Photographs by Frank

10 February 2019

Harsh February Light

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Frank @ 9:59 PM

In some ways we have had typical New Hampshire winter weather… periods of dull drab days and periods of bright, cloudless blue skies. What has not been typical are the multiple periods of warm weather. In the “old days” we would get a January thaw. These days we seem to get a thaw every few weeks.

The latest thaw was a couple of days in the middle of last week. The mud in the road was deep and spring-like. The road crew worked hard to keep it passable.

The last few days have been more typical of February, highs in the mid- to upper 20s F and lows in the low teens. The days have been bright and sunny… good for production by our new solar panels but challenging for photography. I have persisted none-the-less.

The first three photos were made in the last week, with a regular lens. The last six photos were made yesterday using a $20 “Holga lens” that I recently bought on an impulse. This 60 mm lens is all plastic and has a fixed aperture (f/8). Focusing is all manual and rather crude; there are small pictographs along the focus ring to indicate the distance. The resulting photos, all made in harsh February light, have “character”.

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18 August 2018

White Clapboard — Winter Light

Filed under: Landscapes,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 7:00 PM

Recently. I have been working on a physical book the idea for which has been rolling around in my cranium for some time.

Back in the winter of 2016/2017 I spent some time photographing meeting houses and churches in the general “neighborhood”. I ended up with almost one hundred processed, finished photographs.

My first thought was to put together a press printed book, containing three or four dozen photos total. However, the project stalled at the photo editing stage. I simply could not cull the set of photographs down from one hundred to forty-ish. Every time I tried, I ended up with a different subset. I put prints in a folder and put the project aside in frustration.

A month or so ago, one of my photo friends* suggested that selecting a smaller number of photos and making a shorter book might actually be easier. Lo-and-behold, she was right!

I ended up with a dozen photos that I have sequenced and printed four to a 13″x19″ sheet. I have printed four set of folios on some very nice two-sided matte paper. Now all I have to do is decide on the covers and sew the covers and folios together. The decision is always harder than the sewing!

This morning, as an experiment, I spent a bit of time putting together an ebook version (as a pdf file) of this project.  Here is a link to the book which is titled “White Clapboard — Winter Light“.

The ebook is best viewed by downloading the pdf file and opening it in Acrobat Viewer rather than just clicking on the link and viewing it in your browser.**

What do you think?


* We are a group of about ten photographers who meet on an irregular basis to discuss “projects and objects”… that is, our creative processes and the prints that result.

** Opening the file in most browsers will display the book one page at a time. This is OK. However, Adobe’s Acrobat Viewer will display the book as two page spreads, as I designed it.

26 March 2018

March II

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: , — Frank @ 12:00 PM

 

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20 February 2018

Brimstone Corner Road Enumerated

Filed under: Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 10:00 PM

This is what I noticed on my daily walk on the “civilized” section of our road this afternoon.

Why I had never seen this before? Hmmm!

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28 January 2018

Dereliction, Too

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 1:00 PM

On Friday, I had a leisurely lunch and great conservation with my friend Victor at Fiddleheads in Hancock.  After we parted ways, I meandered back home looking for photographs.

A while back, I photographed a derelict truck. Derelict buildings also have a place in my heart. I have passed this old house many times but never stopped to photograph it before.

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24 January 2018

Wintry Mix

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 6:00 PM

Monday night into Tuesday (yesterday) we had a wintry mix of precipitation. The temperature hovered right around freezing and, depending on the moment, it was raining, sleeting or snowing.

By early afternoon, the precipitation stopped and just before sunset, blue sky began to appear.

Overnight it warmed up some and by morning most of the ice coating the vegetation was gone. I wish that I could say the same for the driveway!

The first five photos below were made yesterday afternoon, after moving the daily ration of firewood. The remaining four were made this afternoon while on my daily walk down the road.

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19 January 2018

An Interesting Mile

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Uncategorized,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 1:00 PM

These days, I often walk the mile between our house and the bridge down by the lake.

Some times, I take my camera along on the walk.

This sort stretch of rural road contains much of interest if one looks closely.

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Passing vehicles, leave traces on our snow covered dirt road that would be missed if it were paved.

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8 January 2018

What Is White?

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: , — Frank @ 7:00 PM

A few days ago (before the “big storm”) Joan and I made a snowshoe trek on Gregg Lake. I noticed all sorts of interesting wind-made patterns in the snow on the lake. I had not taken my camera with me on this day and the sky was overcast. Thus the light was flat and boring.

Yesterday, noting that the wind had cleared most of the fifteen inches of snow that had come down in the “big storm” from the ice and that the light was “nice” (there were high, thin clouds but the light was still fairly hard), I had the notion to head out on the lake again with my camera.

I waited until mid-afternoon, when the sun would be low but not so low that the lake surface would be in shadow,  strapped on my snowshoes and headed down to the lake. The temperature was about 10 degrees F. It was about 3:15 when I arrived at the lake and already about a third of the surface was in shadow. I spent the next three-quarters of an hour chasing the edge of remaining sunlight across the lake and making photographs all the way.

The title of this post refers to the notion that, although all of the snow I saw was ostensibly white, in reality white is merely an illusion.

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21 December 2017

Park Hill Meetinghouse

Filed under: Landscapes,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 11:07 AM

Back in September, I “discovered” the Park Hill Meetinghouse in Westmoreland, NH. The photos, I made on that day were okay, but the sky was a “nice” even overcast gray. In that post, I said that I would be heading back in November looking for a better sky.

Well, I have been trying for at least two months to get the right combination of sky and light, so that I could make “the photo” of this wonderful meeting house. The weather has not cooperated, we have had many overcast days and some completely clear blue sky days and rarely anything in between.

Yesterday looked promising and I made the thirty five mile to Westmoreland, arriving just before two in the afternoon. The skies behind the meetinghouse were pretty good, but there was a mostly solid block of clouds to the west and thus the light was quite flat. I made some photographs anyway and waited, for roughly two hours, hoping that the light would get better; it never did.

Finally, driven by the cold (it was in the mid thirties), wind and fading light of the shortest day of the year, I pack up and headed home. I’ll be headed back again at some point!

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15 December 2017

Between The Snows

Filed under: Landscapes,Monadnock Region,Winter — Tags: , , — Frank @ 10:00 PM

We had our first significant snow (three or four inches) of the season last Saturday/Sunday night. It snowed again (a similar amount) on Tuesday.

On Monday, between the snows, I took my camera along for my daily walk.

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