work are on most of the buildings of the farmstead in hooks and latches and handles. Few farms of this size would have such a shop. Did this forge serve all the farms of Skarf Mountain?

Autumn Barnyard, Skarf Mountain Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I'd like to think the barns did it by themselves, perhaps one night when nobody was watching. The next morning it was there like Cinderella's coach, the great doors of the barn swung wide and the hay wagon loaded with crisp, square bales - as if the farm were running once again. Of course, I know it isn't so, but I do believe the barns are watching. taking it all in, even as the glass shatters and the wood grows brittle and frail.

The main barn, shown here, is really three barns, or rather two or three additions to what looks like it might initially have been a hay barn. The original barn is to the left, up and mostly out of the picture. The next section stops just past the right hand great door. You can see how the roof is worn differently at the seam. The section to the right of the great doors appears to have been a tobacco barn at one time; hinged slats open to ventilate the drying tobacco leaves that would have hung inside. This end section has a lower story with access from the end.

At some point the farmer seems to have switched to livestock farming and had to struggle a bit to make the barn fit the new usage. The area to the right of the great doors and on the level below were then fitted with neck stalls made of wood. This also would have prevented operation of the ventilators. It was probably later when the area with the row of windows was added along side of the two first sections of barn in order to make a space wide enough for more livestock. This time metal neck stalls were used. The stalls all seem very small to have housed cows. Whatever they were, there might have been as many as 40.

The farmstead had its own blacksmith shop. Close examination of the chain and ring on the post show it is hand forged.

Skarf Mountain Dairy Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: They built the barns and farmed the land around the time of the Civil War. Their descendants live in shiny new houses on top of the hill. The cow stalls have been empty for half a century. The hay, most probably, will feed horses that are ridden where corn used to grow and cows grazed. Curious, how time rearranges things!

Creeper

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (writing of an autumn train ride): "As we were whirled along, I noticed the woodbine, its leaves now changed, for the most part on dead trees draping them like a red scarf. It was a little exciting, suggesting bloodshed or, at least, an epaulet or sash as if it were dyed with the blood of the tree whose wound it was inadequate to staunch. For now the bloody autumn was come and an Indian warfare was waged through the forest."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Red leaves are often a warning sign (e.g. poison ivy). When I pulled some of this virginia creeper from a tree thirty years ago I got what seemed like a poison ivy rash. Now I know why.

Skarf Mountain Farmstead 2008, #1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Lurid autumn swallows idle farmsteads. At Skarf Mountain Farm as at many others, the harvest commotion, the tramp of muddy hooves, the jangling of cattle stalls, wagons hauling hay, all ended years ago. The wheel ruts in the farmyard are long healed. The locus of commotion has shifted. Now, across every stone wall bittersweet lounges and ignites, sly tentacles of virginia creeper and poison ivy turn neon red, as maple trees flash in the sunlight proclaiming another advance on the old buildings.

I know they are modest structures, these old farmstead, but the building shapes and layouts, thoughtfully planned by generations of practical farmers, tell a story and delight the eye. Enclosed within the old farmyards one can feel the rhythm of their work. In this farmstead two buildings may be gone by spring.

Autumn Cow in Retrospect

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Fall is the time when the earth perspires and cows steam. I'm getting to know cows. While my chest cavity lacks the heft to speak the tongue, I listen as they talk. They warn of my passing, and when I walk between them, talk across the divide. They are inquisitive by nature, and it can be intimidating to have a herd of thirty or forty all watch as I pass. Sometimes I play with them. They will turn their heads sideways to follow me until they are eventually looking backward. Then I go slowly, drawing their heads further until they nuzzle their own flanks, to see if I can make them stumble unbalanced before they readjust their heft.

These are beef cows, steers and heifers. Across the stone fence the neighboring farm has dairy cows; they're used to being around people, and you can rub their foreheads. These can be skittish which is about how I feel as I walk among them. They're left pretty much alone to graze through connecting pastures, but I've learned that these at Four Maples Farm are so calm that sometimes when I pass they don't even stop eating or rise from their afternoon bask in the sun.

Across town at Twin Elm Farm the herd is more mischievous. The farmer wondered, had two of them not been castrated properly? And I wondered what it meant, "castrated improperly."

Sometimes at Twin Elm as I'm shooting they'll sneak up behind me, and when I turn they jump away. One morning I turned from shooting, and there they were, the whole herd looming out of a thick fog, watching me. Sometimes I've had a third of the herd follow behind me as I cross the pasture. When I stop and turn, they stop. When I turn back and walk, they walk.

Nor is it true that cows lack guile. The other day they had me surrounded (at a safe distance). I was shooting one who was well positioned with regard to the light. As I shot I became aware of the cows slowly converging. They thought I wouldn't notice them, slyly nibbling their way along the grass headlong toward me. Their heads were down but their eyes were up. Several times as I was shooting one, he would eat his way almost to the camera, and I'd have to stop, step forward, and shoo him back. They run away when I try to touch them. I ran away when two steers began locking horns in the background. I left quietly and in the other direction.

I ended the day in a muddy farmyard, eavesdropping on three genuine moo-cows with drooping utters that let me rub their foreheads.

Corn Harvesters near Hiddenhurst

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Flying toward the equinox,
the mystical shifting of polarities
that generates autumn perspirations
and soon mute frost.

Momently poised on the hillside,
between orbs, sifting light,
as the field is rolled and stored;
saving up the summer to feed the winter.

All life suspended in the flux between poles,
teetering on time,
like this photo, stop action,
while wheeling engines spin soundlessly.

Solitude

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I visited on both Saturday and Sunday mornings as the radiant sun rising, blazed and dazzled across Hilltop Pond. I left reluctantly when winds came and chased the image off the pond.

Monday was entirely different. The lighting god, to whom all landscape photographers pay obeisance, had floated his great diffuser across sky, and autumn was bathed in soft, shadowless glow. When we passed at 2 PM, breezes still roiled the image, so we rode on to Twin Elms. When we returned at 4:30, the winds were just leaving, and melancholy stillness saturated the air, and I thought of Shakespeare's "Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."

This was the first shot I took. I was immediately pulled to the hushed banks beneath the trees, a concealed area with electric vegetation, a place to safely take it all in, ...and to the sliver of sky reflecting in the water. The sliver was for me the key to the composition. The trick was to balance it properly with actual sky, while also positioning the tree trunks to lead the eye. Sometimes the gymnastics which guide a composition are immediately evident, not often. I made just two exposures, this, and one in which the reflected bit of sky began near the lower right corner. Now, if only I had a few turkeys strolling off in the background on the left.

Pond Tiffany

ERNEST FENOLLOSA (c. 1890s): "The mere representation of an external fact, the mechanical copying of nature, has nothing whatever to do with art. This proposition is asserted by all Oriental critics and is fundamental canon with all Japanese painters....
   ...Lines and shades, and colors may have an harmonic charm of their own, a beauty and infinity of pure visual idea, as absolute as the sound idea in music. The artisitc element in form is ... the pure simple music of a form idea... the fact that such a line organism may represent natural fact does not interfere with its purely aesthetic relation as a line....  Now such line ideas, apart from what they represent, ... are exactly what the Japanese conceive to be the basis of all their art."

Autumn Palette

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: To the painter, pigment; to the photographer, light.

TODAY'S PHOTO: Detonation, Autumn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I interrupt this jaunt through Maine for autumn, drunk and wheeling with color. It seems every autumn is different. This one arrived early and colored up quickly. It reached its peak this weekend as dry clear weather passed through the Litchfield Hills, drawing me to shoot upward of 6 hours a day, and filling my bin with photos I'm eager to share. Much remains from my Maine adventures, and I will return to them during the drab months when I'm longing for color.

Hilltop Pond, 8 AM, Sunday! I'm the only one here. At my back, the sun has just come over the mountain like a still wind. How can such things pass without anyone noticing? I'm transfixed.

Corea Harbor, Gull Watch

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: The ravages of time are everywhere in these old Maine fishing villages. To those who know, the history of each lobstering family can be read in the lobster docks and shacks that line these fishing harbors. As soon as I saw it, I was drawn to the stranded shack in this photo. The dock is long since gone, a bit of the dock hangs onto the remains of the shack as if it were a front porch. A box of rocks seems about to tumble into the harbor. I don't know where the fishermen have gone, but a hole in the side reveals that the wood stove has been removed. My editorial review board urged me to post this photo rather than the previous one, but I took too much pleasure in the many details of the shack to leave that close-up unpublished, and I thought it better represented Corea's life on the edge. In contrast, this image is about safe harbor.

I arrived in Corea in the early afternoon, well ahead of the storm. What there is of the town sits at the back of a well-protected cove where lobster boats can weather the storm surge and winds. There is little left of Maine's fishing industry except for lobstering. The closing of the sardine canneries along the coast was a serious blow to the economy some years back. Even much of the bait for lobster traps is shipped up from Chesapeake Bay.

Each town has its own lobstering territory in which the color-coded buoys distinguish every lobsterman's pots. Everybody knows everybody else's colors, and woe to the lobsterman whose pots are placed in neighboring turf or to a newcomer who wants to add his colors to an established community of lobstermen. Becoming part of the lobstermen's society in any town is more difficult than joining an exclusive country club. The lobstermen generally start heading out to check traps just after sunrise. It's a social occasion where men and a few women share the days gossip. By 8 AM the boats will be out, and the retired lobstermen and those who are not heading out that day will slowly wander off, filled with the day's gossip.

The pots must be checked and emptied every few days. A good lobsterman also knows when and where to move his pots to maximize his catch through the season. Some lobstermen have their own docks and lobster shacks, but there is often a commercial pier where, starting around noon, lobster wholesalers can pull their trucks up to weigh and purchase the day's catch. In some of the most active fishing towns there are also permanent commercial wholesalers with their own piers, warehouses, and sometimes their own restaurants where lobsters can be purchased at near wholesale prices. Many lobstermen sell to them.

Arrive in a lobster town in June or early July and the docks are piled high with waiting pots. That's the beginning of the season for many of the lobstermen. By mid-July the docks will be nearly clear of pots. Then as September approaches, the pots begin coming in for winter maintenance and storage. That's when the most rugged of the lobstermen begin moving their pots further and further off shore. To continue through the winter they must travel further out to sea, through rougher waters, and in freezing cold - not a line of work for the timid. Most lobstermen close down for the winter.

Unlike previous trips to Maine, this time I wanted to catch something of the workings of the industry. Alas, when I arrived in Corea most of the boats were secured against the coming storm. After taking a room in a local B&B on the road into Corea, I explored the town. After dinner I went out to Schoodic Point where I expected the storm surge would make stunning breakers. The rains began sometime around midnight. My intent was to return to Corea and Schoodic Point the next morning before heading back to route 1 and down the coast to Southwest Harbor.

When I woke the next morning the rain was ending, but the driveway into my B&B was under two feet of water - no way to move a car in or out. Nothing for it but to enjoy the free breakfast and hope the water would recede. A maid at the B&B told a horror story of roads washed away and power lines down on her way to the inn that morning. Sometime during breakfast a culvert suddenly opened, and the water quickly drained from the driveway, but when I left the road into Corea was closed. I resigned myself to shooting breakers at Schoodic Point, but half way there a large section of road had washed away. Passage through was impossible. I drove 30 miles ast washouts and downed lines to get around that break, but arriving on the other side, the road to the point was still closed. Hanna had taken her toll. I gave up and hoped I would find open roads to get me to Southwest Harbor.

Lobster Shack, Corea

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: If there was a culmination to the Olson House workshop, it was a small gathering for farewells at Tillman Crane's house in Camden, Maine, on Friday evening. The house is also his gallery and studio/darkroom. We toured the darkroom and enjoyed the many beautiful original prints on display. Beautifully restored wood floors and trim complement Tillman's carefully printed, monochrome images. Seeing them so displayed was a privilege. The gathering was a warm harbor before heading off into the promised aftermath of Hurricane Hanna which was scheduled to roar up the Maine coast over the weekend. I was headed for Corea, farther north on the coast than I had ever been and out near Schoodic Point. There, the storm was bound to be a jolly mess.

In this, my fourth photo trip to Maine in three years, I'm just getting it. An article given me by a colleague at the workshop explained what I was beginning to understand. If you want to explore what's left of the fishing industry, the secret is visiting the points. It's not for the lighthouses that one seeks the points, though they can be a nice bonus, but because the fishing towns out at the ends of Maine's great mid-coast peninsulas were at the edge; the fishermen could get to the big catch quicker, especially in winter when the catch retreats to deeper waters.

Back inside the great bays, Penobscot, Blue Hill, Frenchman's, are well-sheltered cove towns that big tides never touch where boats can be put safely. There one mostly finds trophy yachts and sport, sailing vessels: cutters, and schooners, and sloops. Route 1 runs through or close to most of these towns; they are an easy reach for tourists, and any further south than Wiscasset commercialization and suburbanization for the tourists is rampant. Without a boat one has to drive far to get out on the edge.

At the end of the first great peninsula above Wiscasset is Port Clyde. I had made a return trip there two days earlier. One sees a good bit of nowhere to get to Port Clyde. I went there to catch sunrise light on the old lighthouse. Well, it mostly missed the lighthouse, and by the time I got into Port Clyde the lobstermen were gone for the day. When I finally wanted to get back to Olson House in Cushing, my GPS told me it was just 3.5 miles away. Wyeth lived in Port Clyde and traveled easily back and forth to Cushing. Unfortunately, by car it is 45 minutes away, put asunder by long, narrow Muscongus Bay.

And so, as I headed up the coast just ahead of Hanna, I was aware I was heading for one of the most remote and exposed spots on coastal Maine. At the end of the next peninsula, above Port Clyde is Stonington. I would get there on my way home a few days later. Next comes the twin headlands of Mt. Dessert Isle. I'd fully explored Bass Harber and Bernard, the point towns there. I would head back there on Monday for a few more days of shooting. Above Mt. Dessert Isle and Frenchman's Bay lies the Schoodic Peninsula, the tip, a severed part of Acadia National Park. Just slightly around the back from Schoodic Point, like a little toe, sits Corea, the end of a winding road, lobster piers clustered around a sheltered harbor out on the edge. It was the farthest off the coastal beaten track I'd been.

TODAY'S PHOTO - Dark Windows

from Christina Olson: Her World
"Alvaro chose life on the Olson farm. His brothers had married, so it was he and Christina left at Hathorn Point. Friends and neighbors remember going to see Alvaro for the wonderful vegetables in his garden - his famous peas - and the fresh eggs. He seemed to provide for everyone around him. Although he prospered at farming, his priority was always to take care of his sister, Christina.

"He spent his days working in and around the house, gradually letting go of the Olson farm. He mended the house and barn with contrived repairs. Missing or rotting clapboards would be replaced with mismatched boards and broken windows would often be stuffed with Christina's old rags.

"In time, the Olson house was not the family home that once existed - it became a large house that was difficult to heat and repair. The upstairs was not used, except by Andrew Wyeth for studio space. The front entrance stored wood and remnants of the past. Keeping some of the original characteristics of their childhood home, the barometer still hung in the front hall.

"Alvaro died on Christmas Eve, 1967. Christina died the following month, on January 27, 1968. They were laid to rest in the family cemetery at the base of the hill, overlooking the water, with a view of the house and "her world."

ANDREW WYETH:
"The World of New England is in that house - spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic - dry bones. It's like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It's the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales.

"The shadow of Christina's head against a door has a ghostly quality, eerie, fateful, serious, a symbol of New England people in the past - as they really were. There's everything about Christina - her hand pushing a pie plate toward you, or putting wood on the stove. There's a feeling that, yes, you're seeing something that's happening momentarily, but it's also a symbol of what always happened in Maine. The eternity of a moment.

"I've seen Olson's from the air on the way back by plane to Pennsylvania - that little square of a house, dry, magical - and I think, My God, that fabulous person. There she is, sitting there. She's like a queen ruling all of Cushing. She's everybody's conscience. I honestly did not pick her out to do because she was cripple. It was the dignity of Christina Olson. The dignity of this lady."

Tillman's Dismay

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 12

The idea for using apples came from Gary who produced a beautiful shot with, as I recall, 3 apples. There were apple trees out back, a pail in the shed. The next morning I gathered fallen fruit. Gary shot across the entry hall toward the stairs. I wanted to shoot the length of the hall as I had on the previous day. I'm not sure why I was so set on shooting it that way, but I liked the strong light reflected from the painted wood, and I was in "rigidify" mode with an idea that kept me from really exploring other possibilities.

Tillman told us that he thought the floor had been painted by Christina. It is the color of a hazy sky and has painted brown leaves falling through it every foot or so. If Tillman is correct, here truly is Christina's World, the art work of the artist's muse. Tillman said that nobody had yet solved the problem of shooting the floor.

I wasn't really trying to solve the problem of the floor when I shot this, only use that glaring light, but now I'm eager to shoot Christina's upside down world. In a period when I lost my sunlight I made some experiments from the stairs that hold promise. I vowed to get back to them and never did.

The problem with shooting the hall my way, Tillman quite accurately pointed out, was an ugly building across the lawn and excessive glare through the door. Tillman identified the problem and then stood in as a solution, "Teacher's Dismay."

Earlier I had a reflector to bounce a bit of light back into the bucket, but when I shot this I'd already returned it. Another tool to make part of the kit!

Back Steps

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 11

Back Steps

They look as if they are being swallowed by the sod,
as if the last steps taken
down them
led into
the earth.

So the back door stays closed now.

The pilgrims come and go on the sunny south side,
and few notice the north door
there, near the window,
where Christina often sat,
by the open door.

The Light Press

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 10

I'd been shooting buckets, basins and brooms in the shed. From behind me bright, north light spilled over my shot. When I turned, light and shadow sprayed me. I didn't even think to stop and ask what the thing was used for. I used it to wring out sunlight.

I wish I could have everything in sharp focus. I used my best macro lens and stopped it down to f25. Even so, depth of field is short, and I chose to focus where bright light first leads the eye.

I had many questions in processing the image:

How much shadow detail to squeeze out? It's tempting to adjust curves to lower contrast and make the shadows glow, but ultimately I decided that drama had soaked me, and I preserved only a shimmer to show that something was in the shadows.

What makes this shot color rather than monochrome? When I tried it in monochrome I couldn't tell whether the light source was daylight or electric light. I prefer fresh-squeezed.

Room After Room, Just Visiting

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 9  

I was about 5 years old when my parents rented a new apartment in an old building in New York City. It remained my home until I left for college, and afterward it was my brother's apartment and the place of many family reunions. It is as much a part of me as the freckles on the back of my hand, and in my palm I still sense the unique feel of the crystal door knobs and bathroom faucets. 

Yet, among the profound mysteries of my childhood were the places in that apartment, usually around the door frames, where I caught a glimpse of strangers. In those places the clean paint of my home was nicked to reveal a cross-section of old paint layers. There were pale blues, dark browns, greens, or yellows piled on top of faded cream, on top of stately rust; they were stacked like geological stratifications. I remember taking chips in my hand and trying to peel them apart. Through those cracks in time I could travel back what seemed to me like eons into spaces that were at once my room and yet places very different where other people lived in my home. There I sensed the shuffling ghosts of generations. I like taking photographs in such charged places.

The inside of Olson House contained such cracks in time where stair treads were worn thin, where the grip of absent hands had rubbed the paint from door frames, where mirrors might hold vanished reflections, where scratches on the bottom-rail of a door told of a dog seeking to be let in or let out and a hand that would grasp the door knob in compliance. So far, most of the shots of Olson House that I've posted were taken from outside the house. Such intimate residuum is harder to find there. Much as I had eagerly anticipated shooting INSIDE Olson House, once I got my chance, I found it discouragingly difficult.  Interior space is much less forgiving of lens choices and tilts. Probably its also that I've done much less shooting in such narrow confines.

The spartan emptiness of the rooms was another thing. Furniture was minimal except in the shed, and that was already crowded with shooters. What objects should one introduce? How much should one stage the image? Or were the spirits to be found solely in the way light caressed the mottled, dappled, and stippled surfaces of the of the old house. It had been home, not only to to Christina and Alvaro, but to their forebears back to the Hathorne's who built it? Tillman's photos were elegantly simple and made the emptiness speak, but his medium, large format, black & white film, was also quite different. What should I do with my color digital technique?

In my first afternoon at the house I spent some time shooting an old rocker and its shadows in one of the otherwise vacant rooms. The angle of sun was such that the spindles in the back of the empty chair cast grotesquely exaggerated shadows on the floor, and I spent some time exploring these gothic geometries, but the result was contrived and ultimately passionless - not worth going further. Or perhaps I simply hadn't placed the chair properly, or I shot it in the wrong room, but I moved on. In the entry hall I liked how the afternoon sun caught details of the stairway and made the floor gleam, but I felt no presences, saw no shots, though I took some. I made a number of other tries, increasingly half-hearted, and retreated outside where the bright sun was making the exterior wood of the old house sizzle.  I had four more days to get inside, after all.

Outside the house was instantly gorgeous to me, and I shot until sunset. It was only that night that I recognized my retreat as the cowardly act it was. In order to overcome my difficulty, I decided that on the second day I would re-shoot a shot, justly famous. Even if I couldn't yet commune with the spirits inside the house, I hoped to control the picture space.

A tradition has developed in photographing Olson House.  Perhaps it was the inevitable outcome of the way rooms are strung together and receive light.  Wyeth, of course, set the pattern in, "Room After Room." He uses a similar device in, "The Ericksons."  When Tillman Crane shot his series of photos on Olson House, he reversed Wyeth's perspective by shooting from pantry to kitchen to shed.  

Numerous workshop students have also chosen Tillman's orientation, and it was what I wanted most to try. Of all the room after room possibilities, this seemed the most challenging. It is potentially the longest run possible and includes the three most furnished spaces. Light enters from three directions. I liked especially the bright light, way back at the end wall of the shed, and wanted to include it. Inverting Wyeth's shot allows inclusion of the gleaming wood cook stove and doing so you'd think you were at the Ericksons' instead of the Olsons'. Although I had wanted to shoot this room-after-room since I signed up for the workshop, I still had no Idea what I wanted to do there. 
. 
The goal I set was technical: 1. Explore lens  choices, positions, and tilts and their effects. This is but one. 2. Use light and objects to lead the eye through the composition. 3. Maintain detail in all shadow areas. 

The length of the room-to-room run meant I had to coordinate my work with efforts of my colleagues in spaces down the line. We were all considerate of each other's needs, but progress was slow and sometimes heads and fannies popped unexpectedly into my viewfinder. A few of my shots feature such unscripted, guest appearances though they are not the spirits I was hoping to capture.  

This then is a sketch as I think about the experience of shooting here; I hope it is something to build on. I've shot up, down, left right, and maybe I've learned a bit about the consequences of each choice. If I get to shoot here again, I want to return with a plan and props. Any suggestions?

Christina's Chair

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 8: Wyeth had painted Christina by the geranium window at other times as well, most famously in "Geraniums" (1960). It could almost be the same scene as "Woodstoves" but from another angle. It's worth noting that in moving from one painting to the other, Christina has shifted in her chair as if dodging our gaze; as we try to look in, she turns away.

In "Geraniums," Wyeth peers in through that north kitchen window. What do we find when we look there now? What part of Christina remains?

ANDREW WYETH (on "Geraniums"): One of the most important of the Christina Olson series. I like the way you can see the red of the flowers, through the house, and out the window on the other side, then out to sea. The black thing, by the way, in the opposite window is a black-and-orange work glove her brother, Alvaro, put there. Christina barely seen - just that flash of her striped shirt. She was like a scarecrow when she wasn't rooted in that chair - just bits of tattered rags and hair all askew. What interested me is that she'd come in at odd places, odd times. The great English painter John Constable used to say that you never have to add life to a scene, for if you quietly sit and wait, life will come - sort of an accident in the right spot. That happens to me all the time - happened lots with Christina. The whole point of this picture, which is very abstract, is how you look through the windows and how that brilliant point of color in the geraniums catches light from the other side of the house.

TILLMAN CRANE: "Spiritual presence for some reveals itself in the natural landscape, untouched by humanity. For me, the divine reveals itself in those places where people have lived and worked. My spine literally tingles with excitement when I find a location that resonates with the historic presence of others."

Crossing Thresholds

TILLMAN CRANE: "Photography is also a physical art. Photographers must be at a location to capture the image. We must experience the emotion of being there. We react: How does the place feel? What does the light do? Is it uplifting or depressing? Does it invite or repel? There are places where I feel history, where I feel things have happened. Men and women have lived and perhaps died here. They leave a part of themselves. Their spirit remains."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 7: The geranium window faces south and floods the kitchen with light. Another window facing north permits the free passage of light and air. From the outside, either north or south, we can look through the kitchen and see the opposite yard. In three earlier photographs you were looking through or at the north kitchen window (1), (2), (3).

The geranium window was tended by Christina. It is part of Wyeth's Christina enigma. In "Wood Stove" (1962) he painted her seated, almost off stage, opposite the geranium windows. Center stage is commanded by the sprawling wood, cooking stove and by an empty rocking chair. If stove and chair are not exactly in conversation, they are, unlike Christina, at least intently present. The empty rocker nestles up to the geraniums. Across the room (and the picture) the back door beside Christina is open and seems to have some sort of connection to the back of the chair in which she is seated, but everything about Christina shrinks away from all these things.

How can one photograph in this room and not feel dwarfed by haunting presences? What can a complete stranger add to Wyeth's own intimate record of the place? Can one do more than acknowledge spirits that remain?

ANDREW WYETH (of "Wood Stove"): "This drybrush is intended to be a portrait of the Olson house, both outside and inside. Outside is total fragility. Inside is full of secrets. There's Christina sitting in the kitchen, on the left, and everything's in there - the stove, the geraniums, the buckets, and the trash. I had to overdo it here and reveal all the secrets. Some people say that artists ought to work for utter simplicity. I say to hell with that! Let's get it all in there! I'm afraid of editing too much; it's not natural to be simple and pure. It's not good, either, to show too much artistic ability. You have to fight technique, not let it take over. You can't be nice about things. Like painting a nude - there's got to be some ugliness there. I like to paint in places that are not too nice. That's why I like painting Helga. She's not in love with the neatness of life or things. My father tried to clean up my paintings. Once he took out the hook that Bill Loper wore for his severed hand. That's too neat; too nice. Can't be."

Thresholds

ANDREW WYETH: "It (Olson House) was monumental, but I had the feeling that the house was made of thin boards, not real timbers; I felt that it was something like the game "pick up sticks," which one day the house would look like. ... I wanted "Weatherside" to be a true portrait of the house - not a picturesque portrait, but one I'd be satisfied to carry around in my wallet to look at, because I knew this house couldn't last. I did it purely for myself. I had this feeling that it wouldn't be long before this fragile, crackling-dry, bony house disappeared. I'm very conscious of the ephemeral nature of the world. There are cycles. Things pass. They do not hold still. My father's death did that to me."

TILLMAN CRANE: "The building is essentially a 19th century house maintained in a state of arrested decay."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 6: After a long morning of shooting through windows of the main house, I wandered into the barn. Soon the house and barns would be closed to us and open to the daily pilgrimage of tourists. In a back corner of the barn these webs of death flooded by light grabbed my lens. I shot multiple exposures knowing that the dynamic range was too great for my camera to encompass both bright spots and shadows, that if I bracketed carefully I could reassemble the whole image in my computer. However, when I saw the power of this white light flooding in, it reminded me of a Hieronymous Bosch painting I saw in Venice where souls entering heaven after death pass through what looks like a long concrete culvert toward similar light. I've left my image un-recomposited with burned out highs.