Photographs by Frank

19 December 2022

Found Photo Fun

Filed under: Misc. — Tags: — Frank @ 9:30 PM

This afternoon, I was rummaging through some random photo stuff and I came to a 4×5 negative that I am certain I did not make. Thus, call it ‘found film’.

This discovery reminded me that I had several strips of 35 mm film sitting on the shelf in the garage. I vaguely remember finding this film in a paper safe* I purchased at a tag sale… More ‘found film’.

The 35 mm film is Kodak TMax 400, first produced in 1986 and still made today. One of the 35 mm frames (which was uninteresting and thus not shown here) contained a bit more of the ambulance shown in the second photo (below). This frame suggests that the photo was made in Providence, although one can only see “idence”.

I have no clue as to the age of the 4×5 negative or where it was made..

I washed most (some?) of the accumulated dust off the 35 mm film and scanned it all. I present the 4×5 image and about half of the 35 mm frames here for your entertainment!

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* A paper safe is a light-tight box for storing light-sensitive photographic paper.

30 June 2022

Monhegan Island – Details

Filed under: Misc. — Frank @ 5:00 PM

Wandering with a camera gives one license to observe your surroundings closely and, hopefully, find small bits of interesting things to record.

Here are a dozen of those bits from our trip to Monhegan Island.

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27 June 2022

Monhegan Island – Intro

Filed under: Misc.,Road Trips — Frank @ 10:12 PM

Joan and I spent the past week visiting Monhegan Island, Maine. We spent a weekend on Monhegan almost twenty years ago and said that we should return for a longer visit sometime. I guess that ‘sometime’ was last week!

We got an early start on Saturday (the 18th) for the drive to Port Clyde; we did not want to miss the ferry. We arrived in plenty of time to have a leisurely lunch and wander the village of Port Clyde a bit before boarding the boat. The weather for the trip was good… a bit of roll but nothing too bad.

Upon arriving on the Island, we left our duffel bags to be trucked up to the place we rented for the week and hiked way up the hill to the Daniel Stevens cottage, our temporary abode. The cottage is the last house on Burnt Head Road. The road continues as a foot trail to Burnt Head after the cottage.

Daniel Stevens was a keeper of both the Mannana Island fog signal station and the Monhegan Island light at different times, but as far as we can tell, he never lived in the cottage that now bears his name.

We spent sometime settling in before taking a short walk and then heading back to the village for dinner.

After breakfast on Sunday we took a hike on some of the many trails and arrived back at the cottage for a late-ish lunch just before the rain started. After lunch we relaxed and by dinnertime the rain had stopped and we hoofed it down the hill for dinner. We kept up this schedule for the rest of the week… morning hike, lunch at the cottage, afternoon rest and relaxation, and evening village stroll with dinner. Very delightful!

The weather for the rest of the week was perfect. Highs in the low sixties, lows in the upper fifties and generally clear skies. The fair weather was not the best for landscape photography… bluebird skies and harsh contrast but I managed.

Speaking of photography… I made 1,587 exposures over the week. But don’t worry, I’m not going to show you all of them. I have uploaded ninety-five images (about 6% of the total) that I will show in this and subsequent posts.

Here is an introductory set of photos made pier-to-pier; Port Clyde to Monhegan. The last photo in this series (of a window in the shed on the Monhegan pier) duplicates a photo I made on our first visit. Twenty years ago, their was a broken pane in the window. I was glad to see that it had been repaired!!!

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The second set of photos were made while ‘out and about’ in the village of Monhegan. The village makes up about one-third of the area on the island. The remaining two-thirds of the island is undeveloped conserved land, mostly forest.

The first three photos in this set deserve a bit of explanation. Manana Island is lies a few hundred feet to the west of Monhegan Island; the channel between the islands makes a nice protected harbor. Manana was once the site of a Coast Guard fog signal station. The fog signal was initially a hand struck bell that was eventually replaced with a air powered horn before being abandoned. Manana Island now has a single house, the remains of the fog signal station and a herd of sheep and goats.

I made a number of (OK… way too many) photos of both the fog signal station shed and the solitary tree seen here. I am not sure why they fascinate me but they do!

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Many more photographs to come over the next several days. Stay tuned…

12 June 2022

Flag Leaves

Filed under: Misc.,Still Life — Frank @ 9:30 PM

A couple of days ago I cut two stalks of ‘grass’ while I was out and about. I thought that they might make a good photograph.

This afternoon, I set up the stalks on our deck railing and made some photographs. I envisioned making black and white photos of the stalks and eventually salted-paper prints.

As I was framing up my first exposures, I had an epiphany… the leaves attached to these stalks are “flag leaves”!

I recently learned about flag leaves from the current issue of The Limrik, Antrim’s quarterly community newsletter/journal. It just so happens that Joan is the managing editor of this esteemed publication. I am, by virtue of being married to Joan, the photo editor and business manager.

One of the articles in the June 2022 issue is about the “Flag Leaf Bakery”, a new bakery that will be opening soon in downtown Antrim. During Joan’s interview with the owners of the bakery they described the origin of its name. I quote…”The name “Flag Leaf” comes from the last leaf to develop on the wheat stalk before the seed head forms. The emerging flag leaf signals the end of the plant’s vegetative growth phase and its photosynthesis provides a large fraction of the energy needed for seed production.”

I am not sure if the stalks I collected are wheat, but the leaves attached to these stalks are clearly flag leaves.

Life is full of interesting convergences!

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5 May 2022

Weathersfield Center (again) and Baltimore, Vermont

Filed under: Landscapes,Misc.,Spring — Frank @ 11:17 PM

Back at the end of March, I visited Weathersfield Center, VT for the first time and discovered the wonderful meeting house there. After this excursion, I looked at a map of the general area and noticed the nearby town of Baltimore. Joan was born in Baltimore, Maryland and our daughter, Katrina, has lived there for the last fifteen or so years. Thus, I decided that when I next visited this part of Vermont I would go see Baltimore. Today was the day!

This morning, I taught an introduction to photography tutorial for the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro. After I was done teaching, I pointed my truck north. The weather was pleasantly warm and the skies were partly cloudy.

I stopped first in Weathersfield Center. My first visit there was on a cold, damp day and I used my camera obscura exclusively that day. Today, the light was much more conducive to photography. I made photographs with both the camera obscura and my ‘regular’ camera. I left the images from the latter as color since I like the contrast between the warm orange bricks, the cool azure sky and the green spring grass. I also noticed (and photographed) the nearby town pound* with an interesting iron gate. I had completely missed the pound on my first visit.

After photographing the meetinghouse, I attempted to head towards Baltimore. Notice I said “attempted”… I had either one of those “you can’t get there from here” (use a thick New England accent when you read that!) moments or my map was broken.

Eventually, I got out my phone, fired up its GPS application and, without further drama, found the westernmost end of Baltimore Rd (on VT10 just to the west of the junction with VT106 in North Springfield). Baltimore Road, which is not paved, makes a six mile loop through town. The other end intersects VT106 just north of the junction with VT10. The two ends of Baltimore Road are less than a mile apart!

Roughly half way along this loop one comes to the Baltimore Town Hall (see the last photo below). The (rather nondescript) town hall is the only public building in Baltimore. There is nary church, etc.

Upon arriving home, I learned a bit more about Baltimore by Googling, of course, as any modern guy would do! It turns out that the current population of the town is roughly 230 people, about what it was two hundred years ago (i.e. in the early 1800s) and quite a bit higher than the low of about fifty in the early 1900s**.

The town has a total of 7.2 miles of roads, all of which are unpaved. Just out of the frame on the right of my photo of town hall sits a road grader; my guess is this is only significant asset the town owns other than the town hall.

The town hall was built in 1894 as a one room school house and was used as such until 1988!

In summary, Baltimore is a bit out of the way and on the quiet side, but I am glad that I made the trip. Maybe, I will go back some day and drive the other twenty percent of the the town roads that I missed this time thorough!

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* Town pounds are small, generally stone wall enclosed areas where wayward livestock were penned up until their owners could ransom them. Loose livestock were a serious matter when most folks depended on their gardens and fields for the bulk of their sustenance and the ‘fuel’ for their horses and oxen. Stray livestock could quickly decimate a garden and thus were rapidly escorted to the town pound before (hopefully) they could do much damage. The owner of the strays would then have to pay a fine in order to retrieve their animals from the pound.

** This pattern is typical for many small towns in New Hampshire and Vermont. Populations peaked in the first half of the nineteenth century when sheep farming was at its peak and declined thereafter as farmers moved to more fertile territory as the mid-west (then “the west”) was ‘settled’. Populations generally reached their lows in the first quarter of the twentieth century and slowly rebounded thereafter. The current population of many small northern New England towns is roughly the same as it was two centuries ago.

27 March 2022

For Joe…

Filed under: Misc.,Off Topic — Frank @ 10:00 PM

My friend and stalwart blog commenter, Joe Kennedy sent an email this morning announcing that today was “National Joe Day”… “Really” he wrote.

Of course, I did not believe him so I did what any modern fellow would do… I googled it!

Well, guess what? Today really isNational Joe Day“!!!!

In Joe’s honor, I made this photograph while I was in Brattleboro this afternoon. Being a true modern guy, I used my cell phone!

Happy (or is that Merry?) Joe Day, Joe!!!!

19 February 2022

Progress

Filed under: Misc. — Frank @ 10:00 PM

My late father-in-law, Winslow Caughey, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He enjoyed making photographs of his grandchildren and other visitors as well as the Rocky Mountain landscape. He generally shot slide film and would occasionally have prints made from the slides.

The photograph shown below, which Winslow titled “Progress”, was one of those that he had made as a large print. That print now hangs in Joan’s brother George’s house. We thought that the original slide had been lost and thus print was unique.

However, I recently spent a few cold winter evenings going through the slides we saved when Winslow died and lo-and-behold, I found the original slide which I promptly scanned so that it is saved for posterity.

I have not yet made a print, but I intend to do so and to find a place to hang it in the house. It is a witty photo that deserves to be seen. So here it is…

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The Stones

Filed under: Misc.,Still Life — Frank @ 9:30 PM

I have a habit of collecting smooth stones as I wend my way through life. I picked up the stones shown here on the shores of Lakes Superior and Huron near the end of our trip this past fall. They have been sitting in a pile the garage since we arrived back home waiting to be photographed some day.

Today was that day. The weather was lousy this afternoon (snow squalls and cold) but the basement was warm since we started up the wood stove this morning. Thus, I spent some time playing with my rock pile.

The grid of stones is a composite. I photographed each rock individually and combined the images in Photoshop. It is easier to get consistent light across each stone that way. The stones are all small… roughly the size of quarter to a half-dollar.

Some of the stones used for the stacks are a bit larger, but none of the stacks is taller than about six or seven inches.

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Out and About

Filed under: Misc.,Winter — Frank @ 9:00 PM

The middle of the winter is always a slow time for my photography but I usually take a camera with me when I leave the house just in case. The six photos shown here were made during the past three weeks while “out and about”.

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13 January 2022

Greetings From Brattleboro, VT

Filed under: architecture,Landscapes,Misc.,Winter — Frank @ 11:30 PM

This afternoon, I made a visit to the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro to see the members exhibition. I have two prints in the show.

After I finished taking in the exhibit, I took a walk around downtown with camera in hand.

There were few people around even though it was quite mild. The temperature was right around freezing. I’m not much of a “people photographer anyway. However, I found plenty of other things to photograph.

This is probably not the impression of Brattleboro that the Chamber of Commerce would like one to have… but here it is!

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Once I warmed up my visual sensibility, as I often do, I saw interesting details everywhere.

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The alley way that runs behind the buildings on the east (river) side of Main Street is, most definitely, not what most visitors see of Brattleboro. It is interesting none-the-less.

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