Made on my wanderings over the past ten days.
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1 April 2021
17 March 2021
Two Trees, Two Cameras
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16 March 2021
Three More
Yesterday was cold and blustery; the high was in the teens. We had the stove in the basement going so the temperature there was in the upper 50s. All of which made spending the afternoon in my basement dim room appealing.
I made ten salted-paper prints from four negatives and added some experiments in toning the prints with gold/borax.
The first print below (“Untitled”) is on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag and is untoned. The second print (“Cobblestones”), on BFK Rives, is toned for a short time. The last print (“Farm Field Fence”), on Rives Heavyweight, is toned pretty much to completion.
As usual, showing the subtilties in these prints after scanning them is always suspect. The artifacts are best experienced in hand.
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13 March 2021
Thaw!
Spring is not quite here yet, but there are faint signs that it is coming.
We had a few days of temperatures in the 50’s, in might have actually reached 60 the other day. We even had a night in which it stayed above freezing. The snow is rapidly receding, the ice is pulling back from the edges of the lake and, of course, there is lots of mud in the road!
However, the next few days the high temperatures will be in the 30s and there are two nights predicted to be in the single digits. So Spring is not quite here yet!
The photos shown here were made on walks over the past four days.
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29 January 2021
Random Photographs
Cold*… snowy… drab… gray.
A pretty apt description of January. My photography slows down this time every year, but still I try. These days the little Fuji I bought about a month ago goes with me whenever I leave the premises.
Learning to see wide-angle compositions** has been interesting and fun.
These photographs were all made with the Fuji over the past ten days.
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* The temperature is 5 degrees F as I write this. The high today was 12. More typically over the past several weeks, the highs have been in the low 20s and the lows around 10 or 12 degrees F.
** Remember the Fuji X100F has a 22 mm (35 mm in “full frame” terms) lens that can not be removed.
19 January 2021
Farm Trees
That is “Farm Trees” not “Tree Farms”! Signs, bearing the latter being a common sight in this neck of the woods.
I had been eyeing the two apple trees near the house at the Bass Farm for some time. They are situated at the cusp of a rise in the field. In my mind, I envisioned a photo of the bare branches against the sky made with my camera obscura.
Late yesterday morning, I headed out to see if I could create what I had in mind. The skies were mostly cloudy, but I was hoping for just enough sun to make things interesting. While I was there, I explored similar photos of a number of other trees on the grounds.
After I finished at the Bass Farm, I headed to a farm field in Hancock with an interesting old (dead) elm in the middle. It is too far away from the field’s edge to use the camera obscura and the field is surrounded by an electric fence precluding a closer approach*. Thus, I made a photograph (the last one in this series) using a short telephoto on my ‘normal’ camera.
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* I am contemplating approaching the owners of this field/tree to see if I can get permission enter the field so I can get close enough to use the camera obscura. If that happens, you’ll see the result here… I promise!
5 January 2021
Mid-day Visitor
Late this morning Joan was talking to her cousin on the phone when she began to wildly gesticulate in the direction of the French doors to our deck. I meander over to see what was up and observed this porcupine climbing a small beech tree.
It took me a few minutes to find the tripod, put Big Bertha (my 600 mm lens) on the camera and mount both to said tripod. I made my first exposure at 11:51 AM and made eighteen exposures total before heading back inside. There just is not a lot of action when a porcupine decides to “have a sit” up a tree!
Here it is 12:20 as I write this. I’ll be pushing the “publish” button shortly. Thirty minutes from start to finish… ain’t technology wonderful!!!
As I learned from an old newspaper photographer, always give them a horizontal and a vertical), so here are two photos.
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28 December 2020
Failure / Ice Abstracts
This morning I took the new camera on my walk down the road to the lake with the following results.
The new camera is so small and light one barely knows it is there. Having a fairly wide and fixed lens is going to be an adjustment!
The experiment continues…
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First Photos
I bought myself a new camera* as an experiment in creativity. It works very differently from the cameras I am used to and is probably best suited for street photography, a genre that I have not really explored.
It is going to be interesting to see where this camera leads.
On Saturday afternoon I made the rounds of some of my favorite nearby “photo spots”and made photos more to familiarize myself with the camera than anything else.
The results are not at all different from my usual photographs… not yet, at least!
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* Photographer talk ahead, proceed at your own risk! The new camera is a Fujifilm X100F and is very different from the dSLR s I have been using for the past sixteen years. The X100F is styled like and works similarly to an old-fashioned rangefinder film camera. Its an interesting mix of old (with actual dials for shutter speed, aperture and ISO) and new (it has menus galore and all of the bells and whistles that Fuijfilm cameras are know for). It also has a fixed (i.e. unchangeable) wide angle lens. The camera is small, unobtrusive and light… an ideal street photography camera.
27 October 2020
Mother Nature’s New Carpet
Every autumn Mother Nature provides the woods with a new carpet. It is always the same composition but never the same pattern.
On my walk a few days ago, I was attracted to patches of dappled sunlight on the roadside.
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