High Iron

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Railroads, like vines, crawled up river valleys where factories were already planted - a confluence of opportunities. This valley is the Naugatuck, dotted with towns where many immigrants found work in Derby, Shelton, Ansonia, Seymour, Beacon Falls, Naugatuck, Waterbury and up into the hills to Thomaston and Torrington and WInsted and finally rural Norfolk, source of the river and early outpost of Yale University. I've lived near the Naugatuck Valley most of my life, sometimes shop in Torrington, but know far too little of its history and significance.

I know enough to know the history wasn't always pretty especially in the lower valley, that its decline to rustbelt came early and that it was made worse by massive flooding in 1955. I know also that the whole valley is one of the formative places of American industry, a powerhouse from pre-revolutionary times, and carcases of its growth and collapse are still often visible. In the lower valley the tissue of sprawl has had trouble healing over the shards of rusting tin and crumbling brick, even as environmental plans have had notable successes. There is an interesting article on the Naugatuck Valley here. For now, I'm following the tracks to see where they lead.

Break Time

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What do I think about as I walk hallways in these old mills? What is the flavor of their melancholy? They are wistful only in retrospect, and it's hard to reflect without remembering dark chapters in the struggles of labor in America. However, the political lens is shallow and one-dimensional, and many company towns tell different stories. Drive the streets and look at the number and quality of the houses. They suggest a measure of the lives lived there.

Whether one finds oppression or fair dealing, these brick, mill buildings were built to last, and the companies that built them were invested there. Decisions made there were rooted there; good will or ill will had nowhere else to go, and the bargains struck, ordered relationships and lives and stamped their imprint on every enterprise. Local laws and governments were structured by that imprint, schools were run by the patterns of the mill, and the day was regulated by the factory whistle and the punch clock. Wiki tells us that the first punch clock was invented in 1888, by William Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, NY. Was it a milestone in our relationship with time?

Break time is over, and the hum is long gone. Though we live in a different world today, to what extent do we still live inside these old walls. Or are there new walls as invisible and ubiquitous as the World Wide Web rising up and shimmering faintly across newly formatted terabytes.

Silo Passage

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - The milk bottle, almost as we used to know it, was invented in 1884. Before bottles, farmers dippered milk to customers from a can. First customers got pure cream, the last got skim milk and considerable road grit. Sanitation was unthought of. Even though Louis Pasteur had invented pasteurization 21 years earlier, commercial pasteurization didn't become common until 1895. The first bottles were plugged with glass stoppers wired in place, but the waxed paper seal that I recall soon became common. It was around the same time that railroads began supplying city dwellers with milk from farms hours away.

The bottles from my childhood came in two varieties. Old-fashioned milk came in a double-bubble bottle with a goiter-like swelling in the neck where the heavy cream could collect. Homogenized milk, invented in 1899, came with short, squat necks. Full bottles were delivered to the door by a milkman who took away the jingling empties.

Even in the early fifties a milkman still made the rounds delivering Sealtest homogenized to our apartment on the 16th floor of a building in New York City. I can still recall the sensation of lifting off the paper bonnet, like a shower cap, that wrapped over the mouth of the bottle and kept it clean, then lifting the tab in the center of the waxed, paper seal and popping the top.

The bottles are gone; the waxed cartons that succeeded them are gone; the milkmen are long gone; even the railroads that carried the milk to the city are gone, and milk in plastic jugs travels from large farms and "bottlers" in ever more distant places. The milk in my refrigerator in Connecticut bears codes that indicate it comes from Virginia. Nothing about the production of milk is the same as it was in the twentieth century.

Water Music #2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Invasion of the Skunk Cabbages, Part II

Sometimes there is a short stalk beside the spathe, leaves furled tight and waiting while the golden orb expends heat, is pollinated, turns brown. As each orb cools, the stalks unfurl into a canopy of broad, green, sun-soaking leaves, but growth is all downward. While most things grow up, these aliens send out pulsing roots that pry ever-deeper into the mud, become more tenaciously anchored and impossible to remove. Then the leaves vanish. They don't decay, they dissolve, but beneath the ground and inside each expanding and ever-deepening leaf stalk lies a succession of tiny orbs wrapped in tiny spathes, each one smaller than the one above, spiraling downward into the future.

Water Music #1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Invasion of the Skunk Cabbages, Part I

Alien things, deep in the frozen mud of March, they begin warming, surging, melting the icy earth above them, spathes twisting hotly up through ooze. One day, near where the pond is silted out are a hundred, little, wine-colored hoods poking aside dry, forest detritus; each spathe peeking at the windy world; they are tents encamped amid death in the frozen wetland. Hooded and hidden inside each spathe is a spadix, a golden orb. The air around the spathe is warm and heavy and smells of decay; the scent filters through undergrowth, waking beetles and spiders and flies, calling them to the orb. Inside each purple spathe the warm air is a vortex around the orb, and the whirling smell of cadaverine is intoxicating.

Patent Pending, Unadilla Silo Co.

EXHIBITION 

"Silage: Process in Process"

WHERE: White Silo Farm and Winery, Route 37 E, Sherman, CT

WHEN: April 29 to May 15 (Fri thru Sun, 11-6)

OPENING RECEPTION: April 30 from 1 to 4 PM

Also exhibiting will be painter, Karen Pepper, with an exhibition entitled, "The Lei Collection"

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Perhaps "silage" is a rather unpromising name for an exhibition. Silage is stalks and greens which a farmer ferments in airtight conditions to preserve its nutritional value. Silage provides the necessary, high-energy, diet that will allow his cows to continue giving milk through the winter. It is not especially photogenic, but it reflects a fundamental concept that informs most of my photography and writing: Everything is always in process. Existence is incessant transformation. This is not meant to be especially profound, only that it's there every time I click the shutter, and it will provide an organizing point for the pictures exhibited at the White Silo Farm & Winery, at least one of which will be of a silo.

Hanover Hill Postcard

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In this shot I've moved southeast of Hanover Hill Farm and can see all four silos. I said I had, "little interest in documenting the appearance of farmsteads." Yet I do it all the time. I have hard drives of images showing dozens of local sites through all seasons of the year and in every light, and most of them do little or nothing more than document what the place looked like at a particular moment.

The best of them do it gracefully like a good postcard that will make the folks back home wish they were there too, but the quest is not for postcards and, "wish you were here," but pictures that transport, evoke, move us to some other place, make us feel the earth curving, breezes cooling, the fog afloat in the hollow.

In any case, this photo makes no pretensions to doing that. What you see is what you get.

Spring Storm over Hanover Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: How different Hanover Hill Farm looks from this spot at the edge of the fields by Route 22 instead of, as in the previous two photos, from the top of a hillside pasture a quarter mile north and just beyond Coleman Station! The compass points of all three shots are not too different. From the distant hillside the farmstead seemed in a valley. Here it is clear it is on the top of the hill. You can't tell what things will look like 'til you get there.

I took this photograph of Hanover Hill Farm on May 27, 2008. Until the barns in the photograph burned last month this image sat with the two previous images and other photos of Hanover Hill; all set aside and bypassed. Now that the barns have burned, and I know there will be no more images, I'm moved to post these. I claim to have little interest in documenting the appearance of farmsteads; a "memorial edition" seems out of character. In fact the real reason for selecting these now is that I believe they are finally done.

The caretaker was very clear, "No trespassing!" Without being able to see what happens 10 or 20 or 100 feet out in the field, how the roll of the landscape shifts, what happens as the distant mountains appear, what opportunities the corn rows may offer and a hundred other changes, I had a feeling of unfinished business, and I was reluctant to accept what the convenience of the public roadside offered. Of course, I had come here because it seemed the ideal place from which to catch the passing storm.

P.S. Anyone familiar with the wisdom of Derszu Uzala in the film of the same name may recall his comment that the birds always begin to sing just before the storm ends. Close examination of the above photo will show the birds are active.

Hanover Hill Farm in Decline

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Of course the barns that burned were ruins long before the fire - windows broken, roof tiles slipping, vultures roosting, tin flashing flapping in the wind and skeletal sheds gaping like death. In an area of so many large barns, the immensity and gloom of this farmstead has intrigued me since I first spotted it while driving along Route 22.

Then again, its not really about the barns so much as it's about shapes and forms and flickering rhythms and tones and the way amber rambles into blue as the seasons and the light change.

This image was taken on December 14, 2009 from almost the same location as the previous image.

Poised for Spring

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This broad valley that lies between high ridges along the Connecticut border and a parallel line of New York Hills; and which runs from above Copake south for 20 or 25 miles past Amenia is, throughout its length, a nearly continuous corridor of rolling amber. It's rare in this part of the country to find so many broad, arable fields where a farmer can plow for long stretches without turning - hard to find such expanses of good grazing land. It's worlds away from Connecticut, back across the ridge.

By the middle of the 19th century the New York and Harlem Railroad connected these farmlands to markets in NYC, and different parts of the valley became home to Sheffield and Borden dairies. As one might expect, farmsteads here are unusually large, and their emptiness reverberates the energies that once charged the region with purpose. 

I took this picture on March 8th of 2009.  At the same time this year the valley was still buried under snow, and the crusty ice of the Smithfield ice storm, (2 photos back), just one valley over, was only 4 days old.

Two weeks later, March 26th of this year, the barns in this picture, probably the largest in the valley, burned to the ground, though it will have little effect on the arrival of spring.  I'm sure it's coming.  I heard the peepers.

Below are links to other images and posts from this valley:

Beware Shrub

Threesomeness

Hiddenhurst

Hiddenhurst from Wheeler-Collins Farm

Hiddenhurst from Sunset Ridge Farm

Grand Cowshed (these barns close up)

Forsaken Acres

Idea of Farmhouse #2

Idea of Farmhouse: Of the Land

Watchtowers

Watchtowers 2

Rolling

After the Storm

Hiddenhurst Triumphant

Mute White

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - 

Deliquescence

The slight of white dusting of snow

Eggshell pall above the still pond

Deadpan winter unaware

Of transmutations in the muds below.

How long before this image dissolves

Into the mirage of another day?

The Smithfield Ice Storm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Nobody needs a reminder that this winter won't let go. Another storm is due in today. They've been running almost one a week since the pattern began months ago. Each storm has been different, like a succession of theatrical events, with effects often localized. This picture was taken in Smithfield, NY, on March 8th. In Connecticut the passing storm was of wimpy, wet snow that wouldn't stick and was quickly road slop. Had a friend on the other side of Sharon Mountain not put out the word, I never would have known of the magnificent crisis occurring just over the NY/CT border. My friend had been there in the morning, and several of us joined him for a late afternoon shoot.

Smithfield Road which is set high and has some moderate views was closed. Limbs down everywhere and electric crews were struggling to un-snag wires. Though officially closed, cars were permitted to dodge debris. In one area a row of old, white pines on the hillside all had broken tops and gaping wounds where the weight of the ice had snapped them.

The good news is that though snow is coming, I saw maple sap running into buckets over a week ago, and this week the crimson skunk cabbage knobs were punching through hard, wet mud at White Memorial, and nearby I saw a turtle swimming at the edge of a pond. Winter may not want to let go, but there are things wiggling in the mud that won't be put off. It's all happening.

Hei-a-ho! Hei-a-ho! Hei-a-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (On Lens Choice, part 4, conclusion) Starting hand-held allowed me to explore possibilities. In addition to finding the best angles and positions, I also determined exposure settings.

What shutter speed would produce the kind of motion blur I wanted? The blacksmith's moving limbs probably shouldn't look like dismemberments. Experimentation suggested shutter speeds between 1/30 and 1/125 might work; 1/60 probably was ideal.

While I focused on the blacksmith, the beauty and importance of the shop grew on me; I realized I needed to keep the background also in focus. How much depth of field would the light permit? Probably not enough.

The solution of last resort is to bump the ISO. I knew that in processing I would be pulling detail from dark corners, and that would make the graininess worse, so I set the limit at ISO 800, two additional stops of light traded for grittiness that would fit the subject, I hoped.

With 2 more stops I was still shooting at f7.1 and 1/20th. Even with VR, that's not reliable hand-held shooting, especially when zoomed out. Once angles were decided I returned to shooting from my tripod but with the ball head free to swivel.

The work of blacksmiths does not usually produce sparks, but when asked, Will obliged. I found coordinating the shower of sparks to the wink of the shutter to be ticklish. The best shower happened on Will's first stroke; because it was the first stroke, it was the hardest to synchronize. The shutter must open as the sparks diverge and stay open long enough for them to cross a significant part of the image. Too short an exposure and the ember won't have a trail; as the exposure gets longer, the ember trail fades. I used the same exposure here as previously. Successes were few, rejects many.

The Blacksmith's Vice

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (On Lens Choice, part 3)

Even before I saw Will's shop I suspected that at least to start I would be shooting hand-held. I wanted to explore various perspectives and elevations quickly. The space was a bit tight but allowed me to move around Will and the hearth on three sides. Depending on the angle I could get back as much as perhaps ten feet but sometimes just 6. I could get as close as I dared.

As it turned out Will frequently turned from hearth to anvil and back. They stood at ninety degrees to each other, and by shifting positions I could look into his face across either or view him in profile. There was constant tension between the desire to angle up into Will's face or down at his work on anvil or hearth. As I moved, the background changed presenting compositional opportunities and dangers. Shooting with a zoom and hand-held provided rich options.

Most of the time I like shooting from a tripod. When my pack is on my back, my tripod and camera are likely to be on my shoulder. When I see a promising image I enjoy standing and fine-tuning the composition, and I may stop and shoot from a single position for 5 minutes or 20 minutes, and, when the sky was changing, I've often shot for three hours without repositioning more than ten feet.

I've only been shooting from a tripod for the last 5 or 6 years. It keeps me from rushing and makes me look harder. When I saw this wall in Will's shop, I knew I wanted to photograph it. It is a window Vermeer would want to paint. The light was perfect, outlining the edges of the iron scroll and some of the other iron pieces hanging in the window revealing them in high relief. The orderliness and nature of the stuff drew me. On full resolution copies I've spent a long time zooming and enjoying the particulars, like characters in a drama.

Whether I got the composition right or not, I needed the tripod to study how the layers intersected and to provide separation between them at critical places. A slight move up, down, right or left made a huge difference. A tilt sent the perpendiculars diverging. Sometimes the eye is quick in finding a composition, but fine tuning often requires a tripod.

I also needed a tripod as this is an HDR made from 4 distinct exposures ranging from 1/50 sec. to 1.3 seconds. Of course these shutter speeds alone call for a tripod. Whether one shoots most often from a tripod or shoots hand held more of the time will often be dictated by subject, but ones preferences and practices make up one's "camera habit," and that will determine what lenses one should choose.

Once all photography was done from a fixed camera, but even today practice ranges from those who shoot mostly with tripod-bound, medium and large format cameras that must be patiently set up and viewed with the image upside down - to paparazzi who snag photos by the dozens, one-handed, from the top of a no parking sign. There are so many ways to be a photographer. Shooting style leads to lens choice and is entirely personal.

Back at Will's, I spent most of the shoot with the 18-200mm zoom, first without tripod and later on the tripod but with the head free to move. My 18-70mm zoom is a better lens and would have done the job better; almost all shots were under 70mm, but I no longer pack that lens.


to be continued...

At the Anvil

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (On Lens Choice, part 2) The size of ones toolkit is directly related to ones need for mobility. Consistent with my need to trek backcountry, I question every addition to my pack.

I bought my first 18-200mm zoom as a street lens, not my usual beat, but it's terrific having that much range and vibration reduction (VR) instantly available when shooting in a crowd of people or at an event. Shooting landscape one has more time for lens changes, and I had the 18-200mm range covered by an excellent 18-70mm VR zoom, and an 80-400mm VR zoom. However, it didn't take long before I was leaving the 18-70mm at home and carrying the 18-200mm over the hillsides. I no longer skipped shots that I deemed not worth a lens change.

I don't do a lot of selective focus photography; usually I want as much depth of field as I can get. One lens covering everything from mild wide angle to deep telephoto is almost an all-purpose lens. Almost! I've now owned three different 18-200mm zooms and each one has been a love-hate relationship. The three previous images were taken with my latest 18-200mm lens.

A super-wide 10-20mm zoom is my newest lens. Even when I shot film I never had a lens so wide. It's not a fish-eye but it has lots of tricks, pushes the walls away, bends the horizon, and sees around corners. However, when all you want is a bigger bite, that dizzying magic has to be tamed. I used the superwide zoom here only because I wanted the shop, floor to ceiling. Once I had it, however, I cropped it a bit. Wide angle lenses don't simply capture more, they see differently.

I still carry the big, heavy 80-400mm, and enjoy using it. I love standing back and zooming for compositions in the tangled planes of a cluster of buildings or the patterns on a hillside, or among blossoms rising from the mud of a pond bottom. The lens has withstood abuse and is clear and sharp, and I see nothing affordable to persuade me to switch.

I carry a 105mm macro lens for when I really want to get close or create a smooth bokeh. Having a good macro was essential for me. Many needs all pointed to 105mm rather than 85mm or 200mm. Cost was a big factor, but I also knew that a bit of telephoto would let me keep my distance when stalking insects and similar wildlife. As a lens for wildlife it complements the 80-400mm zoom.


to be continued...

Blacksmith's Attentions

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (On Lens Choice) Yesterday at the Kent Historical Society there were several questions about lens choice, and I made the kind of answer the time permitted. The full answer starts at subject choice and shooting style and is intensely idiosyncratic. The lenses I carry are a result of some statistical average of the kinds of shooting I do leveraged (literally) against the strength of my backbone and the depth of my wallet.

My kit starts with a good backpack because the shooting I like best is in what can be called, for good reason, backcountry even if it is sometimes in fields along a road or down old railroad tracks or even in NYC. I much prefer finding a good place to explore than shopping by car for picture ops. Four miles is a normal day's trek in hill country.

to be continued...

The Blacksmith and his Tools

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - It's not clear what Will is heating on his forge, but he's waiting a moment before grabbing it with the tongs. A few moments earlier he set the small tongs on the swage block, dropping a glove on the corner of the hearth. If you look closely beside the glove you will see some of the leaves he has been forging.

Will

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Last summer at the exhibition of my work in Sharon, Connecticut, I met William Trowbridge. Will is an artist and blacksmith in Sharon, and he invited me to photograph in his shop where I found him at work on vines and leaves for a decorative railing he was completing for a client. I did two shoots in his shop. The light from outside was especially beautiful on the first shoot, but there were technical hurdles which made me eager to go back.

To begin, I had to learn a bit of Will's routine, the procedures he was executing and how he moved in order to begin to find angles. Obviously, shutter speed was critical. How much could Will's arm and hammer be blurred to show motion before it became unacceptably distorted? How would that motion appear from different angles? I shot under natural light; how quick an exposure was possible? When his work generated sparks, what shutter speed best caught their trails? The workshop was part of what I wanted to photograph; how could Will be shot to reveal it?

Finally, the more I shot, the more I became aware of the tremendous concentration and emotion Will puts into his work. The archetypal blacksmith of my imagination is at least 80% modeled after Siegfried swinging away at the previously un-weldable fragments of his father's sword and singing to the heavens. There is definitely magic in smithing. Will's magic came from many gentler, more precisely regulated strokes and complete understanding of the material. Will's one truly "smashing" blow came at a moment of extreme frustration when the material resisted his will.

The more fully I could become an unseen spectator, I figured, the better my shots might be. After two shoots, I'm still not satisfied that I've gotten all I could.

**********************
REMINDER: Sunday, March 20th - Kent Historical Society presentation: 2 PM, Kent Town Hall, Kent, CT
UPCOMING: April 29- May 15, 2011 - Exhibition at White SIlo Winery, Sherman, CT
BOOKS: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

Highlander on Rabbit Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - I've been walking at the top of Rabbit Hill recently, and it occurs to me that it's been a long time since I've seen any of the Highland cattle that used to live in the woods on the north side of the hill. Highlanders are rugged creatures, bred for centuries in the remote Scottish highlands. They'll eat things other breeds shun; to them this forest of swamp maples is fine pasture. I read that their nature is docile from years of cohabitation with Scottish farm families, a practice that helped reduce heating costs, and that their beef is naturally well-marbled. I wonder where the Rabbit Hill Highlanders have gone.

REMINDER: March 20th - Kent Historical Society presentation: 2 PM, Kent Town Hall, Kent, CT
UPCOMING: April 29- May 15, 2011 - Exhibition at White SIlo Winery, Sherman, CT

KENT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

PRESS RELEASE

“Tourist at Home in the Litchfield Hills”

The Kent Historical Society’s Sunday Series will feature Emery (Ted) Roth on March 20 at 2PM in the Kent Town Hall.  He will present a magical slide show of his photographic images, read a bit from his journals and talk about various digital photography techniques.

Roth describes himself as “a tourist at home in the Litchfield Hills,” capturing the beauty of the land and the richness of its heritage. Take a virtual walk with Roth while viewing his moving photographs of old farmhouses and barns, fields and woods, and nature.  This lecture offers an opportunity for both new and accomplished photographers to expand their horizons, as seen through Roth’s eye.  He will answer questions about digital photography and how it can be of value to the amateur photographer.

Admission is free, but donations to the Historical Society are welcome.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - As a weak concession to winter, this week has brought rain and, in low lying areas, flooding. More of everything is expected. Do I sense somewhere off stage they are beginning to construct spring? It's too soon to say, and days like this over Rabbit Hill are still a long way off.

Other projects have taken me away from TODAY'S temporarily. Thanks to all who have written to inquire.

Housatonic Winter Tint

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL (Written while walking early yesterday in the cold beside Lake Waramaug. The picture was made at a different time and place.)

Strange

Passengers:

The first stirred branches, 

lifting a mist of crystal snow 

that sailed due east, 

a spectral galleon over the water.

Another careened 

among the white pines, 

unsure which way to turn and 

trailing a whirling, white mantilla. 

Where do they come from?

Where do they go?

Who is the conjurer?

A third bore down

along the shore

and a sandstorm of snow

skated on ice

through a stillness made immense

by an endless sky of slate 

and the banter of treetop crows 

on a far-off, faded shore.