Category Archives: Water

Dandelions 2016

Dandelions Sunset Hartland Vermont

A couple of years ago I made this successful (for me — I can’t remember offhand if I’ve sold any prints of this) exposure and then very good print of a hillside with dandelions, below:

I’ve found dandelions to be a compelling subject since I lugged a 4 x 5 view camera around (and I have a distinct memory of stopping by a meadow and setting up my tripod and big camera to photograph them after a very significant event — meeting Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche — in 1982).

Still, it’s a bit hard. They are luminous; they glow, they are full of detail; and they whisper poignantly of impermanence. Even if you’ve got a good composition, you’ve got to pull off the photograph. I was a bit surprised and heartened by that good print from 2014.

Since then I’ve got a crazy high resolution sensor with good dynamic range on my main camera, and I’ve got some brilliant lenses. Zeiss and Voigtlander — some of the most brilliant and full of character glass I’ve ever been blessed to use. Not only that, but I live near some good dandelion hayfields here in the hills of Vermont. This year I’ve gone a bit crazy working with these plants. Some think they are weeds, but I think they are a prize beyond price, but only for that very short while, until the wind blows, the rain dumps, or the first hay is cut.

Another one:

Stone Wall and Dandelions in Vermont

These photos are available for higher resolution viewing and for sale as prints:

This Dandelions and Stone Wall print is no longer on the site, but you can email me if you’d like to buy a copy.

Dandelions, Hill, Sunset is for sale.

Yellow Apples in Ice

Yellow Apple in Ice and Rime on Grass, Vermont

Last fall was of course very strange weather, and it featured a bumper crop of apples everywhere in Vermont. Of particular photographic interest was the one tree of pale green/yellow apples that hangs over our little pond. It dropped them in greater numbers than I’ve ever seen as the leaves were turning and beyond, as there was new ice on the water around them in the mornings. They were interesting nestled into the shore with the grass and leaves and plants, and then they were also interesting out in the water. Each apple in the new ice acted as a sort of seed for the ice to make a different pattern right around it. This one at dawn with birch reflections is a different warm tone than many of the blue and green images of ice on this pond:

These photos are for sale as prints on Canson Baryta Photographique paper:

Apple in Ice, Rime on Grass

Yellow Apple in New Ice and Birch Reflections 2015, Dawn

Two exposures: Pine Tree by Former Cranberry Bog

not-infrared, from D800e full frame

exposed with infrared-only camera

A few weeks ago I had a chance to make a collection of small matted/bagged prints for a flip-through bin at Frog Hollow in Burlington. They only wanted infrared prints. That’s a little bit of a funny restriction for me, because I usually consider the infrared to be more like an extension of my palette rather than a separate realm. Anyway, I was very glad to have the chance to do it, and I treated it as a little show. Usually in a show I’ll work from a range of prints that I know work, to something very fresh, new to me. I take it as a chance to stretch out and push myself, which is funny, because I can do that any time. For this show, this image was one of the new ones, and I was very happy to see it come out of the printer. I printed it on Canson Rag Photographique, a slightly textured matte paper, just a little smoother than etching paper, but still with a very nice tooth.

After that I was printing some things with a different ink set in the printer, for “luster” paper rather than matte. Then when I had to switch inks again (a process that is a little expensive) for a print sale last week, I decided to print that infrared print bigger on the different luster paper (Canson Baryta Photographique) to see if it would have different qualities. Yes, a very nice print indeed.

In the old days, when I carried around a view camera with a bellows, dark cloth, and boxes of film-holders, I used to also expose infrared film. It was a tricky and squirrely business back then, often failing. So even if I “saw” the image as infrared, I would also expose some regular sheet film as well, just so that I might get something, or in case it worked better on black and white tri-ex or plus-x or T-max or whatever. That’s a habit I carried forward, but the difference now is that the infrared isn’t always the hardest to manifest. At least last year the most difficult camera I used was the Nikon D800e full frame, trickier to get a good image than with the good reliable Olympus or even the infrared. Often on a given subject I might work with three cameras.

I looked through my catalog to see if I had made the exposure with the full frame rig, and I had. And I got a good one! With the infrared reading informing my vision, I rendered this as black and white. It’s very hard to decide which of these I like better. I think for a small image, the infrared might have it, but the full frame version has much more detail, and it will make a much better large print.

In a previous blog post I wrote a bit about how I am letting go of my notion that each situation or scene can only have one definitive print. More and more I’m opening up to letting it be OK to let any particular vision expand a bit into its various facets.

The black and white non-infrared version is no longer on the site, but let me know if you’d like a print.

The infrared version is for sale in various sizes here.

Back to Post Pond — black and white from November 2006

Post Pond Black and White Photo

They say you can never go back. The other week when I traveled to Lyme to drop a print at the Long River Studio gallery there, it was a real flashback, and I wrote about it some here. It was so funny, being there in a different mind, the place the same but different, even walking past my old house across from Clay Brook as I walked along the brook, the outlet to the pond.

It’s also sort of the same going back through the old exposures. The file from 2006 is the same raw data from the camera sensor. The sensor and lens I had then wasn’t as good as what I have now, and my vision and mood is different. But mostly I think my eye is a lot better, both to recognize and develop images. I guess the main point is that even if I’ve got an older file, sometimes it’s like I just went back there with the camera and found something new. May it always be so. May the past, present, and future always be seen freshly.

Revisiting Post Pond – Edge Ice and Cloud Reflections

Post Pond, Lyme New Hampshire

I made a lot of good photos of Post Pond, many more than I’ve got posted on my site (here is the Post Pond collection).

I often wish I had a time machine and could go back. I have better cameras and much better lenses, and my eye is better. Overall, I’m a better photographer than I was even a few years ago. I did manage to wake up early one late summer morning to catch the rising mist, and I did make some good exposures.

This week I went back to Lyme to show some prints at the Long River Gallery (Originally in Lyme NH, now in White River Junction Vermont –edit). They liked my photos, and I’m now a member of the collective.

Most of the rest of the photos I brought to show to the gallery (because they are in Lyme, and of Post Pond) are hanging in their framed version in the currently hanging show at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital. So currently there is a nice big print of this one on Canson Rag Photographique, a very slightly textured paper:
Post Pond Pickerel Weed in Mist

This week’s Photo of the Week is available in a larger view and for sale here.

Ratcheting Epiphany

Trout Brook into Post Pond, Lyme New Hampshire, Black and White

Usually we think of en epiphany as a flash of insight that happens in, well, a flash. But I think really when it happens it’s been building, maybe for a long while. I think it’s true in meditation practice, as we build insight and capacity to experience, those sudden flashes are really just fruition that’s been on the way for a while.

In photography, from the early eighties I tended to visit and revisit certain spots. Some places, just something about them: photographs just crystalized out of the situation almost every time I was there. The light always different, my eye, my mood, the way the I Ching would toss — everything different though the same place. So, I knew that, and I did it, all my life.

On the one hand I knew that I had, over and over, something new, but on the other hand I also had the sense that there might be one definitive exposure of a certain place. Quite often I broke that, for example in the 80s I printed both this

Cavendish Gorge Vermont, Winter

(on the site here)

and the very early sheet film exposure:

Cavendish Gorge Waterfall, Vermont, Black and White

(on the site here)

And on ad infinitum.

It was only last fall hanging a show of photos at the Ledyard Gallery of the Howe Library in Hanover New Hampshire that I realized it was really cool how different images from the same vantage point were completely different. Those were all of Post Pond, in Lyme New Hampshire.

But even then I didn’t get it fully, and so I never worked on this image, because I kind of thought the definitive image of Trout Brook going into Post Pond was this one with frost flowers on the ice:

Frost Flowers on Trout Brook Ice, into Post Pond

(on the site here)

But no. There is no definitive photo, even standing in about the same spot, even at about the same time of day. And that is part of the point.

Trout Brook Into Post Pond, Summer 2006, Infrared

This summer foliage and water image strikes my fancy now, since it looks so cool and etherial. We’ve had a run of hot and muggy weather in Vermont in recent days that has been more of a feet-of-clay feeling. Moving the mind to a cooler place is an exercise that sometimes fights the body’s pull back to the too-solid experience of heavy hot air.

The exposure was so long ago that I can’t remember the specifics of that August evening. (I only know it is evening from the metadata in the file). Maybe it was hot then. And I guess in a way it is some measure of success of this image. While sometimes a photograph is successful because it is so clearly linked to a particular atmosphere and time in the so called real world, I also like it when the photo creates its own world, out of our normal experience of time. The time in the photo is not so clearly linked to any specifics except the foliage and atmosphere. That’s August, yes. August in the year forever.

This seems to be a good spot for making timeless photos, I see in retrospect, now that I don’t live so close to it anymore. Other successful images from more or less the same location:

Winter

Late Fall

The photo can be viewed on the site here.

Iceland Panorama – Volcanic Rocks and Distant Mountain Seascape

I’ve been wrestling with some newer images — hard to decide about those. But then sometimes some older ones snap into perspective: Oh yes. I put this panorama together from the iceland 2007 trip the other day, and it’s one of those, “Why didn’t I do that sooner?”

I also have a lot of “Why haven’t I done that yet?” images. Well, it’s clear why. Not quite enough time for everything…

Moving on after the exhibition spanning the holidays — lots of work to do on the site and the images.

Trout Brook into Post Post Pond, Sunset, Mist

This is an image that has been on the edge of my recognition for several years now. It’s only in working on this upcoming show, with an entire wall of Post Pond changing with seasons, that this called my attention enough to print it. I’m glad I did; it’s a really good print, and I’m surprised I never really got around to it before.

This photo can be viewed larger here and purchased as a print.

New Ice, Rain, Birch Reflections 2013

It’s funny how we resist change, and yet change makes everything possible. The very energy of life is based on change: chemical reactions and biochemical transformations are dynamic.

Just so in photography too. It’s in those in-between moments where the most happens.

And of course everything is an in-between moment. Still, some times are a bit more dynamic feeling than others, and that dynamic energy is good to ride even when it feels like something we would rather not, a change we’d rather not experience.

This was the part of the fall/winter that is a bit of “Oh noo!” here in the north country. The leaves are mostly down, the world is drab, it’s starting to freeze up. On this day it was raining. From my office window it looked horrible out. Still, a bit restless, I decided to grab the Nikon (pretty weatherproof) and head down to the pond to see what the ice looked like. Worth the trip. And so for all of riding our changing experience. From that “oh no!” bubble of resistance to actually checking it out. What is going on? Maybe something interesting.

This print is for sale here.