Forest Fringe

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: File under the heading, My Eyes are Not a Camera. Spring, summer and fall the forest offers many beauties that defy photography. Sometimes walking or even driving beside or through a forest the passing trees flicker or wink, and where there is not too much underbrush, the eye is led deep, and the forest becomes spatial. Stand still and look at the same scene, and the lively, eye-catching texture is gone and part of the three-dimensionality with it. Close one eye to see more like a camera, and the depth disappears entirely; the forest becomes a wall; the elusive beauty has vanished. Photographing in the woods through most of the year I look hard to find things to lead the eye, a beam of light, a splash of flowers, a trail winding. In winter a layer of snow will reveal the contour of the land beneath and behind the forest and make a space there where the photo eye can wander.

During the next snowfall can I photograph a cathedral there?

From the Ridge in Snow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The snow continued well into the afternoon sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes windblown and sometimes falling gently. The day was more variety show than high drama, but this scene out on the open part of the ridge is pure opera.

The view is back toward the same farmstead. To the left you can see the ancient farmhouse among the trees and, further to the left, the spot on the road where I stood to capture yesterday's image. Zoom in and look around.

I've been out here many times and at many different seasons. Because sky and fields provided a continuous background of white, the two trees are able to command the stage and sing their duet as never before.

Classic II

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Every snowstorm is unique, though there is usually a dramatic arc from first flakes' onset to gentle calm as the storm moves out, or perhaps it ends as rain. I make my guesses and meet this with a plan. On January 28th I wasn't convinced the storm would pan out, so I stayed close to home.

What is it that makes the terraine around Hidden Valley Farm especially fun to shoot? Certainly this farmstead, projecting out over the valley on its acropolis, is as picturesque as any. In addition, the valley is narrow and many angles are accessible. The land is open but retains many features: Buildings, trees, walls, fences are all potential actors in the drama. Of course snow transforms everything, and I wasn't sure who the characters would be with the land spread white.

I parked over the ridge beyond the farmstead so when I walked back, my first view was from above. My plan was to walk down the town road to the farmstead. If the snow stopped I'd still have good shooting close up. If it continued I'd either follow the road into the valley, or walk back up the hill, but I'd turn off the town road and follow the old farm road out along the ridge. Way out the ridge is exposed. Out there a moderate snow might make the hills very interesting, and the brush is wild, and there is a second farmstead that comes into view, and one gets to look back at this farmstead along the whole length of the walk out as various characters move between and beyond. There's nothing I like batter than wrestling with a broad landscape to extract painterly compositions, and I am a sucker for spots that preserve the look of another time.

Descending to the farmstead, potential characters were changing places frequently and I made a number of panoramas on the way down, but I stopped longer here at the switchback where the road comes off the slope and turns toward the barns. Right at this bend I am at the head of the valley. It is an ideal place to lead the eye deep, and the snow had conspired with the hills and trees to make the back field distinct. It's the first time I've been able to include the ancient farmhouse nestled in the hillside. That hillside is the backstop where the valley is finally fully played out and where the tiny spring that carved it begins. The original panorama included more area to the right where the view is framed by another tree cluster, but cropping it this way makes a stronger statement and gives importance to the cluster of trees at the first stone wall, like a family standing to admire the view.

Many of the features of this image are very much like Classic I. As a composition, it is entirely different and testimony to the power of moving a few feet. While I miss the simple statement of the horses here, they would be too indistinct to be meaningfull. In pulling back (both lens and position), the simple intimacy of the farmstead and horses, the cluster of trees set against the gray band of the hillside is exchanged for grandeur. Few locations provide a leading line as strong as this of road, retaining wall, fence, and distant hill. Hidden in the back valley, snow settles on the river. This is a view that wouldn't have looked too different 200 years ago.

I hope you can view it large because there's plenty of detail to zoom into. It is a stitched panorama of high resolution, and it is quite possible to make a sharp print that would be five feet by two feet. My computer screen is too small to show it properly.

White Silence No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A snow storm is a very private place where the landscape is made new; the trees stand out from the hillside, the ground is as bright as the sky, the falling snow is a skrim that sets the receding rows of hills apart, and every tuft of grass on the hillside that pokes above the snow makes its mark to reveal the torso of the land. And even as the veil of snow sculpts space, it fills it. It muffles sound and sets me apart, and as it settles over everything it almost seems to stop time or to enter a new dimension entirely.

My pleasure is wandering there as the hills and trees shift around me until the parts converge and something makes me stop and shoot, some sudden harmony or balance or snow flowers, newly blossoming. They grab the foreground and my tripod. As I wander, the snow is often changing, all at once pellets become large flakes, then they are sand crystals, the wind blows or it is still or the snow stops briefly and the color of the distant hills is suddenly more saturated. Then, in the distance I may see the next assault, the veils of snow closing in again. Being there in the solitude of snow is its own reward, seeing with new eyes and wondering at it all.

White Silence

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Just as white light is the combination of all colors of the light spectrum, so white noise is the combination of all pitches of a sound spectrum, but what is white silence? Each of us may look at this picture and try to give an answer, and many of us will never mention snow or winter or refer directly to this spot on a hillside where someone has planted a vineyard.

What I enjoy in the image is its simplicity, it's odd balance, and that with just a hint of color and shading the substance of a hillside can be suggested, and that at the same time it's less about hillside than about two areas of softly textured color and how they move my eye and about the whiteness of the paper or screen on which I view them. White silence is the feeling they convey to me. For all its realistic detail, for me it is almost abstract and analogous to the silence I felt while standing in the snow storm.

How different from yesterday's photo of classic New England winter, suitable for a Christmas card or to represent the month of December on a calendar. My pleasure in shooting it was about using these wonderfully evocative barns and landscape to retell a bit of Amercian mythology. In the real world such places are rare and never free of modern intrusions. So with the horses posing, how could I resist this one? Although not truly out of the past, the success of that image depends on making the barns, fence and horses as tangible and convincingly quaint as possible.

The two images were taken five minutes apart. In fact the very next subject I turned to study after the barns and horses was the subject above. Photography can be many things, even in the same snow storm.

Classic

Thank you to all who were able to visit the Blurb bookstore to check out my book and for the many encouraging notes in emails and in postings at Blurb, Facebook, here, etc., and to those who decided they wanted to own it.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Photography is many things.

When I was a child my father was always, snapping, pictures. He referred to prints as, "snaps," but he mostly took slides. Some were of family, and I recall that for a long time I was puzzled; when everyone called, "Look at the camera." what was it we were all supposed to look at there in the lens? What didn't I see? Probably I was a slow learner. Eventually I figured out that there was a connection between that tiny box with the lens and the images my father projected on a screen some weeks later. The projector with its assortment of slide format adapters and a loud fan that blasted warm air, the rectangular, plastic trays that periodically jambed, and the leggy, screen contraption... these are still tactile memories even more than watching the latest box of family slides.

When I was five or six, I recall having a small kit. It may have been a prize in a box of cracker jacks, or a trifle from the barber shop for not making a fuss about having my hair trimmed. (Somewhere there must be pictures of me with my head recently buzzed.) In any case, the kit contained several clipped negatives showing animals, and school buses, and clowns. It also contained several negative-size cards of light sensitive paper; when we put the negatives and cards together and took them out to the light of 86th Street, the paper slowly darkened according to the negatives shades. That I remember the incident at all speaks to how impressed I was.

I'd like to think that it was then that an observant adult gave me my first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, and showed me how to go into a dark room and load the film rolls which were sensitive to light like the paper cards. I have no idea how I got the camera or learned about loading film. I was already doing it before I got to summer camp and began spending hours in the darkroom there. What I do recall is my father, shirtless among rose bushes. He's down on one knee and the lens of his 35mm (Was it a Leica) camera is a few inches from an open rose. Somewhere there may still be metal boxes filled with roses and pansies and tomatoes, and the wings of airplanes beside passing clouds or sans clouds. He flew frequently on business trips, the sole remaining record of which may still be preserved in these airplane wing photos. Even then I wondered why anyone would want pictures of these things, hundreds of them. My father was a very practical person, but if I'd asked him why, I'm not sure he'd have had an answer.

You've asked, you've begged, you've cajoled, you've waited, and at long last, it's finally here. Jane Roth proclaims the book, "Scintillating, a 21st Century Masterpiece!" Even the cat is purring about the, "deft cohesion Roth has brought to the blog journals." There are 80 pages assembled to illuminate themes of the year. Everything has been re-edited and polished for publication. This is the book you've waited for.

In all seriousness, it was a great deal of fun going back over the year's wanderings, discovering where I'd been, and realizing a bit more about why I'd gone there. It's easy to preview the entire book at the Blurb Book Store. There's even a button to view it full screen and a place if you want to leave a comment.

There are two editions. Check one out now, even if you don't want to own it. You won't want to wait until everyone's talking about the movie.

Click http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/703334/be844bc7bb8e3a52386faa8de2669c97
for the STANDARD EDITION of BEST OF TODAY'S, 2009. It contains the same images and writings as the deluxe edition, but in a comfortable 11" X 8" format.

Or click http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/703495/3e5d599f912c12360baac59e93f75906
for the DELUXE EDITION which was rebuilt and customized for the larger 11" X 13" format.

Lullaby

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (meditating on branching form melting sand and clay take by "a cut on the railroad"):

"It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The thaw was short-lived. The day after I took this, a great, warm rain washed the last of the ice and snow down the river, and then the weather turned colder, and soon it snowed. Winter is still in charge.

Prelude

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

How Ice Becomes Me

And so I listen to the song of the flowing river and
Witness the ageless alchemy of freezing and thawing,
The tug of the moon,
Caress of the sun,
and the cosmic architecture of ice?

In witless, unhurried waves
Glacial domes chew continents,
What we call culture,
An outpost in an interstadial valley.

Ice slows pulse,
Numbs nerves,
Sends respite,
Ossifies.

The clench and release of
Crystal jaws
Crush fall flotsam,
In a rigor of electrons.

And the river sings more loudly.
Is this midwinter thaw but one of its ploys,
Release the wounded prey to gain a better grip?
Or is it of the flow that pulses in my veins,
And sanguine prelude of a season to renew?

Gigue

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Ice Sorcery

Of the simple wonders, ice ranks high.
I go to the river to learn its magic.
Frozen,
it's crystal scaffolding builds
a dome in air, its hallowed geometries stop
the river's flow.

Last week the hard freeze broke,
the ice ran free,
ten thousand silver lizards
scampered for the rocks, no sooner free than scurrying for their lives,
glistening in the sun
above the undertow and
huddling nightly
beneath the moon's
wordless
incantation.

River Song

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

One could almost believe
it is a live intelligence,
the ice,
so many strategies it finds
for climbing the river's rocky edge,

far more nimble
than I
and my tripod,
trying to get aimed,
and focused and set and....

First rule of winter:
Beware of thin ice
and carry an extra pair of socks.

Petrified Presto

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

Metamorphosis

Look
into the eye
of a snow storm
and it becomes a field of daisies flying wildly,
crystallizing into flowers as they blow,
and deeper yet,
a frothing sea
of galaxies strewn across the heavens
where stars
lie like salt crystals.

Etude in Sharp Staccato

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

What are the lessons of winter as I walk along the river path?
Sleigh bell winter,
sub zero and transfixed;
even suspended the raccoon's nightly sortie on the barncat's bowl
and broke autumn's ceded husks, cracked its brittle leaves.

Feet get heavy and fingers grow numb trying to catch magic.
Space constricts.
I stand beside the car,
fingers too stiff to open the clasp on my backpack
and unable to escape inside the car with the backpack locked to my
        spine.

If the essence of photography involves stopping the world,
what does one photograph when the world stops?
Or has it merely stood still a moment to pose?

Hilltops

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Where are you? A few weeks back I wondered about the process by which a place becomes just space. Now I have some other thoughts and questions.

1. Is space always defined by measurements and coordinates? Is place always defined in spite of measurements and coordinates?

2. I know the hilltop birch in this picture and how the field falls to the farm on that shoulder of land before it tumbles over into the next valley and how the water that flows there finds Bee Brook before reaching the Shepaug River, and I know the hidden hill behind this one as well and how on the hill beyond that there's an old farm that looks back at us. I know that from the top of the hill behind me I can see all the way to Mt. Tom and where my house is and town and the valley where the state road runs. Does the motorist know place in the same way the hiker does? or the pilot? or the astronaut? When they gather together around a table for dinner, are they all in different places?

3. And those people who always turn the wrong way when they come out of the elevator even though they've done it dozens of times.... Is their difficulty spatial? or platial?

4. Sometimes the world is flat. How come? Growing up on Manhattan Island, I knew the hills. I've walked the city since I was 8 and I've climbed Lenox Hill (Though I never knew Robert Lenox ran a tenant farm there), and I've climbed Murray Hill (Though I never knew there was once a fancy estate with stony soil masquerading as a farm there), and I've enjoyed the view from Morningside Heights and walked in the streets below (Was there really once an insane asylum where Columbia now stands?) and I know how the subway rattles overhead where Broadway takes a dip too deep for the IRT to stay under, and I've even been told that the word, "Manhattan," means "Island of Many Hills." However, words can lie; there's no hill at Curry Hill. My preferred means of travel in NYC has always been walking; I know the hills in my muscles, but no matter how I may be puffing on my way up to see Tulip Trees in bloom in Inwood, no matter how often they may tell me the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, I still know the Island of Manhattan is utterly and totally flat. How did that happen?

5. And when you wake in the middle of the night, and you don't know where you are, where are you?

6. Are you sure you're awake?

Sleigh Bell Harmonies

GUEST JOURNAL by Jane Roth: When I look at snow covered, 19th century homes and barns, I am reminded of Paul Gage (1850 - 1934) who was a successful harness maker in Washington Depot, CT. Along with designing and making straps and fittings for draft and pleasure animals, he also produced bells for winter sleighs. People knew which neighbor was arriving by the harmonic tones Mr. Gage designed. Join me in imagining Mr. Gage's symphonies.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I took this photo last winter in the early morning of March 9th. When Jane saw it she wrote the journal entry above. Unfortunately, nobody else we knew was enjoying winter on March 9th, and it seemed downright unfriendly to post this then.

We've just come through a week of bitterly cold, windy dry air and a three day, above-freezing reprieve. As good as it felt to stand and photograph with the sun on my back, the same sun melted the wind-blown snow into a scrappy, gray mess. As I write I hear the chatter of white crystals blowing agains the windows. There's a nor'easter due, and I'm hoping that tomorrow morning I will be standing in a field somewhere enjoying sleigh bell weather again.

Along the AT, No. 6

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the last of the River Walk fields the AT passes a lone, ghostly silo. Stone blocks the size of a large buffalo or pachyderm suggest the outline of a retaining wall or foundation. What was the scale of the operation that justified cutting and moving these hefty stones? How many oxen did it require? Where are the people who can recall this place?

But there's always a hill beyond the hill along the AT. Ahead is Silver Hill with an elevation of 1,266 feet. It's a short but steep and rocky climb to the top where there's a good view facing west. Then its down Silver Hill and up Bread Loaf Mountain, and Pine Knob and on to the Taconic Range and the Berkshires and eventually even into Canada.

Before the top of Silver Hill is a shelter with a rocky overlook facing east where someone has built a swing out over the Housatonic River Valley. From it one can sing and swing and watch the sun rise as the bird's feed in the valley below.

NOTE: All of the AT images in this series were shot in March of 2006.

Along the AT, No. 5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When you are most alone on the AT, you are still joined to other wanderers in a continental continuity that spans the nation's eastern cheek from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. There's always someone just out of site along the AT.

Along the AT, No. 4

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The AT is a path across both space and spirit, a line of wilderness along which we track ourselves.

Along the AT, No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Many find this section of the AT monotonous.
Progress is measured by how many fields have been crossed.
The boundaries are centuries old.
Rock walls hauled from the black earth transfix the acres.
Ancient trees seize the margins and lift a lattice of Gothic tracery.
Beyond there are always more hills.
Many find this section of the AT monotonous.

Along the AT, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The stroll along the AT continues. Between Kent and Cornwall it follows the corridor of the Housatonic River. As it nears Cornwall Bridge it crosses some fields that are mowed for hay. In March the ground is still cold, but the damp air is beginning its work.

In photographing the landscape, fog is the great simplifier if only one can get the crop right. I experimented with cropping tight to the cluster of tall trees on the left, but the image seemed static, too neatly balanced left and right, closed in. The framed mountain is only half of what is important here. We are moving along the AT, but we look sideways, perpendicularly to our direction of movement. The dissonance provided by the "bleeding" chunk of tree, left, and the hint of a second hill is a reminder that lateral movement across the picture is a second axis.

Sadly, the image suffers from a technical flaw and probably will never be printed, but this compositional pointer seems important to remember. Will it still be so when I am back on the AT with a changed atmosphere, different eyes and, hopefully, a steadier hand? Will anyone else think it matters? Does the effect even work as intended, or are the cues too subtle? How does one find the balance point where both the axis of the trail and the axis "out the window of the train as we pass" have equal pull?

Along the AT

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: My photographs are the record of my wanderings. They follow a regimen: wander, shoot, review, realize & publish to my blog. I try to wander every day and all the rest follow. In the past I've compared photography to fishing. If there's any sense to my analogy, then my blog is dinner, but I'm really more like a dog in the field following myriad scents, and no matter how I try to stick to the regimen, some scents are lost.

While re-cataloging my photos this week I came on the record of this forgotten journey along the AT. I recall walking this way and stopping here back in March of 2006. If correct, the photograph tells me it was 8 in the morning. Exhibiting at Macricostas was still a year away. I remember making decisions about where to stand and how to frame the trees and vines and choosing to do it just this way. At the time the whole shoot seemed very promising.

I've forgotten how it got forgotten, why I followed different scents. Perhaps I rushed to review the shots too quickly. Often, time is needed between shooting and reviewing. I've decided several images I made on this shoot were worth my attention, and the discovery of the photos is likely to send me this way again some morning. A wanderer can always thread his way back to the place, though the experience, if useful, will be entirely different.

Once upon a time I passed by here too quickly. Be sure to let your eyes get accustomed to the fog.

Skarf Mountain Whirled

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: With the snows of Sunday's photograph barely done whirling, this image looks back a half year to the same barns last May. Some might take pleasure in knowing that there's less time to the return of this world than backward to it. I say, why rush? I want to taste each season as it comes, and I haven't yet had my fill of winter's delights.

This was the shot I was looking to imitate when I headed into the blizzard. Of course when I got there I realized that changing conditions called for something quite different. The odd surprise was that, without the clouds to point the way, I couldn't even find the spot from which my wide lens had set this tree in motion.

Whiteout Over Skarf Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What is it about the solitude of a raging blizzard like this that I find so serene? I shot this yesterday at Skarf Mountain. The blacksmith's shop is the back, red building almost at the center of the picture.

The trip had been dicey. Instead of taking 20 minutes it took closer to an hour. When I reached the farm the thermometer in my dash board, which had read a reassuring 9 degrees F. on the way over, had dropped to 7. When I opened the car door, wind and sparkling snow blew in and reminded me to put up my hood. This was fine, crystal snow that didn't stick or compact into balls. It just blew around. It was especially deep in the hollow of the farm road, and it was cool falling in around my ankles.

Because I didn't know how much cold I could take, I moved quickly. I sought a specific spot and composition, and when I couldn't find it I might have panicked, but decided immediately to drop my plan and fall back on things I knew. A broad, rocky, swamp of a brook divides the west field from the east field. If I could cross into the east field I knew the angles would work, but the whirling drifts of snow made the brook hard to see. Wandering into it would be an ankle buster at least. The bridge was near the back end of the field. My spot with good angles was just on the other side.

And so it was that when I set my tripod here, just east of the brook, the moment fell into place. It was as if a switch had been turned, and inside the whirl of wind, urgency and drifting snow was a kernel of downy stillness in which to stand, a place where the hollow, old barns might remember sheltering the herd through other storms and other times, a place where the forge might remember fire, a serene place to watch the magnificent expanse of wind and white drifting in front of me.

On the other hand, maybe it was just the quiet from turning down my hearing aides so they wouldn't whistle with feedback under my hood.

BE SURE TO CLICK THE PICTURE TO VIEW LARGE.

Blacksmith in Technicolor

ISAIAH, chapter 54, verse 16: "Behold, I have created the blacksmith who blows the coals in the fire, who brings forth an instrument for his work;"

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This marks the start of the fourth year of TODAY'S. The first photograph published to TODAY'S was a monochrome image of a farm in Cornwall. There have been relatively few monochromes since. I decided to publish this image Wednesday (way back in 2009) in monochrome to add a patina of age. Is that a cheap way of populating the image with ghostly presences? I immediately missed the rich colors of brick, wood, and rust. On the other hand, it simplifies the composition and, perhaps, encourages the viewer to zoom in and wander around the shop. Until one makes that journey, the color image seems to me to be too now - more about the current state of things than spirits still playing at the benches?

I also wondered, might this shop be better explored on video? Is still photography better suited to composing a single farrier's presence than leaving the viewer to wander and search among the general, smithy mayhem? I'm interested in what viewers think.

In the meantime, zoom in and explore the benches. To help you on your tour, here's a link to an early, illustrated textbook on farm blacksmithing that will tell you what some of the tools here were used for. How many can you locate? Can you spot the unfinished wagon wheel the smithy might have been working on when he stopped for dinner?

The Blacksmith's Shop

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW: "The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: ...and here is the blacksmith's shop. It was the hub of the farm, at the meeting point of the two major axes of work. Three walls have windows to catch the breeze when its hot and so on a cold day approaching winter solstice, as here, sun shines in all day long. The farm house is just beyond the window shown above; the barns are behind.

Unused shops are a magnet for clutter, but much of the clutter here is what was left when the forge ceased working at least a half century ago.

Click on the image and you can step in and have a real look around.

Storm Over Skarf Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The farm's founder was a blacksmith. His land was fertile and prime, on the top of a mountain just outside of town. When the sun shined, it shined here from dawn until dusk. His family were leaders of the community. Some of his grandchildren live on the hills behind me.

Like most New England farms, the crops varied with the economy - tobacco, corn, grain, and always dairy. It's been a half a century since the golden Guernseys who once grazed here, last "came home." Except for a bit of hay, both barns and farm house sit empty.

The large barn on the left was the cow barn. The barn has received so many changes and adaptations that it's hard to tell for what purpose it was originally built. There are both metal cow stalls and older wooden ones still in place. To me they look too small to hold the large dairy cows I see on farms today. Most of the up-hill portion of the barn is for hay, but at some time in the past a milk room was carved out of part of the bottom floor. Hidden behind the cow barn in this image, and facing onto a common barnyard, is a small barn for bulls and another for heifers. On the far (south-facing) side of the cow barn are giant doors that swing open onto the barnyard, and in the fall someone still pushes a tall wagon full of hay inside between rows of empty cow stalls where it will stay dry. Beside these large doors is a long row of windows that still fill the milk room with sunlight and whose shadows still mark the passage of a day.

The two, wooden silos were made by the Unadilla Silo Company in 1951. They probably replaced earlier silos in the same spot. Wooden silos were inexpensive, and farmers expected to have to replace them as they aged. The boards of these have shrunk, the iron hoops fallen slack from disuse. The bill for each silo was $250 and another $50 each to ship them from Unadilla, NY. A small passage leads from a space behind the silos down into the milk room. Most summers vines block access.

The buildings on the right include chicken coops, outhouse, a corn crib, machine shed and food storage. They cluster nicely around an area that may once have functioned as a dooryard, orchard, and garden. The old farm house is visible at the back. At the corner where the axis of the barnyard galaxy and the axis of the dooryard galaxy cross is the blacksmith's shop.

May the Joys of the Coming Year Be Many

The photo and greeting card above was made by my daughter, Melissa Cherniske. Portrait photography is her business and her bliss. You can find out more about her work and commission her to photograph your family by going to http://www.LENSCAPES-PHOTO.com, and clicking on "portraits."

The Idea of Farm House No. 8

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: From my former classmate Tom Hubka, in his excellent book on the connected farms of New England, I learned the phrase the old-timers used to describe the farm. I've added a second phrase to make a two stanza rhyme:

Front house,
Little house
Back house
Barn

Front yard
Door yard
Barn yard
Farm

In the early 19th century the farm had no front yard, no pickets, but it always had a dooryard. The door yard is the place outside the kitchen in front of the ell or, "little house," but it was often also adjacent to the back house where the farm shops were located.

So it was the true center of farm life. It was not only a place to chop the firewood or harness the ox. There, vehicles were repaired and animals butchered. A chicken running headless one moment might soon be plucked there. Nearby corn was shucked and apples sorted; bushels for canning as sauce, crates to be pressed into cider, a few choice ones chosen for pie, and one red beauty polished and eaten. It was also the place to greet neighbors and spend some time catching up on the news of the day. Young ones played and old ones idled. Keeping a messy door yard was a sign of slovenliness and akin to moral turpitude.

Today the door yard may be grass or it may still have a vegetable or herb garden. Very possibly, however, it has been paved for parking. As a place, the dooryard, once the work center of the farm, has completely vanished.

The Idea of Farm House No. 7

CARL SANDBURG - Upstairs

I too have a garret of old playthings.
I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs.
I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs.
I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern.
And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs.
I too have a garret of old playthings.

The Idea of Farm House No. 6

FRANK GOHLKE:  "Among the few positive things we humans may do that other species don’t is to create Places. We can quibble about the details, but most people who have thought seriously about the matter would recognize a few necessary components in any satisfactory definition: places, like landscapes, do not occur naturally; they are artifacts. A place is not a landscape; places are contained within landscapes. Place is a possibility wherever humans linger, but it’s not inevitable. Sometimes we just occupy space. Places can be created intentionally or as a side effect of other actions with other intentions. Place seems to be more likely to come into being the longer we stay put, but many nomadic cultures roam in landscapes whose minutest features are named, recognized, and given a place in the story of a people and a world. 

"Place has something to do with memory. The evidence of the actions of human beings in a specific locale constitutes a physical version of memory. In the visible traces of their passage I read the investment of desire, hope, ambition, sweat, toil, and love of people who set this location apart from raw space. I don’t need to identify the origin of every feature to sense its significance. The intentions of the inhabitants may be opaque to me; I only need to be aware that intentions were acted on here. Long-enduring Places demonstrate Wright Morris’s dictum that the things we care about don’t so much get worn out as worn in. Some would go further and say that the vital energies, positive and negative, that are discharged on a site create a psychic echo chamber in which what happened there can continue to reverberate indefinitely. It is that faith which informs Joel Sternfeld’s pictures of locations associated with horrific crimes, utopian communities, and the civilization of ancient Rome, moments whose perturbations can persist for millennia. 

"Human history takes many forms, some material, some mental. Place partakes of both. One way to define Place in a few words, in fact, might be as a unique and significant intersection in space of human history and natural history. Is the Grand Canyon a Place? In what sense? When did it become a Place? When the first human being set eyes on it? When the first band of Archaic hunters camped on its rim or along the river at the bottom? When the first story about it was made? The first permanent settlement? When the first photograph was taken? When Congress made it a National Park? Or was it when the uplift of the Colorado Plateau and the downcutting of the Colorado River began 17,000,000 years ago?"

The Idea of Farm House No. 5

COLLABORATIVE JOURNAL (guest contributer, Jane Roth): Old farmhouses go through many incarnations from the vision of the original owner, through renovations driven sometimes by changing need, sometimes by changing values. Sabbaday House began modestly but rose in stature. The rooms were small, and one flowed into another without halls. Remove the kitchen addition and the first floor bedroom wing (added in the 1950's), and you're left with four rooms on the first floor and four bedrooms on the second floor but with small "eyebrow" windows. Eyebrow windows hint that earlier this was probably attic or garret.

In any case, the second floor became the bedroom floor, divided, minimally, by need for privacy. The flow of the current layout would be unsettling to the original owners. The 4 over 4 (or sometimes 2 over 2) pattern was repeated all over New England. The first important addition was usually the kitchen ell. The old structures adapt well; farmhouses often have "good bones."

We toured Ridge Farm with the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the farmers who built it in the 19th century. In the kitchen was an old, cast iron, wood stove and a gas range. Someone explained that it was years before the gas stove was actually connected, and they stopped using the wood stove. The granddaughter, already an adult herself, remarked on the lack of a dining room. Where did they eat, sleep, bathe? Where did the family gather on cold, winter nights? Again it was explained; there was always something cooking on the wood stove so people gathered there, and the tub had a large wooden top that served as a table.

The second floor of the house had some built in cabinets, and flooring that didn't match the layout of the rooms. In spite of good bones, this was an awkward renovation. What might be acceptable to gain a bit of space within the same space? When the bathroom was added did they rearrange the boy's and girl's spaces? It was a tight fit, but back then boys slept in one big bed, girls in another. Even then, someone explained, the second floor was always considered "not for company."

We lived in an 1820s or 30s farmhouse when we first moved to Connecticut. By 1830 New Milford was a hub, and the property on the top of a fertile hill was choice farmland. The house still had its original, central chimney and large bones that provided for spacious rooms. It suggested this had been a profitable farm, but the stairway was narrow and very steep. It doubled back on itself to avoid need for a passage along the side and to make space for the large chimney. It was the most economical way short of a ladder or spiral to connect the floors.

At the top of the stair a tiny landing had just room for a window ahead and a door to each side. The doors led to the two front bedrooms. They were spacious and sunny. Behind them were more rooms, but we can only guess they followed the traditional layout. The only thing certain because of the stair configuration and the original chimney, the people who lived back there had to pass through the front bedrooms to reach their own. Wasting space for a common hall or vestibule would have been profligate.

What had probably been two back bedrooms was at some point made into three cubbies connected by a long, windowless hall. It's hard to imagine that whoever designed the thrifty stair also designed the wasteful hall. The saved space of the stair was given back, and one still had to pass through a front bedroom to get to the back. In the bedroom cubicles one could do little more than sleep, but everyone slept alone. Then, the largest of the cubicles was converted to a bathroom, and everyone had to use the back hall. We learned that in the 1920s or 30s, when "the Jewish family" moved in, a new wing was added with servants quarters. When we rented the original section, The farmer lived up the street and his hired hand lived in that wing. The long back hall in our section ended at a door, forever locked, but on the other side the hall was still going.

The clear pattern in all three houses is for an escalating need for privacy. At Mountaintop Farm there's another empty farmhouse. Behind it is an old outhouse with spaces where three can sit and share one or another of life's pleasures together. In many houses today every room has a private bathroom where one can take long, hot showers and a computer terminal through which one can look back at the earth from cameras in space. Perhaps never before in history have we been so free to be alone.

The Idea of Farmhouse No. 4

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

What is the process by which a place becomes just space?
How long till the energies fade?
Do they float among dust motes?
Do they make the floor creak?
Can one spot them as they glimmer,
Too indistinct to have a name?
And that moment, waiting for reply,
Is it still suspended there in the silence?
Can these survive a hundred seasons?
Can a photograph catch and hold them as they vanish?
How keen is the edge of what lingers?
How hollow the pull of what's gone?

The Idea of Farmhouse No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Stairs without landings
Banisters without bottoms
No garret at the top
Where heirlooms gather dust
No dank cellar
Where everything reeks and rots
We take steps two at a time
And grasp only from newel to newel.

The Idea of Farmhouse No. 2

ALFRED STIEGLITZ (as quoted by EDWARD WESTON): "A maximum of detail with a maximum of simplification."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The kitchens are gone, the old ones with the great chimneys that rise and embrace the house so that whatever gets cooked in the hearth or oven tastes of cast iron, and is digested first to fuel the next day's work, and then passed down to fuel generations. Families lived on everything that got canned there and on the bread that was baked daily, and arms got strong hauling kettles and washing laundry and the lessons learned were serious, the recipes passed down, tasty.

The old kitchen was in the ell until July when the women escaped to the summer kitchen. What lore, what culture blossomed in the dooryard with the lilacs and the chickens? No room has changed more or more constantly than the kitchen, not even the privy, and it's hard not to wonder how we've digested the changes.

TODAY'S PHOTO - The Idea of Farmhouse No.1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Thoughts on photographing an abandoned farmhouse.

Passages

At the threshold
Milk was left
And muddy boots
And ill will
And first kisses

In the blizzard of '88 the snow was piled to the top of the door.

Summers, the screen door
Let the breezes pass
And whispering
And the smell of midday meals
And the tractor's steady grind.

One fall the dog sat on the stoop and barked all night.

Across the threshold footsteps tracked
The days and weeks,
Wearing the boards.
Till the paint on the door jamb was thick,
The wood, brittle and dry.

Sunrise on Winchell Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: And here is the "long trajectory," referred to in my journal entry of December 7th. The sun, just rising above Connecticut mountains far behind me, rakes across the ridges, touches Winchell Mountain in the upper branches of these two autumn maples and at a few other points outside of this image, and lands next and finally on the side of the distant Catskill Mountains many miles away and on the other side of the Hudson River. At the top of the Maples day begins while I stand still in the shadows of night. In a few more moments the sun would have lit the whole hillside, but the cloud window closed, and the moment passed, and an overcast day began.

In October I posted the first image of Pleasant View Farm which I took from near this same location. I had intended to end the Pleasant View Farm series yesterday with this image, but I couldn't resist posting one of this week's snow photos first.

NOTE: best viewed full screen.

First Snow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The first snow of the season and I'm standing near where the last two images were shot. It's Tuesday and I'm about to meet a friend to shoot a deserted house. It's getting hard to get up here before sunrise. It takes 50 minutes on the road which means I have to leave home at 6:15. When I make my sunrise run to Pleasant view now, it's colder than it was over the summer. Ripeness is all.

Between Fields

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: "Ripeness is all." (reprise)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Looking at yesterday's image, my brother found himself on the Yellow Brick Road. I'm hoping this image, shot on the same day, might leave some viewers also somewhere in the Oz zone, perhaps off to the side of the famous road and slightly dizzy from that perfume of untamed nature that doesn't affect tinmen. Every farm has areas between the corn and hay and cows too rocky or swampy, where nothing useful grows, and something else is always lurking.

Last Day of August, 2009, Pleasant View Farm

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: "Ripeness Is All."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yesterday's image was taken on August 8th just after the hay had been cut. This was taken over three weeks later in afternoon sun as the corn tassels were darkening. Both belie the truth that we never really had summer this year, and the corn was over-watered, and the hay had no time to dry. I hope viewers will ignore all of this in favor of whatever truth the image suggests.

Valley Mist

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The gentle roll of the land in this photo might suggest a broad plain, but the head of cool steam that's blowing off has risen from unseen valleys. This is the top of Winchell Mountain, a fertile plateau about a half mile across. It's named for James Winchell who as a young man in 1760 began the first farm here, and for his descendants who cultivated the land for three generations after. In addition to farmers, his descendants thrived and included scientists, lawyers, carpenters, ministers, teachers, engineers and a university chancellor. The land is farmed today by a family whose roots in the area are at least as old.

Winchell Mountain is an excellent spot to learn how morning happens and to watch the vapors as they cloud and drift and vanish. Off stage left I can look eastward, beyond corn fields, deep into Connecticut. If I walk right and look where the hill saddles, and the cow's graze, I can look west above a patchwork of hills, and beyond where the Hudson River must be, to the towering, shadowy Catskills. That's a long trajectory for the sun to shine its beam.

Even on mornings when the top of Winchell Mountain is in cloud, I've learned to wait and catch the drama as the cloud curtain lifts. This is a grand spot from which to collect morning.
----
NOTE: This one needs to be seen approaching full-screen.

Susurrus at Pleasant View Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

It was really very soft,
That pedalpoint moment
When the sun's eye
Cornered the globe,
Swept past ridges and mountains
And made earth sweat,
Every blade bathed and dotted
By dew drop globes
That eyed back the sun,
Sustaining the pedalpoint
Softly over the whispering birds.

Bounty

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Still cows, but my lens has moved from the slopes that rise above Twin Elms Farm to the top of Winchell Mountain and Pleasant View. It is late summer on one of those afternoons when I can almost feel the vital pulse of the planet, the ways it refreshes and rejuvenates itself. Here is the grand organism at work, even if this year provided rather more rain than farmers wanted

This is a large dairy farm, the kind of operation that takes the constant attention of a knowledgeable staff. In addition to twice daily milking, they raise and harvest many acres of corn and hay, and breed and raise calves. I know how much work it is running a dairy farm, and I'm thankful there are still people who do it, whose herds still graze on what's left of our Eastern farmland. For me there is a complex mystery, easily taken for granted, at the heart of the odd partnership of humankind and dairy cows. The mystery is not apparent when I read the stories of the great breeds of domesticated cattle.

In any case, I was thinking about this as I was driving back from a shoot today when a "Birdnote Moment," played on National Public Radio. It described another odd relationship, this between humans and a species of undomesticated bird. Somehow it seemed to shed light on why I think we underestimate the mysteries of our relationship with many animals. Rather than explain it myself, I refer you to the Birdnote text and/or the aired Birdnote mp3 where you will hear the bird's song.

Are we changed when there are no scenes like the one above to reflect upon, only cartons of milk and plastic-wrapped burgers?

Be sure to click on this image to see it large.

Eye to Eye

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: If your mind is of a literary bent, I recommend this link to parodies of a belovéd bovine verse:

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/31410-Carolyn-Wells-The-Purple-Cow-Parodies

Cownundrum

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: For whatever it's worth, and I assure any enthusiast that it isn't much, the following was based on my observation that cows always show immense curiosity in my tripod. As soon as I take camera in hand and park tripod near by, it becomes a new field of exploration for cow brains to digest. Cows who previously had no thought to move, spot it standing there from across the yard. Many times while distracted photographing one cow, I've turned in time to glimpse another shy from the tripods falling heft, and in time to snatch it up before she moves in to sniff at her fallen prey.

A COWNUNDRUM

What is it about my tripod that catches the imagination of cows?

Perhaps it's the physics of the thing,
A philosophical flight by kinekind
Into the calculus of matter
And the stability of a trinity
And the ultimate futility of it all?

Or could it be the buxom milkmaid she longs for,
Humming on her stool her cowtown blues?
Or before that the fatted calf,
So utterly contented, beside the man on the stool
And the whine of his whetstone?

Economy of Hay

ANSEL ADAMS: "The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm suddenly aware that I'm spending more time than ever revising images in Photoshop. It's not a bad thing; I still shoot more than I fiddle. In part, I think this is a natural result of drilling more deeply into the program and finding new ways to combine procedures, but I also think it is driven, in part, by my use over the past few months of HDR. If nothing else, HDR has drawn me toward situations of "impossible" lighting, and impossible lighting has led to post-processing fixes. But it has pushed my editing skills in other ways as well.

Without HDR this shot isn't impossible, but it's very dull. There's a branch that angles down and stands in relief just where the roof shadow is darkest. It is a detail I especially like, and below it is a ripple of vines that catches a ray of sunlight. Neither of these were clear to me in the two images I had shot to use for an HDR. In the exposure that let me capture sky, no matter what I did, that branch, at best, looked like obscure texture on the background barn boards. In the brighter exposure the background shadow was so bright that the leaves, though well formed, looked relatively flat and uninteresting. HDR technology combined information on the deep shadow from the overexposed original that revealed the hay wagon properly and preserved information about the color of the bright leaves from the underexposed image that was set to capture the sky. In the HDR software I could play with this balance and see what the whole might be. It was there that I saw, perhaps remembered, the bit of drama in the contrast of leaves and shadowed barn.

Unfortunately, the wind that day was blowing hard, and the leaves in the HDR looked like a double exposure. The actual HDR was useless. I made plans to come back, but on this day I had a useful sky, and when I did get back the hay wagon was gone, the hay stacked deep inside. However, I looked at the HDR with its double-exposed leaves, and I knew how I wanted the tones pulled together. Back in Photoshop I could combine the best of both images manually and then carefully adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation in carefully localized areas until the image was toned and colored as I had seen it in the HDR. The HDR software had let me sketch it.

Efforts such as this have led me to drill yet deeper into Photoshop tools and make many sorts of small adjustments I might not have made a year ago. Now, even when I don't need to make an HDR, I have a greater facility to make changes. As to the kinds of changes I'm making digitally, they are not very unlike what Anselm Adams taught photographers to do chemically in printing. However, digital processing allows infinitely more control and a much shorter learning curve. Of course, it also opens the doors to almost anything.

Last Haying

DAVID PLOWDEN: "It seems I have made a career of being one step ahead of the wrecking ball. I have been beset with a sense of urgency to record those parts of our heritage which seem to be receding as quickly as the view from the rear of a speeding train. I fear that we are eradicating the evidence of our past accomplishments so quickly that in time we may well lose the sense of who we are."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The hay that feeds the cattle through the winter comes from fields adjacent to where the beef cattle graze. Mike has already filled the first wagon and towed it to the lower field. Driving a loaded hay wagon down the hill, he must be careful to cut across the slope at the right angle. Too gentle a descent, and the hay wagon may tip sideways, spilling its load; too steep a descent, and the new load will propel the tractor on an uncertain ride. I've watched Mike plot a "switchback course," and bring a train of three raggéd, hay wagons down a steep hill safely behind his tractor.

On the hillside above him he's already cut the hay and raked it into furrows. Behind the tractor is a baler. As it runs along the furrows it gathers the hay and stuffs it into a metal duct which extrudes bales. Periodically the baler catapults a newly baled block of hay into the wagon at the back. On this particular day the catapult is giving him trouble, and after each bale he stops the tractor, gets down from his high seat, and resets the catapult arm. There has been too much rain, and some of the hay is not dry yet, but he won't even finish baling the dry hay this evening.

Each year there are fewer working farms in New England. When I first photographed at Twin Elm in 2007 they were growing corn here, but harvesting the corn became more work than they could handle. The equipment used to harvest corn is entirely different from that used to harvest hay. Today the corn harvesters lie abandoned in the fields over the wall where the herd grazes.

******************
Many thanks to Mike, Ralph and their family for continuing permission to shoot at Twin Elm. Similar thanks to so many others who have given permission over the past three years for me to walk their lands and photograph. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving filled with laughter and loved ones.

Mooed Indigo*

KONRAD ADENAUER: “We all live under the same sky, but we don’t have the same horizon”

*Photo title suggested by Arthur Boehm

GUEST JOURNAL by Jane Roth:

The Cow

She lumbers up the hill
Once spry,
Now heavy, awkward,
hirsute and laden with flies.
Culled from the herd
Her differences noted.

Sad, alone
She seeks friendship
And could adore
The human in the field
Alas, cross-specie relationships
Do not endure.

Cowstellation*

JEANLOUP SIEFF: "All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model."

*Photo title suggested by Margo Schab

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Alimentary Meditation

Grazing along the sunny ridge,
On windswept plains,
Or in the shadowed grove,
Brazen fragrance of the herd,
What does the fly know of the cow's itch?
What does the cow know of the flies hunger?
What do intestinal microcultures know
Of the universes they reverberate.

Among Beef

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Everything beyond the dairy yards is running wild. He's not a bull, but there's probably no convincing him of that, nor do the other steers or the heifers seem to realize he's really just an ex-bull. There are several of these ex-bulls in the herd. I'm sure they each have a social rank, but I can only guess which one is chief ex-bull. They watch me more closely than do any of the other cattle, and I watch them back with equal attention. Beef cattle require little handling, and at Twin Elm they're left pretty much to themselves as they wander the extensive fields. As a result, they're on their guard when the strange guy with the tripod comes through.

Everything beyond the dairy yards is running wild. The fields are shrinking, being reclaimed by wild bittersweet and thistle, and other things with thorns, barbs, spikes, or spines that cows won't eat and people can't traverse. In some places fields have been abandoned entirely, though here and there they are penetrated by narrow channels through the brush, passageways kept clear by the cows and often only passable by cows. And the water that flows down the mountainside, long ago washed out much of the farm drainage system. Muddy areas trampled by the herd are often nearly impassable by human feet. I may meet parts of the beef herd almost anywhere up the mountainside. Beyond the dairy yards everything is running wild.

The ex-bulls take seriously their duty to guard the herd, and I respect that, but they are not brave, and so we do this little dance as I make my pictures. Cattle raised without regular human contact maintain a safe zone. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads giving them wide-angle vision. With their heads pointing forward they can see everything from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Of course they turn their heads to extend this vision, but there's a blind spot at the back and a point of balance. If I enter the blind spot they will turn. If I encroach on their safe zone from behind the shoulder blades, they will move forward and away from me. In this way I can kind of herd them into positions where the light is right or the background interesting for my photographs.

Sometimes the ex-bulls will try to herd me, but I've learned not to retreat from my own safe zone. They do this slowly. They're probably not trying to herd me so much as approach on their own terms to satisfy their curiosity. However, I preserve my safe zone. When the ex-bull gets too close for comfort I never retreat. I move toward it, and it retreats.

I've read that bulls that grow up with other cattle know they are bulls. Individually raised bulls may think they are people and challenge approaching people for dominance. I have no idea how each of the animals in the Twin Elms herd was raised, and I try to watch signals closely. At the end of a shoot, as I leave the pasture, I always keep one eye behind me.

There have been times when several ex-bulls converged around me. Being surrounded by so many tons of beef surmounted by sharp horns is not comfortable. Then I'll plot my advance toward one of the converging ex-bulls. Sometimes when I look back the remaining ex-bulls are gently butting heads. Everything beyond the dairy yards is running wild.

*******
The concept of "ex-bull" was adopted from writings of Helga Tacreiter. I found her observations on cow behavior interesting, and suggest these web sites:
http://www.psyeta.org/hia/vol8/tacreiter.html
http://www.cowch.com/index.html

How Now Brown Swiss? No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It takes two to tango with a cow. I guess it's to be expected. Yesterday I spoke of the problems I had getting the cow to turn her head the right way. This shot was taken this morning while my friend Lazlo stroked Bessie's nose and diverted her attention, all the while snapping pictures with his right hand. While he stroked I snuck in from the side. Even so, I feel lucky to have caught this, and I threw away fifty to get it.

Yeah, I know, it's a slow-moving cow, and people have been known to get some pretty good shots of tigers leaping at a lens. These Brown Swiss really are sweethearts. Unlike dogs, they're much too polite to ask to be petted, but once you start, they'll put down their heads to show you where. I wish their noses didn't constantly drip.

To give due credit, Brown Swiss are ideal models if you can overlook nose goo and sometimes a pancaked flank. Black Angus may make great steak, and they can look nice dotting a field, but dark fur obscures the features of their faces and the otherwise sinuous contours of their bodies. Dappled cows such as Holsteins and Guernseys and unlikely breeds like Belted Galloways compound these problems by camouflaging their bovine curves. Brown Swiss and Jersey cows have smooth, even, light, tan coats which darken and lighten softly across their flanks. Sunlight can reveal magenta or orange overtones. When the angle to the light is right, all the curves of the torso are visible and sometimes you can see the ripples of the rib cage. Brown Swiss are larger than Jerseys, awesomely so. Add large, furry ears, a docile nature, and high butter fat content, and I'll introduce you to a model any photographer might fall in love with.