Photographs by Frank

5 April 2011

April Snow

Filed under: Early Spring,The "New" Yard & Environs — Frank @ 8:37 PM

Ah… early April… spring snow… that wet heavy glop that fortunately doesn’t stay around long.

The morning of 1 April  about 3 inches of new snow fell in our neck of the NH woods.

A few days later, on Monday, snow showers that lasted most of the morning began while we were having breakfast.

Much of the woods are still covered in the remnants of the winters accumulation so in some ways there was not much change in the view.

However, upon closer examination, one notices that many recently bare surfaces such as stones, trees and many man-made surfaces had a new coat of fresh snow. This is usually the first stuff to melt so if you want to catch it photographically you need to work fast.

Here is the weekend’s (plus Monday) crop:

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31 March 2011

Looking Down (on) the Road

Filed under: Early Spring,The "New" Yard & Environs — Frank @ 8:37 PM

One of the camera clubs I belong to does a “monthly challenge”, where a topic is announced and folks shoot images during the month to “match” the topic. The current challenge is “looking down”. I don’t often participate in these challenges, preferring instead to go my own way.

However, a couple of weekends ago, I headed out for a stroll down “our” road in NH and decided that there is a  lot of interesting subject matter on a dirt road during mud in NH.

Mud… that is the season in northern New England that comes between winter and “black fly”. Mud occurs about the same  time that the maple sap is running.  And of course, by the time “black fly” is over summer arrives… we have no spring to speak of in northern New England!

So, here are the “keepers” from my stroll. Most are along the lines of “looking down” with a few others thrown in at the end. The first image (which is actually the last one I took during the outing) is the one I submitted… just for fun!

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21 March 2011

Spring Break

Filed under: Early Spring,The "New" Yard & Environs — Tags: , , — Frank @ 12:01 PM

Early March… Spring Break time for those of us, students and faculty alike, in higher education.

Many head south, not me… I spent most of the week in NH. However, I started the week photographically with a Sunday afternoon trip to Sachuest NWR to look for harlequin ducks. None were to be found.

Most of the rest of the week in NH was not particularly good for photography… the light was very flat gray and dreary for three days. Things began  to look up photographically-speaking on Thursday and Friday when the fog set in! Nothing like fog to set a mood, so I headed out each afternoon.

Here are a dozen from the week:

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Comments appreciated, as always.

 

5 March 2011

Snowy February

Filed under: The "New" Yard & Environs,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 10:11 AM

Well, I realize that it has been more than a month since I added an entry here. The winter is generally a slow time for me photographically, but I do continue to shoot, so there is really no excuse!

February continued the snowy winter we have been having both in NH and in Mass… we got around a foot of snow (in NH; in Mass. it was mostly rain) on the last weekend of the month.

Still, Joan and I have been getting out at least once a weekend, between shoveling events,  for a snowshoe hike around the NH house. Most of the time, I remember to take the camera!

So here are a half a dozen photos from the last couple of weeks:

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Comments appreciated as always.

23 January 2011

The Beaver Swamp in Winter

Filed under: The "New" Yard & Environs,Winter — Tags: — Frank @ 9:58 AM

Last weekend, Joan and I took a jaunt through the beaver swamp behind the house in NH. There was about a foot of powdery snow that was a few days old, so we strapped on the snowshoes and headed out. The temperature was in the mid-teens (Fahrenheit) but we were warm and toasty from the exercise and the sun.

There is a high ridge on the west side of the swamp so deep shade develops down in the lowlands at least an hour (maybe more) before sunset.  Towards the end of our hike, the light was just right  for really bringing out the texture of the snow. I had been watching all of the bits of old vegetation that protruded from the snow in anticipation of “good light” and so was ready with the camera. The light lasted less than a half hour and I had to keep moving to the east as the shadow of the ridge worked its way across the swamp.

Here are the “keepers” from the afternoon:

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14 January 2011

Around the (new) house – New Hampshire Winter

Filed under: The "New" Yard & Environs — Tags: , — Frank @ 12:27 PM

Joan and I recently acquired a new house in New Hampshire where we plan to live upon retirement in a few years.The house, a classic New England Cape, is, according to some, way out of town!

It is the second-to-last house on the maintained section of an old dirt road. It sits on a bit more than six acres of land with stone walls on two sides and a nice beaver swamp at the back of the property. The back of the lot abuts property owned by NH Audubon which is part of a large (probably a couple thousand acres) tract of “wilderness”. Pretty much paradise by this nature photographers reckoning!

In the future,  I am sure that there will be many photos of the wildlife that the shallow, still, water of a small beaver swamp attracts. Come spring, I am planning to build a semi-permanent blind in which I expect to spend many early mornings and evenings.

But for now, I am content to photograph animal tracks in the snow, stone walls in the snow, random rocks in the snow… well, you get the idea… a New Hampshire winter… aah!

Here are the photographic results from the first couple of weeks since we (sort of) moved in:

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Thanks for looking.

10 December 2010

Massachusetts Wildlife

Filed under: Amphibians,Audubon Sanctuaries,Birds,Carver's Pond,Odontates,Other Insects,Southeastern MA,The Yard,Wildlife — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Frank @ 9:13 PM

Back in September, I entered ten images in a photo contest sponsored by Massachusetts Wildlife magazine, a quarterly publication of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

I had pretty much forgotten about the contest and my entry. However, I was pleasantly reminded about it when I recently received email informing me that four of my photos have been given awards!

According to the email from Peter Mirick,  the editor, there were “1,137 entries received from 183 individuals living in 149 cities and towns, some as far away as Florida and Arizona.”

No large cash prizes! Just a subscription to the magazine and a few extra copies of the  issue in which the images will be published.  However, it is nice to have ones work recognized this way.

Here are the four images that were selected:

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And here are the other entries:

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Thanks for “wandering by”.

21 November 2010

Wings Neck Lighthouse

Filed under: Uncategorized — Frank @ 5:55 PM

Wings Neck Light is a decommissioned lighthouse on Buzzards Bay in the village of Pocasset, MA; it  is now privately owned and run as a vacation rental property. One of the members of the Stony Brook Camera Club, to which I belong, is acquainted with the owner and obtained access to the grounds for us one recent late afternoon.

As one might expect for November, is was blustery and cool along the water but not unbearable. The light as the sun was setting was good… not great… just good.

Here are half a dozen shots from the outing:

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11 November 2010

Civil War Reenactors (More Black and White)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Frank @ 12:39 PM

Each spring, the town of East Bridgewater, MA holds “Calvin Harlow Day” in honor of Sgt. Calvin Francis Harlow, 29th Mass Volunteers, Infantry Co. C, a local Civil War hero. As part of the festivities, the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a group of Civil War reenactors holds an encampment and skirmishes with a rebel unit at the Sachem Rock Farm.

I have attended this event for the past three or four years and made photos of the action without much forethought. This past May, I went again with a specific goal in mind. I wanted to take candid black and white portraits of the reenactors. I approached the task as a wildlife photographer would… big surprise! I mounted my 70-300 mm lens on the camera and stalked the soldiers!

In making these images I paid careful attention to the light and to the backgrounds. It was a bright sunny day with way too much contrast for good photography.  Fortunately, there are a number of trees around and waiting for folks to move into open shade was not too hard.

As you might expect there are plenty of people, both spectators and participants, milling around at an event like this. Thus the hard part was getting “clean” backgrounds. The key was finding angles that would eliminate distractions in the background.  Getting soft, out of focus, backgrounds is relatively easy… the long lens pretty much takes care of that.

All but one of these photographs, were “candid”, I did not ask the subject to pose and in most cases, I doubt that the subject even knew I snapped the shutter. (I am not going to say which portrait was posed!)

Here are the photos; comments appreciated as always:

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30 October 2010

Black and White Landscapes – Revisited

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Frank @ 11:24 AM

I  have a new tool, an ink-jet printer… it is not a toy, no matter what Joan says! She seems to believe that adage “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.” Not me… I’m sticking with “tool”!

One of my main motivations in making this purchase was to get a printer with multiple “black”  (i.e. black and two shades of gray) inks. This enables one to print true black and white images.

My old printer, which is four or five years old, is still working fine but it has only one black ink, among a bevy of colored inks. This means that even “black and white” images are printed using the color inks and this makes it essentially impossible to get truly neutral shades of gray out of it. Despite my best efforts (including building, refining and re-refining custom profiles for each paper) all my black and white prints made with this printer had an ever so slight green cast to them.

Actually, until I directly compared some of these old prints to ones from the new printer, I thought that they were perfectly  neutral… and they are very close  in some light (i.e. day light) and not so close in other light (e.g. fluorescent light). Ugh! But such is the nature of the beast. The old printer is simply not the right tool for creating black and white prints. However, the new printer is a perfect tool  for black and white printing.

The ability to print “real” black and white has caused me to go back though my images and rework some of them before printing them with the new tool. All of these images, which were captured in the last roughly four years, were originally presented as black and white images but I went back to the original color files to rework them.

The reason for this is two-fold. The software tools for processing images gets better (and more complicated) with time and my skills in using the tools also, hopefully, gets better as well!

So, here are a half dozen landscapes that I have reprocessed and printed in the last few weeks. Some of them are significantly different from the older versions and some very similar, so much so that the small electronic versions displayed here will not look different from the older versions. However, the prints from all of them are much, much better than I could have done with the old printer.

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In closing, I am reminded of a quote from Ansel Adams (Wikipedia entry). Old Saint Ansel,  perhaps the most famous landscape photographer even a quarter century after his death, was purported to say:

“The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”

I think that this is still (maybe even more) true in the digital age. Not only can we reprint images as our skills improve and the tools change, but we can reprocess our “negatives” … the original (raw) file… as well!

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