March Meditation

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

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

A Paneful Composition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noir Technicolor

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

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

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

There now...

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

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

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

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

Farm Noir

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

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

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

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

Rabbit Hill, Winter, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

Corn Grater

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Three Maxims

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

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

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

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

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

Winter Burn

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

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

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

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

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

First Lights

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

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

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

Meadow Gold, Macricostas Preserve, 9/9/06

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

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

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

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

Freeman's Meadow

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

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

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

Misty Morning, October 8, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shape of Wind

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

Radial Composition in Ice and Grass

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

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

Edenalia No.1 (alternate)

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

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

Edenalia No.1

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

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

A Farm

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

Creepers & Climbers

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

Checkered

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

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

Sundown

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

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

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

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

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

Explorations of Form No.16, Syncopation 1

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

Explorations of Form No.15, Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explorations of Form No.12, Fugue

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

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

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

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

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

Explorations of Form No.11, Context

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

Explorations of Form No.10, Shadow & Substance

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

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

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

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

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

Exploration of Form No.6, Volume

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

Exploration of Form No.5, Pattern

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

Exploration of Form No.2, Implication

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

An Aria

SHAKESPEARE: 

Since brass nor stone nor earth nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality oe'rsways their power.

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

Staccato

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

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

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

Golden Delicious

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

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

The Dreamer Merlin and his Prophesies

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

Tell William

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

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

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

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

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

'The Joker,' setting by Cartier

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

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

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

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

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

Pop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

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

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

Time Suspended

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

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

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

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

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

Glacial Chill

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

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

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

Collinsville Company 1826-1966

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

Cathedral of Mt. Tom

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

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

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

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

Of course Friedrich was a genius and ended life insane.

Beyond Memories

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: NOT MEMORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Porch & Blacksmith's Shop in Fog

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

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

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

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

Composition in Barn Board & Autumn Leaves

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

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

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

Upon Brume

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

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

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

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

Barnyard Thaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barnyard Freeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New England Farmhouse

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea:

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.



Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar,

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known.

-Tolkien