Category Archives: Autumn

Frozen Dewdrop, Frost, Gold Maple Leaf, 2008

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Frozen Dewdrop, Frost, Gold Maple Leaf

I’ve been intending to post this since the leaves were just falling, and I almost got distracted by newer and more timely images now. But I think this is good.

I’m glad to still be spry enough to get down on the ground, even when the ground is freezing. This good old lens, a 60 mm Nikkor Micro, has been a real workhorse, and I’ve come to really love it. It’s been really good to get close to stuff. However I may be moving on, and I’m certainly moving on from that copy of the lens, which I’ve given away. It’ll be interesting to try the new (used) update, a 105mm Nikkor Micro. I’m a little worried that the longer lens will be harder to get as close to subjects. I may end up replacing that old 60mm Micro lens.

I’ve been really shaking things up lately: new (used) camera, and now a handful of new used lenses. I’ve also been studying the lens characteristics closely. I’ve got some good new images from working with the new things, and a large project in the works. I think this will be an exciting space in coming days and weeks — and then again a good burst after some work in March or so. Stay tuned!

Snowy Fall Cattails, Vermont, 2011

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I’ve been meaning to post this for a good while, probably over a year. This is only the second cattail-featuring photo I’ve published, despite some lifetime affinity for the plant. The first one is here. This older image, embarrassingly, has been mis-linked for a while on the site, fixed now.

When I was a kid I had a thing for cattails, because they were where the frogs and turtles were. They were exotic plants, somehow eradicated from the suburbs where I lived. If I saw them through the car window, I wanted out of the car, right then, and to run to that spot.

Later, I came to see beauty in the rhythmic semi-chaos and lyrical arcs and juts and dips of them. Now that I have a patch of them in a little pond, I sometimes pull them out so they don’t spread too much and fill the pond, as they will. Still, lucky to have some, and certainly lucky to have a pond.

We just got a bit of snow late last week, quickly gone; it’s been unusually mild again this early winter here in Vermont. No snow on the green cattails this year. Despite the mildness, it is December, and the still-got-some-chance vibrance is gone from the leaves.

On a morning like the one this exposure was made, I might dash out with one camera, or load up with as much gear as I can carry. In this case I had both the DSLR and the compact camera. Though the compact “isn’t as good” as the bigger camera, sometimes that is the device that really nails it. On this morning I’ve got several more good exposures, and many of them are from the compact. This image was from a really good morning with the camera. I really need to work on some more of these!

Hillside Apple Orchard- Pink, Gold, and Mist VT 2012

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Hillside Apple Orchard- Pink, Gold, and Mist Hartland VT 2012

Finally, an image from the new camera. Of course, now it’s extra heart breaking to post a relatively low-res screen image, when there is even more detail and clarity than I’ve ever had in my images. In the full size image you can see the mist-dripping spiderwebs in the grass. The pink area behind and between the trees is really distinct bits of red. It’s actually a lot of poison ivy.

I like the space and tension between these two trees. This is actually a cropped version of a larger panorama which shows more of the apple trees and the open space downhill, to the left. But this crop does some of the things you might find in many of my compositions: textured space with tension pulling at the edges.

To the right there is a sliver of a crop of the 1:1 full-resolution image, just a bit of the right corner between those trees.

Yellow Windfall Apple in New Snow, 2011

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This is my fourth in what is turning out to be a series that might be called, “Looking down at the ground, just around 32 degrees farenheit.”

Though I’m piling up a lot of images I want to post, somehow this fits into the series. Also, my wife has said, “ooh, what’s that?!” (in the good way) as this image has been on the screen.

This is by our little pond, a couple of decent-but-neglected gnarly old apple trees with some hardwoods and softwoods growing up around them too close. Quite a few of the apples fall into the pond, and the painted turtles actually manage to bite chunks out of them there. I’ve only seen the evidence of the bites, never the actual apple-bobbing turtle-comic event.

One of the images in the piled-up and ready to go also fits into this series, so let’s see if I can keep it going for 5 before I get distracted.

Leek, Frost, Black and White 2010

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This photo isn’t a prize iPad lock screen image or home screen image, which was a roll I was on last week, but I did find it while flicking through a catalog on the iPad. It struck me, strikes me, to be very much of the lineage of large format based silver prints I used to make in the darkroom in the early 80s. This looks a lot like an 8 X 10 I might pull out of one of my archival boxes of silver prints I made in the darkroom. It’s kind of surprising it came from a digital camera.

The good gray tones, textures, a wild composition with strong lines — it has all the stuff I used to try to do. I’m not positive I like it, but I think I do. I know I’m not the same person who made those other photos back then with the big film camera, but there is some echo, some thread. Very mysterious.

Beat up Shade and Sunflower, 1981

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Beat up Shade and Sunflower
As the last post featured a sunflower facing west, this sunflower actually was facing west as well.
In 1981 I was young and skinny and wondering what to do and nursing a recent heartbreak, a year out of four years of college, wanting to be a photographer. I was working hard at that, trying to hold onto something. Funny to try to hold onto Photography as the one solid thing in my life — like grasping moonbeams and falling snowflakes. Funny now, but So Serious then. I lived in a shoddy apartment, but with good hearted people. My life was quite full of open hearted friends, and we had an amazing garden. I worked enough to buy food, sheet film and paper and spent the rest of the time with the camera or in the darkroom. I washed a lot of silver down the drain, and crystalized a lot of it onto film and paper too.
I scanned this film today, and also found silver prints of this image in archival boxes. I will print it a bit better now than I was able to in the old days.

Sunflower Facing West, November 2010

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I’ve been thinking of scanning and posting an old favorite of mine. I’d have to find and scan some 4×4 film, not such a big deal. And I want to do that anyway. But then I got caught up in looking at more recent images, and this very much reminds me of that other one.

This is from the same ice storm as that other image I posted, the stump and weeds.

I’ll try to post that old favorite one next week. It hasn’t been online since the 90s, and I can get a much better scan of it now.

grass and stump after ice storm, November 2010

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On this day I was busy with web work (an interesting project, now complete: The Corinth Social History Project). It was a good day to be working at my desk, with cold freezing rain outside. During a break I took a look out the window at the “awful” day out there. Beautiful! I poked my head out the window. Yes! Where’s my camera?! I went out and filled the 2GB card that was in the camera, and I had to come back in for another card, and ended up with quite a few good photos. Unfortunately I was so caught up in the day and the photography that I didn’t stop to grab the smaller Canon G11. Sometimes the greater depth of field afforded by the smaller camera is an advantage in this kind of work, though much of what I did that day actually benefitted from the shallow depth of field of the prime lens I had on my DSLR.
This is a of photo with qualities I’ve had in my mind to work with for many years. It’s great to see them come together here.

To me it evokes baroque music, but also with the added sparkle of psychedelic electric guitar work, with some post-modern minimalism thrown in. There were times when Jerry Garcia would tease Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” during jams, but alas, that musical confluence was all too rare. Here we have it visually, at least in my mind.

Water Weeds, Autumn Foliage Reflections, Hartland VT 2010

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Sometimes in the Autumn I go mad with the push/pull I feel in photography. On the one hand, here in Vermont at this time the landscape is the kind of beautiful that would be worth traveling half way around the world to experience. On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid cliche.

On one hand, the colors are vibrant and electric, the environmental energy is dynamic and constantly fresh: moving from heavy gloominess to bright, crisp, sharp and thousands of shades between. And on the other hand, the plants are dying, the days are shortening, and we’re spending much more time indoors.

On one hand, this is one of the most clear manifestations of the changing of seasons, touching into the eternal cycle of life on our planet, a timeless quality. On the other hand, here in Vermont there are so many gardening and household chores to do, that it’s hard to find a moment to look up and pick up the camera. And that struggle starts after I manage to get away from my desk. Luckily (though not from the photographer’s perspective), work always seems to gear up at this time of year. It’s our constant human dilemma: existing in eternity, with the capacity to touch the timeless — but stuck in time and too busy to look up and notice.

So here, I found a bit of time to look, opened up, avoided cliche (I think) and made an image I like. This is literally in my backyard, our little pond reflecting our maple trees.