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.
One day last week, Joan came home with a flat of pansies for her garden. I was struck by the amazing variety of different shapes and colors. I snipped off a few flowers (she will never notice!) and brought them in to my “studio” (i.e. the table in the basement). I photographed each flower individually and, after cleaning up the background a bit (pesky dust spots!), I composited the three frames using PhotoShop.
This image reminded me of a project I began last fall, but had not gotten past the “collect the specimen” stage. Last October I collected a number of fallen leaves and glycerinated* them. They have been sitting in a pile for months. After finishing the pansy composite, I was inspired to finally photograph this collection of leaves. The final images you see are, again, composites.
The grid image is what I had envisioned the seven or eight months ago when I collected the leaves.
* Autumn leaves look very nice when you collect them but they are hard to photograph since they are not flat. One can press the leaves to get them flat, but, in my experience, they become brittle as they dry and thus hard to handle. They also do not stay flat for very long. Glycerination is the solution to the problem. By coating the leaves with glycerol and pressing the leaves between two glass plates one gets supple flat leaves that stay flat and therefore easier to photograph.
I made a few new Autumnal Abstracts this past week.
Inspired by this post (at The Online Photographer), I decided to present the new work in pairs.
Choosing the pairs was a interesting process. Starting with about two dozen photographs total, I made and discarded many pairs before settling on these three.
The first pair is comprised of two different exposures of the same small scene (a pair of brightly colored leaves, if my memory serves). I chose the second pair because they both have somewhat linear patterns and they have contrasting palettes; warm colors vs. cool colors. The third pair was chosen because they have similar palettes and both include red in the lower right quadrant.
None of these pairing were planned.
The last pair, however, were intended to be displayed together from the moment I pressed the shutter release back in August (see this post).
What do you think?
On Labor Day (4 Sept) we headed out on the road. Our immediate destination was western Montana and a nephews wedding on the 9th.
After the wedding festivities were over, we began the meat of the trip. Our first destination was Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), just to the west of Yellowstone National Park, our second destination. We spent five nights in Yellowstone and then wildlife refuge hopped back east.
We visited C.M Russell NWR, Bowdoin NWR, and Medicine Lake NWR all in Montana, Lostwood NWR, Des Lacs NWR and Upper Souris NWR in North Dakota and Agassiz NWR in Minnesota. We also visited the International Crane Foundation and the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin before heading home.
We arrived home yesterday (Saturday, 30 Sept) having driven just over 7,400 miles in total.
Of course, I made one or two photographs along the way! Here is the first installment… wildlife photographs.
More to follow over the next few days.
Birds
Mammals
Yesterday afternoon found me in the lovely village of Grafton, Vermont.
On Thursday evening, in snowed at the higher elevations in both Vermont and New Hampshire and there were still remnants on the ground on Saturday afternoon.*
These photographs were made by photographing the ground glass of a camera obscura.
*Here in Antrim we got mostly sleet and just a trace of accumulation. A fellow from Marlboro, VT said they had about six inches and there was still patches of snow in the woods at higher elevations, including the upper reaches of Lempster Mountain (about 20 miles from Antrim).
I spent last Friday evening and Saturday morning/early afternoon making photos of people at the Antrim 2020 community planning event.
People are not my usual subjects – my father once commented that I was the only one he knows that goes on a six week vacation and comes back with nary a single photo of a person – and I won’t bore you with photos of people you don’t know.
On Saturday morning, after the rain had stopped, I slipped outside for a short break from ‘event photography’; this diptych is the result:
This year’s foliage season has been quite spectacular.
Last Thursday, we headed to camp to take the sailboat out of the water. While Joan scrubbed the summer’s accumulation off the bottom of the hull, I headed out in the kayak to photograph the lake shore. The first three photos are the result.
On Saturday, I headed out for a short drive. On the outbound leg, I headed up towards Hillsborough Center and then on to East Washington. I headed back towards home via Washington and Route 31. The Pierce Homestead is near the junction of Routes 31 and 9 in Hillsborough.
On Saturday, I photographed down by the bridge on Gregg Lake three times. The skies were cloudless, bright blue when I passed by in the morning. In the early afternoon there were scattered clouds and by late afternoon the skies were mostly cloudy. The early afternoon skies made for the most interesting photos; the last thee above and the four below.
Yesterday afternoon, I took a walk up the “wild” section of Brimstone Corner to work on the 2016 edition of my Autumnal Abstract series.
This is my third year of making Autumnal Abstracts; here are the 2014 and 2015 versions.
All of these photo are made using a slow shutter speed* and deliberate movement of the camera. A moderate telephoto lens (a zoom set to 80 mm this year) was used. The maxim “less is more” seems to hold here. Thus, the narrow field of view of a telephoto seems to work better than a wider lens.
The resulting exposures are unpredictable and irreproducible; this is what makes it fun!
Processing in the computer is limited to the usual adjustments (black and white point setting, contrast adjustment and cropping). The “abstractness” comes from the camera not the computer.
This year I seem to favor the very abstract with swaths of bold color.
However, there were a few less abstract frames that caught my eye as well.
* Typically the shutter speed is in the range of one to four seconds. A neutral density filter is used to achieve these shutter speeds.
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