Study in Transparency

ANDREW WYETH on Media:
"To me, pencil drawing is a very emotional, very quick, very abrupt medium. I will work on a tone of a hill and then perhaps I will come to a branch or leaf or whatever and then all of a sudden I'm drawn into the thing penetratingly. I will perhaps put in a terrific black and press down so strongly that perhaps the lead will break, in order to emphasize my emotional impact with the object. ... I may go into tones at times but to me it is a very precice and very vibrating medium."

"With watercolor, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow sifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a windowpane. ... I work with impulsiveness. I use eleven kinds of brushes, camel's hair or sable or an old house painter's brush. Sometimes a scrub brush. I've torn pictures in half trying to get into them, to get structure and weight and form and succulence and passion."

"I work in drybrush when my emotion gets deep enough into a subject. So I paint with a smaller brush, dip it into color, splay out the brush and bristles, squeeze out a good deal of the moisture and color with my fingers so that there is only a small amount of paint left. ... But if you want it to come to life underneath, you must have an exciting undertone of wash. Otherwise if you just work dry brush over a white surface, it will look too much like drybrush. A good drybrush to me is done over a very wet technique of washes."

[On egg tempera] "There's something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive, or hornet's nest. The medium itself is very lasting one, too, because the pure method of the of the dry pigment and egg yolk is terrifically sticky. Try to rub egg off a plate when it's dry. It's tough. ... You will notice that in my temperas I am not trying to to gain motion by freedom of execution. It's all in how you arrange things - the careful balance of the design IS the motion. It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment. Tempera is not a medium for swiftness; it's marvelous, but its not for the quick effect."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 4:

Several Wyeth images remained in my mind throughout my time shooting at Olson House, but one more than any other challenged my shooting. I wanted the same sense of transparency and motion Wyeth captured in, "Wind from the Sea," his homage to Christina after her death. Only once did I actually go to the window of Christina's room to search for it there. It wasn't the window or Wyeth's composition I wanted but something of the airiness and delicacy of his work, though I did think about getting curtains and shooting them there blowing in a breeze. Yes, if I do this again I will have to bring some spectral fabric or a bit of gossamer, but I know that what I really have to do is make gossamer with my camera. We have no pencil or paint, only light and lenses.

On Wednesday, the third day of the workshop, I was the only one there at sunup. It was thinking of "Wind from the Sea" as I began shooting the kerosine lamp through the kitchen window. Across the kitchen the geranium window admitted backlight. The house was still locked and I couldn't get in to move the lamp, but there were a wealth of compositions I could make by just shifting my camera a bit; a move as small as an inch sent reflections reeling while shifting the collisions of chimney, walls, window frame, and geranium silhouettes. I made 45 images of the hurricane chimney through the window. The one above is the most satisfying and the last shot. I'm not certain if it has anything to do with "Wind from the Sea" or Wyeth's transparency, only that they were in my mind, and in some sense I was being moved by the spirit of Wyeth.

Notes for Next Time: What I failed to do was watch this spot to see how it changed throughout the day or to "stage" it for another day's shoot. I was too busy looking for other angles on Olson House. I guess one must recognize that a rich photo site such as this, maybe any photo site, must be explored in stages. Does Tillman have a method for tackling big projects? Well, yesterday I found this article entitled, "Working Style," among his musings. It's reassuring to know he struggles with the same issues.

Tinder-Dry, a study

ANDREW WYETH: "Through the Olson's I really began to see New England as it really was. ... Overall, it's like dry bones, the house is like dry bones, the house is like a tinderbox."

GENE LOGSDON: “I believe artistic creativity exists in the same way a thought exists, or love, which is to say that it arises in that mysterious realm of the human animal where body and spirit intersect.”

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 3:

This workshop has given me a fuller appreciation of Wyeth's achievement, not only his technical gifts, his ability to finesse transparency from the surface of his paper; but more importantly the evident physicality of his work, the degree to which emotion seems to leap from the tip of pencil or brush; a true expressionist!

Of the Olson House, Tillman Crane wonders, "Why did Wyeth work here? Was it the personality of Christina or the quality of light in the house? Perhaps both."

After a week shooting there, it seems to me the most natural place in which to imagine Wyeth working. Its light and flashing surfaces inhabit his work, but do Christina and Wyeth still inhabit the old house? Can a camera's lens find them as well?

Notes for Next Time: This was taken shortly after sunrise on my first morning at the house. The light was dazzling, and I knew it wouldn't last long. I moved quickly from location to location, composing and refining only a bit before moving elsewhere. As a result, this image has some technical problems. I initially preferred a related shot for its greater complexity, but I'm pleased with the syncopated beat and geometric play in this, and I want to remember it. It is a study, a jumping off point for a more focused (in both implications of the word) shoot.

Alas, the consequences of moving quickly are that I lament all I missed. A bit of zoom and crop and wonderful (low-res) things appear amid my rejects, a zoom away, but the review is instructive. I was enthralled by the crisp carpentry of the house. Now I think I know how to make the joints creak. I was afraid of the bright specular highlights and how they would record, so I only took a few, but they are a feature to be cherished. Spirits move in specular highlights. Then I chose to trek ahead and took shots from the meadow which had a wonderful glow; one is already posted.

I think of driving back to try again, but I fear by the time the trip can be made and the weather is right, the orbs will be out of alignment, the sun is racing south, and this is the north face of Olson House.

Through the Kitchen

ANDREW WYETH - "In the portraits of that house, the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul almost. To me each window is a different part of Christina's life."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 2: 

What is the responsibility of anyone who strives to create art, to those who have gone before? Even if Tillman Crane hadn't specifically raised this issue, it necessarily imposes itself when one spends a week shooting photographs at the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, so completely is Wyeth's emotional life caught up with that house and landscape and with Christina and Alvaro Olson. One doesn't have to spend long in the house before one finds Wyeth's work begins to resonate there.

However, it is now not only Wyeth's work that distills the air. At the instigation of the Farnsworth museum, TIllman Crane has created a body of beautiful, large format, monochrome images of the house. Additionally, for some years participants in various workshops of the Maine Media College have grabbed images in 2 hour photo shoots there; it is hard to attend any workshop at the college without encountering some of this work. As Tillman pointed out at the start of our workshop, most of those photographers, given only two hours to shoot, find the time cramped, and such visits tend to produce or reproduce, "the obvious shots," what I have called "postcard shots."  However, whatever they are, the proliferation of these obvious shots gives them currency, adheres them to the tradition.  In the end, of course, it is Wyeth who looms largest.

Nine of us, including Tillman Crane, the instructor and Richard Barnett, the teaching assistant, had access to the exterior of the property at any time of day or night and unrestricted, exclusive access to the interior for several hours every morning and again every afternoon for a week.  At the end of the week, I find even this time is far too short to address the considerably greater challenge of this workshop: Engagement with the tradition. My urge to rise early and shoot late and to process sometimes 300 RAW images a day and then cull them to 50 for review at the next day's workshop left little time to think and plan for addressing the tradition.

On the other hand, perhaps such assimilation is too much to expect. Those ideas are percolating now, and hopefully I will get another chance to go further. More importantly, too conscious an engagement with the tradition might have led me to, "point making," the shooting of sterile idea photos that did not originate in the ability of the house and property to speak directly to me.  A good photograph hits us visually, and for me engagement with the house has to also be visual and emotional. I set out first to find my own relationship with the house. Of course, Wyeth's memories and their connection to things and places in the house are not mine. However, If the house spoke to Wyeth emotionally, perhaps some residue of that emotion was there in the light and the air, perhaps even bits of the spirits of Christina and Alvaro Olson were there to be detected and photographed. 

Above the Meadow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 1

The Olson House!  Betsy James, wife of Andrew Wyeth, knew it from the time she was ten. She recalled it as, "looming up like a weathered ship stranded on a hilltop." The looming quality of the house is still impressive. Most people know it from, "Christina's World."

When I shot this photo, there was a brilliant sky with pretty clouds, and the natural temptation was to shoot a skyscape and put the house at mid level or even near the bottom of the composition in order to show off the sky.  I shot 42 images of the house from the meadow that morning while the light kept shifting. I wasn't thinking of Betsy James' comment, but only the first five feature the sky; fourteen try to make the house loom in the upper right corner. However, even so, I never would have framed it this way had I not seen the way Wyeth often composed the edges of spaces and forms, crunching them against the edges of his composition. The image I chose, the one above, was #40 of 42.

Elsewhere I've lamented the loneliness of reviewing my digital "contact sheets," the difficulty of selecting. Yet, this time the choice of this image over the others seemed obvious. I knew it when I took it. That's why I stopped (41 and 42 are bracketing shots), though at the time I didn't know all of the reasons. Reviewing our contact sheets one afternoon at the workshop, Tillman Crane suggested a student crop an image, putting a small detail in the corner. He showed how doing so could draw important attention to such a detail that would be otherwise too insignificant to notice. This and other reasons for choosing image #40 didn't occur to me until I got home, and began to review and think seriously over my week at Olson House.  

Harvest Vortex

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: It's always about light, but it's not enough to stop there. Images like this point up the fundamental importance of tonal balances. How bright was the brightest straw catching the late afternoon sun? How dark, how penetrable were the shadows? No photo, painting or movie can make the constant adjustments eye and brain make in understanding what is seen. Photography can't duplicate the visual, and more importantly, it is not my purpose to try.

The problem I'm solving is not, "What did it look like?" but "How do the forces of the composition balance & resolve?" Here, I found it essential to create continuity as the rough texture of the straw became shadowed. A bit of glare on the left, too deep a shadow on the right, and the eye hesitates. As the eye moves left to right, it must be able to move smoothly through these zones; the photo must remain essentially one rectangle of even texture. At the same time, the shadow area must be dark enough to give form to the whole composition.

When I printed this for the Gunn Library exhibition, I found I needed to reinterpret those balances. Print on paper is a different medium than computer screen. Neither has much in common with what we see.

Bog Hollow Fog #2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY - The fog silence of Bog Hollow, isn't really quiet. A fluttering of wings brings another dove to the silo dome. A bit later, from a nearby tree another takes off into the fog. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a tractor - - - echoing in the hills it sounds as if under water, an unearhtly whooshing. As the echo decays the soft chittering of the swallows returns, an effervescent froth, hovering in the leaves, it fills the damp farmyard. The tractor returns, the sequence repeated, again and again at roughly five minute intervals. Occasionally the fog thins for a moment, everything glows a bit brighter, and the chittering increases and quickly subsides.

I'm alone in the fog and trying my best to make images of this.

Bog Hollow Fog

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

The fog began at Bog Hollow.
Because it hadn't been there a few moments before,
I figured it would soon lift,
but it stayed as long as I remained.

I followed the road up into the hill.
The shorter way is through the wallow where the cows have made a trail,
but I'd done that once.
I knew where I wanted to go.

I had planned for this,
familiarized myself with this tangle of wild pastures, the cow trails,
so I could be east of the farmstead when the sun came over the mountain.
I had planned on sun.

Stowing Hay

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: I arrived one afternoon at Twin Elm Farm to find them unloading hay from one of the hay wagons. I'm told that the square bales must be put away quickly before they begin to rot. The roll of the round bales gives them protection. The water can't get in, and I've seen some left in fields over the winter and used in the spring, but this is not a blog on the technology of baling hay.

I would have liked to have included the head of the man in the hay wagon. I shot the photo from two angles. Two of the images caught him standing upright, and the back of his head completed his form. In the end, it became a choice between showing the back of a head or showing the two bodies' tensions engaged together in work.

Equally important to the composition: In the alternate angle, the barn is more foreshortened, and the whole hay wagon is included. Instinctively, I knew it was the wrong spot, but I might have "unbeheaded" moments if I moved there. Looking at the two compositions now I see clearly why the move was wrong. Here the action begins with the man feeding hay onto the convayer; there it begins in partly empty wagon - we stumble. Here the receding roof line of the deep barn is at an angle to continue the movement of the men's work; there, the cupola is directly above the front corner of the roof, and the diagonal of the receding roof is clipped, compressed before it can develop any force; the cupola no longer "crowns" the composition, it stops short. Whether one likes the shot or not, here the full diagonal of the composition is put to work; there it is wasted.

I experimented with closing in more on the wagon to make the "upstream side" proportionally much larger, but doing so sacrificed much of the old barns and the sense of place.

The import of all this is to again recognize the need to give oneself room to respond to instincts whose motivations may be obscured. A few quotes return to mind from earlier posts:
MINOR WHITE: "Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence."
EDWARD WESTON: "Composition is the strongest way of seeing."

Moving Hay

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: They call it Twin Elm Farm. It's just down the road from what I will now call, "Barlow Farm," yesterday's TODAY'S. The land of Twin Elm and Barlow stretch well up the side of the mountain behind them and fill a good part of the Webatuck basin. Twin Elm was the largest farm in this part of the valley, and the farmstead is a tangle of barns, sheds and backhouses. They surround farmyards on multiple levels. Some of the farmyards are overgrown, and its clear few people go there anymore. After 40 years of farming, the pace is slowing a bit. This will be the first year they're not raising corn and filling the silos, but they've been busy. The first haying is mostly done, and they're gathering hay bales from the distant fields for use over the winter. They've given me an especially warm welcome, suggesting good spots to shoot from and sending me up the old farm road to spots high on the hill that overlook the whole valley.

The constantly shifting hay wagons, tractors, and hay bales provide a steady stream of compositional possibilities, and on every side details and textures invite photos. I would not be surprised to learn the house is from pre Revolutionary times, and the barns and cupolas have some delightfully restrained detailing that looks like it may be from the 19th century. However, Twin Elm presents shooting challenges. This is the west side and catches the setting sun beautifully, but it's hard to find other angles on the barn complex. I'm drawn to spaces, walls and windows on the east and south, but everything there is overgrown - hard to get to and hard to compose.

Today I systematically worked my way down the hills mostly following cow paths to find more angles on the barns. The further out in the field one goes, the weaker the cow paths, and far out the thistle and other inedibles begin to take over, and the field becomes a labyrinth of blind passages among prickly bushes. Often I wasn't sure the way back would be easy, and I found it reassuring to come around a corner and find a cow or steer observing me curiously. It seemed I was everywhere before I finally reached the field near the bottom which I thought would provide the desired angle. Of course the light was wrong. It was nearly 5 PM when I got there, but now I know where to go and how to get there, and I look forward to spending my next free morning there. It will take awhile for the sun to come above the mountain. If I'm there by 6:45 there's a chance I'll get a good show, and maybe some of the liabilities of this new angle will turn to assets.

Making Hay

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Sunrise is definitely more than the flip side of sunset. It is the time when earth sweats, and fog rolls through valleys, across ponds, and over hilltops. Dawn is especially productive in late August and September when the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures produces the best fogs, and when the sun rises at a more humane time. For such graces I'm grateful.

On Saturday I stood for two hours in a recently explored field near Bog Hollow.  The grass, just mowed and baled when I explored, had grown back and was above my knees, and by the time I was high enough on the hill for the shots I wanted, my socks were waterlogged, and my boots were squishing.  As I stood and shot, I wicked dew, and it was not long before I had wet knees, but I was still there more than an hour after taking this.

Catching photos in the morning fog poses another challenge. The fog was floating by quickly and a mix of fog and low clouds was playing shadow puppets with the sun as it rose; every moment the light was different. At times I could look right at the ball of the sun without squinting, and a moment later I'd have to turn away. At other times the sun was obscured, and I'd wait and watch and try to guess where the next shot might open. Landscape photographers are used to things standing relatively still. Such rapid changes made every shot a chase. When the shooting was good I had to force myself to slow down and compose carefully. Too often, by the time I had moved to the right location and composed, the event that had moved me had moved on.

I've held this photo for a few days hoping to get back and find a more dramatic sky and fog, but I like the quiet way the eye is invited to linger over the hay bales and the farm and silo before considering the hills and the distant water tower. In a shot like this sky and landscape are welded together and it would tax my skills to "fake in" a different sky. The hay bails from midsummer cutting remain littered across the fields and provide an essential element to link foreground and background. There's a chance that I can get back this weekend to see what more can be made of them in the hour just after dawn. I hope I can find the fortitude to leave the comfort of my warm bed at 5:15; I hope the hay bales will still be there; I hope the earth will be putting out a good sweat.

"Invitation to a Tale," Unwound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invitation to a Short Tale

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

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

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

Bog Hollow Melody

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

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

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

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

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

Here Comes the Sun #2

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

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

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

Here Comes the Sun

AH SUNFLOWER!

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

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

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

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

Gotham Recesses

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

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

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

Between Walls

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

Danger

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

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

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

Dr. Gotham

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

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

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

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

From the Tip of Hog Island Looking North

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

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

Paradoxes!

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

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

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

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

Gotham 2: The Blackwell's Island Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intruding on Rocks

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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



©Emery Roth II, 2008

visit LENSCAPES PHOTO FIELD TRIPS & WORKSHOPS

Sunrise over Bass Harbor, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My short lens is zoomed to 31mm.

Sandburg Fog

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

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

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

(Yesterday's TODAY'S)

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

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

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

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

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

The Silence of Fog

Still at the Underdocks

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Emery Roth II, 2008

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

Wish You Were Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Tradition

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

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

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

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

Similar view - 2007.

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

Bass Harbor Boogie-Woogie

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

#2 Bass Harbor Blues

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

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

#1 Bass Harbor Melody

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

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

Wharves at Dusk

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

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

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

Southwest Harbor, Gunmetal & Silk

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

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

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

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

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

Sea Breeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maine Lobstermen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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