Autumn Barnyard, Skarf Mountain Farm

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

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

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

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

Skarf Mountain Dairy Barn

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

Creeper

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

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

Skarf Mountain Farmstead 2008, #1

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

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

Autumn Cow in Retrospect

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corn Harvesters near Hiddenhurst

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

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

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

Solitude

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

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

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

Pond Tiffany

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

Autumn Palette

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

TODAY'S PHOTO: Detonation, Autumn

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

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

Corea Harbor, Gull Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lobster Shack, Corea

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

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

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

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

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

TODAY'S PHOTO - Dark Windows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tillman's Dismay

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back Steps

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

Back Steps

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

So the back door stays closed now.

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

The Light Press

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

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

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

I had many questions in processing the image:

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

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

Room After Room, Just Visiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina's Chair

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

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

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

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

Crossing Thresholds

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

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

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

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

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

Thresholds

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

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

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

Light Passages

ANDREW WYETH: "It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion. It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY Reflections While Shooting at Olson House, Part 5:

We returned one afternoon from our midday meal & workshop to find a blue and white, Art Deco sky sailing by Olson House. Some trick of Mercury copied from a vintage rendering of the Chrysler Building. It was spectacular; the farmhouse windows glowed white fury. But the clouds were moving quickly, what I call "theater lights," and I hurried to find a position to catch the full show. Alas, the midday visitors were still on the lawn; the place was not yet ours. Also, to include the sky, one had to include the newly shingled barn, a new wound gaping in any photograph. After several unsuccessful attempts at the full scene, I turned to the windows. I sometimes wonder who sends these fanciful lighting designers who assist us in our work. With such a sky, who needs curtains?

The whole show lasted perhaps half an hour, and then it was gone. The sky-makers packed their bags and went home. Their gifts, such as they are, remain.

Lenscapes, http://Lenscapes-photo.com

Study in Transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tinder-Dry, a study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through the Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above the Meadow

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

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

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

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

Harvest Vortex

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

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

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

Bog Hollow Fog #2

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

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

Bog Hollow Fog

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY:

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

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

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

Stowing Hay

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

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

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

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

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

Moving Hay

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

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

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

Making Hay

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

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

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

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

"Invitation to a Tale," Unwound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invitation to a Short Tale

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

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

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

Bog Hollow Melody

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

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

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

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

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

Here Comes the Sun #2

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

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

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

Here Comes the Sun

AH SUNFLOWER!

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

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

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

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

Gotham Recesses

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

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

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