Composition in Triple Time

1845 reference to J T Smith's illustrated book, published in 1797, defining a compositional "Rule of Thirds":

"Sir Joshua Reynolds has given it as a rule, that the proportion of warm to cold colour in a picture should be as two to one, although he has frequently deviated therefrom; and Smith in his 'Remarks on Rural Scenery,' would extend a like rule to all the proportions of a painting, begging for it the term, "the rule of thirds," according to which a landscape, having one third of land, should have two thirds of water, and these together forming about one third of the picture, the remaining two-thirds to be for air and sky; he applies the same rule to the crossing of line, etc."

Composition in Primary Colors

EDOUARD BOUBAT: "A photographer is like a bird."

Composition with Barnboard & Sheet Metal

FARMSTEAD PHOTOGRAPHY: Barns and backhouses are usually simple structures that lay bare the geometric shapes from which they are composed. One sees the gable side or the long side of a barn. Except when topography dictates differently, the buildings often reach out in rows or perpendicularly. As I move around a farmstead the gable ends pile up and move apart, grow thin like turrets and then spread the broad cheeks of a gable face. Silos and various hoppers add cylinders, cones, and semispheres, but especially they add verticality.

As one circles around these barn-clusters gables, broadsides, vertical thrusts and backgrounds are continuously recomposing themselves. With shorter lenses walls, fences, rooflines, and hillscapes lead the eye deeply into the photo illusion, and a really short "wide angle" lens will send the corners flying as the illusion goes deep. With a long lens at a fair distance the elements flatten like an architect's elevation diagram. The painter's palette is paint; the photographer's palette is objects in space.

Talking with the Sun

Fermenting grapes along the baccate wind,
Earth afloat on purple scent.

The Farm Road

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY
I'm standing in almost the same spot as yesterday's TODAY'S, but this shot was taken two days earlier, before the snowfall. It was one of those cold, gray afternoons when the light was "bad." There are no shadows, and the blue-gray atmosphere adds to the lonely feeling of the silent farm, once the hub of greatest activity in The Hollow. Behind the farm lie idle hay fields and behind those the swamp. It has gown greatly now that farming is no longer a major activity here.

On the other hand, when the farmers are gone, the beavers have free reign. This expansion of wetlands here in spring, summer, and fall makes the hollow thrive with wildlife. There's a special energy here which makes the birds sing and the insects buzz with special gusto. A little way down this farm road the fields and swamps are only sleeping. I grew up in the city and used to think nature only happens in the summer. I greatly fear too many of us have lost all remembrance of the kind of vitalizing force that can be breathed here.

Owl Song

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
Tu-whit! Tu-who! -a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit! Tu-who! -a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

from Love's Labours Lost by William Shakespeare

After leaving Hollow Farm, I went a mile up the road to Beardsley Farm. The size of this farmstead makes clear it was once the largest dairy farm in the hollow, but it's been a long time since the breath of a cow steamed the air in the barnyard. The barns are in decay and all is quiet. Far to the right, at the foot of the distant mountain, are the intact remains of Straight Farm. As you can see above, the snow was still falling. There would be a few more hours of good shooting, but by this time I was getting hungry for breakfast and morning coffee.

Tracery

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: "To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line of decision between in and out is the picture's edge. While the draughtsman starts with the middle of the sheet, the photographer starts with the frame."

These are the same barns as pictured in yesterday's TODAY'S; they were taken the same morning. I started shooting here at about 7 AM while the snow was still falling. By 9 AM I had circled around the barns and the house hidden behind them. I had reached a spot somewhere off in the field on the right. That's when I snapped the image posted yesterday. Are these polar opposites?

Bad puns aside, how glorious to experience this familiar place suddenly and momently so transformed!

Clarion Call

MARC RIBOUD: "The best photo strikes the eye as the right chord strikes the ear."

Readers of TODAY'S may recall my mentioning how difficult I've found it to get good shots of Hollow Farm. The barns have a stateliness and classic New England beauty that results, in part, from the way they have been able to stretch out in this broad, flat section of The Hollow. It always baffles me why I have not been satisfied by more of the shots I've taken here. However, the few I've thought good enough to put on TODAY'S include some of my favorites. "The Hollow" was the title shot for the second Camera's Eye exhibit, "Vanishing Farmsteads." Another shot, "Barn Dance" shows three of the four west-facing gables above but from a very different angle. Three of my favorite window shots were also taken there:
The Other Side
Peeking In
Inner Space

It's always about choosing. The painter paints; the photographer chooses and forever wonders about the reasons for his/her choices - tries to put words around a principle. Why this one over those dozen variations on the contact sheet? The photographer waits for that perfectly tuned chord to strike the ear.

Homage to Stanley Kubrick

I woke early this morning, the nor'easter was still blowing, and I bundled warmly to shoot blizzard. While those images simmer by the fire, here is another made yesterday at my visit to the Cold Stream time generator, officially known as: The Coldstream, Aerophocus, Kaleidographic, Exspectroscopic, Polyopticon Time Generation Maize Chamber.

The great hull of the maize chamber is made from finely galvinized metal. The precision optics system, a huge compound eye, consists of thousands of lenses, each about the size of a dime, that are mounted on the surround hull. Each lens is made of hand-ground, hand-polished, super-fertilized, country air. It is said that lenses so made can absorb millions of times their own weight in time. The floor is mud and cobb. All photos made in the maize chamber are mostly natural and minimally photoshopped (unless otherwise noted). In other words, this is pretty much what the camera saw. No, we don't see the way cameras see.

As to the nor'easter, it wasn't a bad snowfall, though nothing like what was predicted. However, the snow stuck to the trees thickly and has been long lasting so I could shoot at leisure, alone with the still-falling snow. Sometimes one doesn't need a time generator to expand time.

To better enjoy this image turn down nearby desk lights, and if possible view full-screen against a dark background. Special thanks to Brent, Carol & family for their permission to shoot photos inside the maize chamber and elsewhere on their farm.

Corn Crib Boogie Woogie

We are looking into the core of the Cold Stream Time Generator. It is at the core where time flows most rapidly. You can actually watch as moments of light elongate and then slither into oblivion.

I haven't had a light machine like this to play with since third grade when my friend Marc and I built our own planetarium in his parent's clothes closet. The project involved a lot of brown wrapping paper which we had in infinite quantities. My recollection is pretty much that we infested the closet for about a week. Our planetarium didn't do much since the stars were fixed in place - most any old place, I recall.

This one is solar powered and constantly rotating around the sun. No photoshop tricks have been used to produce this image.

Light Shift

MARTIN PURYEAR: "I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them."

Before you toss this photograph aside thinking I accidentally sent the same image twice, please look again. If you come back thinking the differences are insignificant, that's fine. Redundancy properly resides in the eye of the beholder.

After taking yesterday's shot I turned and shot a totally different subject. The light was so spectacular one could almost shoot anything. Perhaps I have. In any case, I was also still thinking about the fence and wanted to take a shot that framed out everything above the pickets. Four minutes later the sun was four minutes further west, and I turned and composed and took this shot. To my eye those four minutes put a whole new light on things.

Pickets

Good light and bad light - the how-to books of landscape photography almost always advise shooting around sunrise and sunset "to catch the good light," and I confess to having been in the past such a moralist of light. Light - "good," and, "bad"? It's not that I no longer love the sunrise hallelujahs and sunset hosannas. I don't think anything will take away the lift I get at golden hour when the low sun casts deep shadows - lights previously invisible textures - makes all surfaces glow orange. At such times I want to photograph every bark-wrinkled, leaf-dappled tree.

But, woe, my heathen ways lead me beyond orthodoxy!

Today on the internet I read, "There's no such thing as bad light, just misunderstood light." - I wondered, is a tornado just misunderstood wind. In spite of giggles, the profundity of light justifies the internet quote. The connections between feelings and qualities of light are very intimate and resonate deeply. The light of sunrise and sunset provides an emotional spectrum that is too narrow to light a horizon that begins inside us. In fact, when we understand more qualities of light, one can argue, we understand ourselves.

Two days could not be more different than Tuesday, when I took the previous, "gray," photo and Wednesday when this image was made. Midmorning on Wednesday big clouds blew through, and dry, clear air made the sky intensely blue. It was just the light I wanted for another go at the Kallstrom corn crib. I spent most of the afternoon inside it shooting light rays and shadow patterns. Part of me wanted to be outside seeing what could be made of the precious sunlight, but I stayed in the crib. When I finally came out the sun was just reaching that golden hour, and I decided to walk to Johnson farm to see what the sun was doing there. On the way back to my car I spotted this old picket fence catching shadow play from an odd angle.

Pighouse in Gray

Yesterday was a gray day without shadows. The fields of the hollow were restlessly somber, and the thaw was making mud. On such days I have little urge to shoot, and I expected no trouble hiking the full four-and-a-half mile loop that has become this winter's regimen. Since I wasn't expecting to shoot much I meandered, and the more I meandered, the more the gray of the woods and the barns and the houses became one and closed around me like a soft blanket. It made the anxious afternoon strangely comfortable as, with my longest lens, I began exploring the surface of the grayness. My naked eye saw only a hint of the red pighouse way on the other side of the hollow, but through my long lens it was swallowed in hollow.

Previous posts of The Pighouse:
Pighouse in Snow, 2007
Rolling Straight at Sunrise #3

Webbed

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: "Honoré Daumier said that photography described everything and explained nothing. This is often true. In some cases it is perhaps an improvement over the habit of traditional painting, which often explained everything and described nothing."

Whatever the case, two companions of this photo have already been included in TODAY'S. They are, "Plowshares," and "Sunset Ridge Farm at Sunrise."

If you zoom in close you'll better understand the title. The explanation is entirely up to you.

Fallow Crib

Thanks to all those who wrote in to help me resolve my questions regarding the tonality of my new monitor.

Yesterday's photo was finicky in its need for good monitor consistency. Today's photo is much more forgiving. Enjoy! Of course those with well-tuned monitors will see much texture in the dark areas of this photo. For the photo to work as a print, that texture needs to be visible.

Encribbed

I will be most grateful for viewers of TODAY'S who write back and provide a bit of guidance to help me understand how closely the image on your computer screen resembles what I sent from mine. Of course, before you read further, I hope you'll take a moment to look at the image without worrying about my technical needs.

This image is intended to be dark. HOWEVER, the broad dark patch that runs obliquely across the middle of the image from top to bottom should not be murky. It may help to turn down the lights immediately around your screen, and it is best viewed as close to full screen as possible. On my monitor there are gray-blue scrappy areas as the light on either side of this dark band shades to black. There should also be islands of that blue-gray in places through the center top and bottom. Finally, as my eye adjusts I can also make out hints of rust deep in the recesses of some of the blue-grey shadow. Thanks in advance for your help.

Some of you, by now, will be reasonably wondering why anyone should care about such an image. Others will begin to think about how insubstantial photography is as an art form. Where is the real photo? Photos have always looked great on a light box, but when light boxes are everywhere and tethered to the internet, where's the original. One can possess a painting, but photographs keep slipping from our grasp.

In any case, I find it curious that as I was working Encribbed tonight I kept thinking of this image.

Edge of Winter

I awoke to snow and a commitment clean up after the annual New Year's Eve frolic. Just get the dishwasher unloaded and reloaded, run em-urgency coffee to Jane, gather my kit, and hopefully the snow would still be luxuriating. This was one of those snows that hugged the edge between snow and rain, and heading south I saw more rain. Turning and heading north I saw more ice. Some things are not meant to be. Later in the afternoon I walked down the road across from my house and shot for a few hours as the fog began to settle into the valley.

CLICK - it was there, and 141 others - disposable, like all photos - not, as a painting would be, toiled and fussed over until the painters sweat was in the mix. Do any photographers have a style, really, or do they just have preferred subject matter?

On Light

...and another distinction between photography and painting:

No matter how much painters tell us their painting is about light, it is first and last about brush strokes.

No matter how much I look for textures to give my photographs a painterly feel, they are first and last about light.

Does this distinction mean that painters can't play on photographers' turf and photographers can't shoot on painters' courts, or does it help define a line of tension across which photographers and painters play their sport? Just wondering.

Time & Matter

The march of days, the spin of the earth - no matter how I may try to deny it, photographs are always about bits of stuff transfixed in intervals of time. This is true for photographs in a way that is not true for paintings. Every photograph is of a specific place over a given span of time and is unalterably connected to that moment. A painter may paint Adam and Eve and we accept it. When a photographer tries, the resulting picture is likely to look like two naked actors in the park? And this fixation in time means that history treats photographs differently than it treats paintings. What does all this suggest about how differently these two media communicate something universal?

Earth Roll

The deep roll of the earth bristles under a light blanket of snow as if restless even in sleep and silently tumbles onward. What will the new year bring?

Pighouse in Snow, 2007

I never seem to get tired of shooting this tiny building which my daughter and I know as, "The Pighouse." If you were checking or receiving TODAY'S last May 15, you saw one of my earliest shots of it. Then, the first patina of green was appearing on the hillside. At that moment in the seasonal shift I could distinguish the lower forest from that farther up by a sudden shift in color and texture where the slope changed. That line part way up the hillside becomes a compositional element in the May photo. The line disappeared a few days later when all the leaves were fully open.

In contrast,, this December 14th photo is from the first snowfall of the season. For any photographers in the group, I've got my lens out to 400mm which in digital conversion is more like 600mm. That means I'm not quite snug, but sheltered in the doorway of one of the barns, and there's a good deal of snowfall between me and Pighouse. I did a bit of experimenting with shutter speed. Here at a tenth of a second the snow is silky; at a fiftieth of a second it looks more mealy. Jane always says, "Snow like meal, snow a gret deal." but neither of us know what that means. As I recall, there was a bit of wind. Overall it was a disappointing first show as nothing ever accumulated on the branches.

I'm looking forward to the next blizzard and have picked my perch. Unfortunately, there is no barn in which to take cover, and I need to work on strategies for dodging the inevitable snow flakes that take aim at my lens.

Have a good holiday and hope the new year brings new peace.

Dry Dock

The first photo-friendly snow of the season fell on December 14th. At 2 PM I was huddled just inside one of the barns of Straight Farm shooting out into the blizzard. I took some shots that may yet appear here. There are reasons why I often resist posting from my latest shoot. Sometimes I think a good image can be bettered, and the first take should be held back. Or in the process of shooting, I'll take a good shot but think, "A half an hour earlier would have been perfect." or "If only it weren't hazy." or "Two days ago and the snow would have been fresh." So it was with this shot taken on December 18th.

A book I once read advised, "When you see a shot, always stop and take it. It won't be there when you come back." I shot nine images here even though I knew that I'd have better opportunities. Of the nine, I only shot one that included this much sky and thus caught the dance of the trees. I passed up a second opportunity on Thursday when the light was better and the snow was worse. I passed again today and a large, boat had been dry-docked right beneath the windows. I don't think it will be sailing on before spring.

Styx 3

Styx 2

Styx

On first view one misses much of the lower pond. Turn away from the sunny embankment posted yesterday. Turn, and the pond opens to a shadowed recess where the eastern wall of the ravine had been.

A pond like this is never completely still. There's always some little thing bubbling up to the surface, a branch cracking, a wood duck gliding out of view behind tree stumps, a breeze on the water that can't be felt. Somewhere in back of this picture the pond spills into a rut beside the old road, then crosses where the road has washed away, passes a clearing where old mattresses and a broken multimedia hutch crumble and rot, tumbles over rock and broken culverts until it again finds a fit stream bed, and heads off toward Thomaston.

Beyond the Middle Pools

I'm sure that the first time I walked this way I moved quickly through the middle pools - a corridor to something bigger and sunlit beyond. In fact, what I like best about this lowest pool - really a pond - is its contradictions.

#5 Bog Time

John Szarkowski: "There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made."

and a bit further on,

"There is a pleasure and a beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening. It had to do rather with seeing the momentary patterning of lines and shapes that had been previously concealed within the flux of movement."

Only when the water is still are the images consistent. Then one picks the frame and shoots, but when the breeze plays on the pool's surface every shot is a new discovery. Change the shutter speed, and even more effects are possible. However, one is only certain what one has much later on when the images as "virtual contact sheets" are viewed on the computer. When the wind was quiet and the water's surface still, the shots proved crisp and bland.

I watched through my viewfinder as the breezes rippled the surface until I was no longer watching the ripples but riding the undulating forms leaping through the frame, and then shooting became easy. After review, of many shots taken, it was clear to me that this was the one to choose.

#4 Bog Runes

A hexagonal room, five three-foot wide, white walls closing around a three-foot wide entry - the center of my portion of the fall exhibit. On each wall, one of the images taken at the inner pools - a small chamber of quiet - a destination - a place to stop and enter five distinct winks of the shutter.

#3 Bog in Double Oscillation

The main trail down to what is known as "Plunge Pool," is off the beaten path but not unknown. It descends from the ancient road alongside a creek and then runs along the eastern side of Plunge Pool across from the deepest plunge and the previously mentioned lookout. Where the pool is cinched in, like a woman's waist, our trail climbs a steep hill amid Mountain Laurel and then abruptly forks. To casual appearance the left fork, afte dropping again steeply, dead ends, so most people go right. What appears a dead end is actually the entrance to the inner sanctum. Cross the gully on the conveniently "fallen" log and we''ve reached the bottom edge of Plunge Pool and our new trail.

Most people never realize there are, in fact, five Plunge Pools here. Without quite realizing it we are crossing an earthen dam; there is water to our left and, just a few feet lower, also on our right. Whether men reinforced the work of beavers or beavers the work of men, both have practiced engineering here. Having crossed the dam the traveler needs faith. Just plunge in at the most likely spot where the brush is thinnest and the outlet from the upper pool is most rock-studded. Somewhere on the other side is our trail. Now, mostly sealed off from the upper pool, we have reached the three tiny pools that descend like a staircase through a narrow ravine. Later in the summer the outer, official pool will be a garden of water lilies, but these three inner pools will then be mostly algae. Right now they are clear. The water in this new pool moves slowly amid fallen trees and ancient boulders and then stops. There is no visible outlet, just another dam. Somewhere beneath, the water penetrates to the next pool, and so it goes.

There are shots to be taken in all 3 of these pools. Every day I went back for more, arriving around 2:30 and shooting until the last of the light fell behind the cliff around 4 PM. As I reviewed my daily images, I was eager to post some of them online. However, back then I was still building sites whole, and didn't want to devote photo time to publishing. It was a big job. Then, as I was thinking about making audio tapes of the frogs, my lens was lured somewhere new, and I stopped going to Plunge Pool.

This fall, in thinking about what to exhibit at Camera's Eye, I chose to use the series of Plunge Pool Reflections as the core of that exhibit. It was the first time I had printed any of the images.

#2 Bog Glyphs

I photographed the Plunge Pools into the beginning of April. I liked the quiet of the place, even a faint sense of danger there. The name Plunge Pool stems from their position at the bottom of a very steep slope. At the top is a lookout along a trail that ran here long before Europeans, but from the lookout on the ancient trail it is impossible to know the narrow gorge with the small pools exists. From the bottom, as I shot, the cliff was always a looming shadow, and it felt as if the world of these pools had dropped from earth into some remote space of slimy things and ooze and a wonderful display of light in the clarified pools. The sun set early and fast in those hollows, and the trail back to civilization was through one of the least traveled areas of the White Woods.

Plunge Pool Early Spring, 2006, No. 1

In late March of 2006 I spent a good deal of time shooting pictures in the back pools, really almost bogs, behind Plunge Pool in Litchfield, CT. It is a quiet spot. Few people go there. There's a single log spanning a creek, an improvised bridge, and then a spot with some rock hopping - thick, soft mud often awaits any misstep - before you get to the trail along the western edge of the pools. A series of three pools, each notably lower than the one before, cross a narrow passage to a larger pool. There used to be a road back there along the far side, but it washed out and sections are now under water. By late march things were beginning to stir. A warm spell woke the frogs and got them singing, but the water was clear as I'd never seen it before.

Hay for Sale

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: "Painting was difficult, expensive and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance."

I shot this photo in February during one of the big storms. I'd passed it hundreds of times before, but I never thought to take a picture. I posted a number of shots from that storm shoot, and this one was always in the "almost" category, but it got cycled onto my desktop periodically, and each time it came up I liked it more. In late March I even edited it for TODAY'S. At that time I experimented with removing the electric wire, but the space above the barn looked too empty. It was set and ready to go on April 1 with the wire, but again something else nudged it aside, and it fell to the back of the pack. I exhibited it with The Camera's Eye in May, but it attracted little attention, I think. I wish I fully understood my attraction to the image.

Last night an ice storm passed across Connecticut (as well as much of the rest of the country), and this morning all the branches to their outermost limbs were glazed and crusted with ice. It could have been a photogenic moment. Instead, I went to the mall and post this.

Through the Fog, a Barn

It was very September. I was also very trespassing, shooting at what I've come to call, "End of the Bog Farm." The propery was vacant, lonely, and still. Just in case, I was watching the mist. A trespassed tresspass is best answered by a quickly tendered handshake. I was watching for a person. I didn't expect another barn to appear in the mist just there. And it was red. The barns I was shooting were distinctively tan.

The Sunken Forest

The weather has suddenly turned cold. Yesterday they predicted snow, but what we got was unphotogenic, so I'm looking back over photos taken earlier in the fall. The morning I took this shot near Coleman Station, NY, I was disappointed that the fog was not thicker. However, the effect it made from the top of this ridge was startling. I took the shot not believing it would make a good picture. It's been haunting my computer desktop ever since, and I've been looking for chance to post it. It looks especially nice now that the leaves are off the trees and everything has nearly lost color.

Outside Space

[A NOTE ON THE PREVIOUS TODAY'S - HELP REQUESTED: I received a number of comments both positive and negative on "Inner Space." A few people commented on its darkness. In fact, if your monitor (and my monitor) is correctly adjusted there should only be a few shapes visible other than the two bright forms. It should appear as if you have just come from sunlight to the edge of a darkened room and your eyes have not yet adjusted.

If the barely visible highlights between the two forms were not visible at all or, alternately, if you could see the interior space clearly, please let me know. One of us needs to adjust. As I've just calibrated my new monitor, I'm very curious to find out if it is in sync with most of you. Any comment regarding how the image looked on your monitor would be helpful in assessing whether my calibration has been successful.]

Inner Space

Geese in Bucolia

The skies were terrific yesterday morning. I wish my camera could have caught it. It wasn't the cloud formations, though there were some magnificent ones both early and late, but certainly not in this picture. No, not the skies themselves but the flocks of things the flew through them.

These are rolling hills with a number of large ponds, so I'm used to being interrupted by gangs of geese. One hears the barking of the pack long before it arrives. They have been so frequent, that sometimes I don't always stop to look at their neat formations. However, this time it wasn't quite barking, at first, perhaps a distant clamor. I turned and waited as it grew into a frantic hubbub, and what emerged from the distance was not the usual squadron, but multiple squadrons, a battalion arrayed for full invasion.

Whatever they were doing wherever they were going was, as always, only in the mind of a goose. There were multiple such waves of invaders moving through the skies to the northeast. A new wave came every 5 or 10 minutes, so there was barely a lull before the next advance, and then they were again all over the sky at once, and it continued so for 40 minutes, and then there was an eerie silence.

The silence was eerie because the wings still flapped and the clusters of birds still passed overhead, but these were not geese. They were black and larger than crows. They might have been turkey vultures; I never trained my long lens on them, and they were not in goose formation, but flew as a clan the way crows do; and in and among these large birds were what might have been swallows, flying tight like a school of fish. At first I thought it might be some flock of little birds defending their nests against larger birds, but this is not nesting time, and these birds were all allies, probably on their way to the great goose convention. The swallows' paths looped and twirled around the vultures. It was quite a show.

It took a long time for all of these to pass, and the first of this mixed formation were long out of sight before the last came through, and then there was nothing. The last of the swallows and vultures were a bit ragged like the end of most parades.

As to the picture above, for me it's all wrong. I wish I knew how to convey the experience properly, but perhaps it is a better subject for dance or film or even architecture, or perhaps I'm just not up to the challenge. I can make interesting images of a squadron of geese flying in formation, but to convey any part of the spectacle, a photo would need to bring sensation as close as that clamor of yelping geese and as close as the intense silence that followed. At the same instant it would need to be as wide as the horizons. I fear it's not a subject for photography.

Crossing Bucolia Grandis

For those who may have thought to question the linguistic pedigree of recent titles, I have requested clarification from my staff of linguistic scholars. Here is Larry's letter of authentication:

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Roth [mailto:eshtooter@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 8:21 PM
To: Larry Friedman
Subject: Re: linguistic inquiry

Yes, One can cross it and it's biggish.

t
-------------------------
Then, yes, it is "Crossing Bucolia Grandis". But remember, you MUST BE CROSSING Bucolia at the EXACT same moment that it is being grandis. I tell you, IT MUST BE EXACT, otherwise, one would have to use the Hortatory Subjunctive in this case, and that always hurts. L.
-------------------------

The dance continues. What distinguishes true variation from a reductive redundancy? Where is the boundary between a new composition seeded by an earlier and a weak parody?

Composition in Bucolia with Diagonalia (for Larry)

One of the most useful concepts to reach me, came via Frank Lavelle at his Maine workshop. It was the notion of supporting characters in a photograph. Putting it that way helps me clarify an image.

If I want a broad landscape for my stage, the act of casting parts can look like a mysterious dance as I meet the actors and watch them move. Sorry if it sounds corny, but its a kind of communion dance. At one point in the dance (I'd like to think as I took this or the last shot) an admiring cow moo'd quite loudly. I stopped for a moment to see her neck stretched farther than I had imagined it could and took that as a sign of her approval. There was no shortage of potential actors here. The cow was a ham. The fun for me is in turning & moving as everything undergoes parallax rescrambling until something clear appears. The task then is to explore the variations and slowly refine the content and trim the frame.

In this shot the corn crib no longer plays a noble hero as in the last image. this time, it must counter and support the new lead's bravura display. If you have the tools handy, zoom in and taste one of the apples.

Composition in Bucolia

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: "The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture's edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it."

"If the photographer's frame surrounded two figures, isolating them in a crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before."

Not Keeping an Eye on Corn (for Louie)

I would provide something for your ear, but I don't know how to upload music.

Corn Crib

How far the distance in psychic miles between this image and the food store where we shop! Somewhere the harvest is real, but I had little thought of it Thursday while eating the traditional harvest foods. A day later as I shot this corn crib newly filled and ready to support milk and beef production through the winter, I had no sense of the aptness of my subject matter.

We were 20 people at my daughter's and son-in-law's house on Thanksgiving, and the board was spread with turkey and yams and corn and corn bread, and cranberry sauce in two varieties and squash and rutabaga and nut stuffing and cider and pumpkin pie and apple pie and yet more that I can't recall, and it was wonderful beyond description, but at some point in our national history, whether we lived in the city of the country, we would have understood the journey from field to table and been inwardly thankful for the harvest to our very core. How long ago was that and how are we changed because it is no longer so?

Hillside Redux (for Jonathan)

I was almost ready to pack up and had returned to my car when I noticed the setting sun penetrating beneath the low branches of trees to light this spot of ground in the middle of Hillside Farmstead. It was an impossible lighting situation of high contrast between the very dark shadows and the brightly lit surfaces where the barns caught the last light of the sun, and I didn't expect anything to be useful. Hillside's finest feature is the series of "backhouses" that enclose a compact dooryard, and this shot caught them from an unusual angle. I was surprised and pleased to discover how much detail I could lift out of the dark shadows with Photoshop, and I was pleased with the zigzag composition that resulted.

I was directed to the beauties of Hillside Farm by my friends Ken Cornet and Joe Mustich and began shooting there when I returned from Maine in mid July. This was the first photo from Hillside that I prepared for posting, but then I had hard drive problems and thought the prepared photo lost in the related system crash. This morning I set out to reprocess the image and found, to my delight, that I had in fact saved my original work.

This is an ideal photo to make a request for your help. Last week, concerned about the accuracy of my laptop screen for editing photos, I purchased a stand-alone monitor which I have now calibrated. This should mean that the image I see is similar to an image seen on any properly calibrated monitor. As you look at this and subsequent photos please be on the alert for any image that strikes you as too light, too dark, or that seems to have an unusual color cast to it. Notifying me of such possible issues will help me considerably.

Finally, after the last TODAY'S Jane asked to be associated with Jonathan's viewpoint, and Jonathan wrote to indicate that, as I expected, the particular photo would not be desktop wallpaper. It is a decision with which I fully respect. On the other hand, Jonathan's wife Wendy, an artist, wrote in to say how much she liked the image. For my own part, I feel a bit awkward in ascribing the word art to anything I've produced. Rather, I only claim that my interests are aesthetic rather than documentary.

The issue for me isn't what one might or might not hang on one's walls - one should hang what one likes - but what is the proper domain of artistic discourse whether in photography or any other art form. Was it Edvard Munch, painter of "The Scream," who wrote that the camera would never be an instrument of art so long as one couldn't use it in heaven or in hell? I once had a friend who lost his balance and swerved sharply right. He began collecting reproductions of great works of art in order to scrapbook the angelic penthouse portions. At one point, knowing my interest in art, he offered me his nether leavings. In fact, Munch is right in suggesting it is essential for art to plumb the vast personal and collective abysses which underlie all human experience. It is only in touching both pleasure and pain that art transcends the decorative and touches the sublime. The field of photographic discourse, whether it lands on Jonathan's desktop or Jane's wall needs to touch ALL those things inside us that matter. As to my car photo? It matters not at all. It was about Hollywood.

Moving Pictures

Ah well, another one Jonathon won't wall paper! But it does bring me to the matter of matter, subject matter that is. The thing is, I'm not sure it matters (subject matter, that is).

I'm not a journalist. Of course, whatever you shoot you need to know how to shoot it. After that, forget it, or you'll never see the moving pictures.

Family Farm

Inside, the fittings are still in place for milking a small herd of dairy cows though all about the ceiling is giving way to slow-motion implosion. When the wind blows you can sometimes hear echoes of the fallen bucket and cows standing, waiting to be milked.

Autumn Unhung

It's hard not to feel it on days like this when the sky is gray and the thatched meadow has lost its green shimmer, and all the pods have burst. Richard has just collected another bowl of eggs from somewhere inside these barns, the fields are empty, and few cars pass along the road.

This was taken on my first morning at Cold Spring Farm. What can I say? The weather man had predicted sun and clouds. He was half right.

Farm of a Thousand Faces

Cold Spring Farmstead is a compact structure made up of three connected barns and two silos. It's odd geometries are compounded by the general decay. One section is beyond use and all three are bending and twisting as members give way to age. From what I've been told this hasn't been a working farm for at least 15 years, though several times a day Richard, who has lived here most of his life, disappears somewhere inside the structures and emerges later with fresh eggs. To me this remains a mystery as I have yet to see a chicken.

I'd like to call Cold Spring. "The Farm of a Thousand Faces," as I sense that potential in it. I first saw it last Monday. The day was overcast and a gloomy, diffused light touched it everywhere. I quickly fell under its moody spell which influenced every shot I took. In three or four hours I worked my way systematically around the farm and up onto the steep hill to the west. The best shot I got was from the back of the barns where the field descends northward; setting my camera low to the ground, the barns look like they are rising from behind the grasses.

I returned on Tuesday afternoon when the sky was bright and crisp, and I shot until the sun had vanished behind the hills. I had come to shoot that back face again, but it was quickly clear that at this time of day it was all in shadows. I again climbed the hill to the west and found I could cross a stone wall and get even higher on the hill. From this angle it is hard to avoid shooting the old farmhouse. Unlike the barns, the house is in immaculate condition. It's bright white siding presents a serious photographic obstacle in late afternoon; it invades shots taken from the west and makes proper exposure settings impossible. If the two structures have any message together, it must be their contrast. By the time the sun was low in the sky I had worked my way back to the front which was catching intense orange light. I will have to repeat that, but I was still eager to reshoot the back.

I returned shortly after sunrise the next morning and shot until midmorning. I had thought the early light would catch that back face, but I quickly saw that the back won't catch sunlight until next spring. As I adjusted my shooting plan for the morning I came on the frost-covered grasses of the previous posts. Then I again climbed the hill and worked my way to the south-facing front where this shot was taken.

While I've been a bit disappointed in the results of these three shoots, twelve or more hours of shooting under such varied light has taught me much about how light effects these structure and left me more intrigued than ever to unlock those hidden faces.

I went to Cold Spring Farm on a tip from Frances for which I'm very appreciative. Cold Spring Farm is a 45 minute drive from my home. That's the farthest I've traveled for repeat shoots of the same farm. I expect to be back often, and there's much else to be shot in the neighborhood, but we are increasingly in the dull time after the excitement of seasonal changes. All the best things occur in times of change, and I'm already wondering if I'll be able to get here when the snows start..

Mome Raths

My mission yesterday morning was to make my third trip back to Cold Spring Farm in New York State (not to be confused with Cold Stream Farm in Connecticut) to catch the rear face of the barns in early sunlight. For that I had gotten up early - not early enough to be there at sunrise, but early enough for early light. The farm is 27 miles by country roads from my home. I figure it takes two gallons of gas each time I shoot there.

I had been there at sunset the night before when I climbed the steep hill west of the farmstead and shot down at the barns' fronts and east side bathed in orange light. Such is my ignorance of late season sunlight that when I arrived the next morning I discovered that at this season the rising sun also hits the fronts of the barns; the rear won't be sunlit until next spring.

What I found behind the barns, however, was a world of frost preserved in the shadows. Somewhere in this thicket I perceived Borogoves, and I was determined to catch them while avoiding the dreaded Bandersnatch. Three shots show the results of my hunt. The others are below.

Your expert opinion is sought to see if I have identified all three species correctly. I'm also interested in your preferences among the three shots.

I went on to shoot more of the Cold Spring farmstead which is sharpening my understanding of the workings of the sun on complex architectural shapes. I'm far from done here, but it is odd that I drove all this distance for a bit of frost I might as easily have found at home. Then again, this line of old fence continues to intrigue me.

Slithy Toves

Mimsy Borogoves