This afternoon I had to run an errand in Keene. The light and skies were perfect as I got to Hancock (around 5 PM) on the way home.
I had my camera with me and made a few photographs.
On the first Saturday of each month (COVID not withstanding*) I get together with a group of friends and fellow photographers in Brattleboro to share work.
Yesterday morning, I headed out for our meeting early hoping to find some foliage to photograph in the early light. I was not disappointed. In addition to nice light, many of the local ponds and lakes were shrouded in morning mist as sometimes happens this time of year.
After our get together, I meandered home from Brattleboro stopping to make photographs in Fitzwilliam, Troy, Jaffrey Center and Hancock.
Although most of the photograph were made using my ‘regular’ camera. I did breakout the camera obscura on a few occasions.
*After a several months of meeting via Zoom we have been getting together outside on the Common in Brattleboro. Now that the weather is becoming less conducive to outdoor meetings, we have to figure out what is next.
Yesterday morning I had some business to attend to in Saint Johnsbury, VY. It took me just a bit over two hours to get there via the interstates. The trip home took six hours… I meandered!
The foliage is pretty much peak in the northern part of NH and VT.
I left the house yesterday morning about ten on a mission. I first headed to Littleton, MA to meet my friend (and stalwart commenter here) Joe.
Joe’s car was loaded with cameras… roughly four dozen. A friend of Joe’s had decided to down-size his collection of antique cameras and I was glad to facilitate their donation to the Vermont Center for Photography.
After transferring the cameras to my truck I headed directly to Brattleboro (where the VCP is located) to deliver the goods.
One the way back home, I made a couple of stops at favorite places to photograph in Marlborough and Harrisville. The late afternoon light was nice and, at least in some directions, there were interesting clouds.
I pulled into the driveway at six on the dot. It ’twas a successful day.
Last week I prepared another batch of four negatives (at 4″x5″ on half a letter-sized sheet of OHP film) from some old files and made some more cyanotypes. I am pretty pleased with my process as it stands and am now able to confidently make nice prints without much struggle.
I am still trying to decide on my “standard” paper(s), for cyanotype. I printed each of these four negative on four different papers*.
The differences between papers are very subtle and all made good prints. So as not to bore anyone, I show only one print from each negative!
* The four papers are:
Fabriano Unica White (250 gsm, 50% cotton, $0.11 for a 5″x7″ sheet)
Stonehenge Warm (250 gsm, 100% cotton, $0.17 for a 5″x7″ sheet)
Fabriano Tiepolo (130 gsm, 100% cotton, $0.16 for a 5″x7″ sheet)
Rives Heavyweight White (175 gsm, 100% cotton, $0.27 for a 5″x7″ sheet)
All these papers were purchased as large sheets from Acuity Papers (a small outfit in Indiana; highly recommended) that I cut to size myself.
This morning Joan and I headed out for a hike on the Peirce Wildlife and Forest Reservation in Stoddard. Our goal was Trout Pond, a beautiful and completely undeveloped body of water. Of course, I took along my camera.
This morning. as I headed out the door to go for a walk, I noticed a meadowhawk perched on a flower just outside the porch door. I successfully resisted the urge to get my camera and headed out for the walk.
Shortly after my return home, I was sitting in my chair rehydrating when I hear Joan call from out in the flower bed where she was working “Perched Darner! Perched Darner!”. As quick as I could I headed out the door, camera in hand but as is usual with darners (they do not stand still for long… ever) the perched individual was long gone.
It turns out that as Joan worked on cleaning up the flower bed she was disturbing lots of small insects and creating her own mini-feeding swarm in the process. There were at least there or four darners making regular passes over the beds and carefully veering around us as we stood there. In addition to the darners, there were also a number of autumn meadowhawks also taking advantage of the bounty.
Darners are very frustrating to photograph. They spend the large majority of their time in flight; even eating most prey while on the wing. Every once in a while, when one does perch, it is their habit to hang vertically from a branch or twig quite near the trunk of whatever plant they chose. (They are big and heavy as odes go and prefer good sturdy shrubs for perching.) This often makes for very cluttered photos.
In all today, I saw three perched darners. The first was in such deep shadow in a rhododendron that the photos are not worth showing. I never got close enough to the second to even make a photo. However, I was able to get a pretty typical photo of the third darner. I was able to make exactly three exposures before it took flight again.
Meadowhawks, on the other hand, are pretty easy to photograph. They perch frequently and often on nice isolated stalks of vegetation.
There were plenty (a few dozen) of meadowhawks around both the flower bed where Joan was working and at other places in the yard. Most were mature males but there were a few immature males and females in the mix.
On Saturday, I took my camera obscura out for a “spin”. I had not used it in a while. I have had a photo in my head for some months now and Saturday afternoon I thought that the conditions (skies, light, etc.) might be good, so I headed out.
The photo I had in mind is the last one in this set. It is the old railroad trestle across the Contoocook River by the paper mill in Bennington (NH). In addition to the light being right and having a good sky, this photo required that the river level be fairly low as I needed to “rock hop” out into the middle of the river in order to get the angle of view I wanted. It all worked out pretty well, except that I strained a muscle in my left thigh “hopping” the rocks. I put “hopping” in quotes because in reality there was no hopping done; only a slow cautious crawl out and back! In the end I made the photo I had in mind and as the saying goes one has to suffer for one’s art!
When I got back to the computer, I discovered that there were some exposures on the memory card that I made back at the end of April (the 28th to be exact). I had never downloaded these files and, in fact, had completely forgotten about them… sort of like what happened back in the day of yore film when you developed a roll of film and found exposures at the beginning that you made some months prior. This doesn’t happen often in the digital age, but it is fun when it does!
The first four photos below were made back in April. The last three were from Saturday.
Back in March I began the process of relearning/perfecting the making of cyanotypes after a twelve year hiatus. Following, much experimenting and testing over the past few months, I am now trying to make some finished prints some of which might even (hopefully) rise to the level of “art”.
All of these small (4″x 5″) prints were made in the last week or two by contact printing a digital negative on hand coated paper.
Yesterday afternoon, about 3:30, I headed for a walk down the road on the Harris Center property near us. The weather was in the low 70’s and it was partially cloudy. Although at one point, I had to sit out a brief sprinkle under some hemlock trees. I got back home just before 6:30.
The pattern for this year held true. There were small numbers of odes present but a decent number of species to be found. The most common species were the meadowhawks, slatey skimmers and spreadwings (probably Elegant spreadwings, but possible Slender spreadwings). I saw about six of each. The meadowhawks were all in the old log landings along the road and were all yellow (i.e. either immature males or females). The skimmers were mostly male and found at the waters edge near the beaver dam. Although, I did see one female in a clearing along the road. The spreadwings were mostly in the stream flowing out of the beaver pond. I also saw two male eastern forktails (one immature) in the grass along the road just downstream from the dam.
Additionally, I saw very briefly a nondescript brown dragonfly that paused just long enough for one exposure as well as an unidentified damselfly and what I think was a male common pondhawk neither of which stayed around long enough for even a single photo.
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