Category Archives: Winter

Ice and Moss, Meditation Retreat, Vermont 2009

Moss and Ice, Meditation Retreat, Vermont

I probably talk too much about meditation and photography, or Mind and photography. In a way, of course I would, since the two are hand-and-glove. Still, it’s pretty rare that I come up with, or post or publish, a photo produced during an intensive actual meditation retreat. The mostly steady two hours a day counts as a steady mini-retreat, but it still doesn’t approach the intensity of a real, long, retreat.

This is probably especially true these days, when my meditation technique is more focused on mind than on the space around. My long retreats these days are silent, with long periods with my eyes closed, and no camera with me.

This one though is from one of my old retreats, sitting with open eyes, and walks with a camera during some breaks.

This photo is to me a good representation of some aspect of mind and meditation. Even those super-quiet Zen Enso brush paintings, and other traditional Japanese and Chinese meditation-inspired paintings are also quite full of energy. I’ve said before that I find the kinetic art of Kandinsky, Klee, and many abstract expressionists to be quite representative of states of mind, and the kinds of states of mind that a meditator will spend a lot of time with. While there may be peace to be found in Mind, there is always energy, almost always some movement and dynamic quality. There is movement, and there is stillness. There is something like substance, and there is space around that. There is a figure, and there is the ground. So this seemed to me to be quite in accord with this retreat experience.

Physically this is the kind of thing that shows up after a winter when we’ve had a good snowpack, and it then mostly melts in the late winter. Lately our snowpacks in central Vermont are not reliable they way they used to be. We used to have one brown winter in maybe 10 or more, and now it seems we might get one good snowy one out of 5 mostly brown ones. It’s easier, maybe, but spooky and sad. This year I don’t hope to see very much of this kind of late February/Early March effect, but you never know. Maybe we’ll get some real snow. I’ve got a lot of these images stocked up, and maybe I’ll find more good ones to release.

But first there will be an entirely different project. With luck, the next images will be quite different. Stay tuned!

Wooden Path Clay Brook to Post Pond, New Snow

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This has been and still is a rich vein, these recent posts of just-at-freezing point along Clay Brook in Lyme NH. There’s still lots to mine here, several really good images I made at the time I lived near there. Most of them are winter images. But here in Vermont, it’s full-tilt bird-song springtime. While it’s been an unusual and good discipline for me to linger on one theme for a while, I need a path out of here.

And this, literally, is the path between Clay Brook and Post Pond. For a stretch through some wetland, there are some boards. This day, fresh snow in big crystals covered the boards. I have a handful of cool abstracts. Here is one.

And note, this photo blog was hacked, I think yesterday. It’s back, hopefully it will hold up against attack for a while.

Grass, Rime Ice, Clay Brook 2008

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This is the same year and the same brook in Lyme NH as the last Photo of the week “Water Grass, Ice, Rime, Lyme NH“– actually, this is exposed less than a week later. I wanted to continue the “just at freezing” theme I had going, but instead I wanted to continue along the thread of the poetry last week’s image. This not as kinetic, probably not as interesting a composition, but I like the Chinese painting quality of it. Nothing just-at-freezing here: I bet it was between 5 and 15 degrees fahrenheit to have rime ice like this.

I’m relatively freshly back from a 10 day silent meditation retreat, just over a week of back-in-the-world. Hence the long delay between posts here. I’m pretty on-fire with stuff I want to post here, but I was gone.

Water Grass, Ice, Rime, Lyme NH 2008

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I have a lot of images on deck, and most of them would break out of this just-melting-freezing semi-macro streak I’ve been on. But I’m continuing it here.

I like the combination of energy and serenity in this image. I think it is both a good composition, and a very unusual one. The textures sing to me. It’s both normal and extraordinary. All in all, it’s all the things I like to pull off in my own photographs and to see in others’.

This image pierced me when looking through my catalog late at night while listening to some new Japanese Shakuhachi music I bought the other week. The music and this image went together well. Flipping through images quickly, this one and the music blended and caught me, and I just stopped. Stayed stopped for a bit. Good.

As for the exposure, my old house in Lyme New Hampshire bordered on Clay Brook, which flows out of Post Pond. I have a lot of images of Post Pond up here, and there are probably some Clay Brook images scattered around. I used to walk there a lot, with camera, and it was a very fertile place to make images. There should be a lot more Clay Brook images, and I will do it.

I think I’m going to have to create a new category on the site for this streak, this mini-genre I’ve been showing on this blog recently. We’ll see what next week will bring to the Photo of the Week…

Nut Shell, Ice, Forest Floor, March 2012

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Sometimes the photo of the week is a struggle, because there are too many choices. I want to post everything. This week is especially hard. I’m fresh back from a trip to Boston, where I got to spend a day at the Museum of Fine Arts. Out of so much visual inspiration there, I was particularly struck by a little show in a quiet hallway of some modern Japanese print makers. Such a beautiful sense of composition, tension, serenity, luminosity, form, texture, and emptiness! I was particularly taken with Toko Shinoda, but there were others: Kōshirō Onchi and Yozo Hamaguchi. It made me long to spend more time with pure design, to be able to create form and texture out of empty space. But for now I spend creative time with a camera and computer.

When I got back to Vermont, this art-inspired mental explosion was compounded. My longing to participate in delicious resonant abstract composition was quickly satisfied. And beyond satisfied. I’ve spent a few sessions photographing melting ice on the forest floor, yesterday until I was quite exhausted from all the visualizing, bending, and squatting with my camera. I’ve always been drawn to this as a fertile ground of imagery. I spent a particularly long day in March of ’06 (examples here and here). This week is a pretty big session of it. As I go through the hundreds of images I’m exposing and see what works and what fails, I’m going back out to the woods to find more melting ice. This one is fresh from yesterday’s session.

I don’t know if this image will make it to print. I’ll see how much I like it as time passes. The issue is that it will need a lot of hand work, repairing blown-out specular highlights. On the one hand the luminosity and depth of the image wouldn’t have been possible without sunlight on the ice. On the other hand, the texture creates highlights that no digital camera sensor I’ve ever owned can handle. To print this, at least at a large size, I would have to repair thousands and thousands of single-pixel spots that show up as ugly squares. Maybe there’s a trick to deal with this. I hope so.

Snowmobile Track Macro Panorama, Cavendish Gorge VT 2012

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Well, it seems this WordPress theme is rather limited in maximum image-width. This is a case where I’d love to be able to splash this image across a large monitor or your wall as a large print. This is too small. So I’m putting it up in the regular pages, perhaps a bit prematurely, here.

This is quite fresh, this last Sunday. Somewhat typically, I was in a magical place of great scope, but I saw something two inches from my toes. I like both the overall composition and the fine detail and texture.

There was some question in my mind whether Cavendish Gorge would even still be there after Hurricane Irene last fall. It was in a part of Vermont that got really clobbered. The Black river, which you can see in the gorge here and here and here, was huge and ferocious in that storm. I think the dam above this gorge diverts a lot of the water, so that it ends up at a hydro dam at the bottom end of it. I guess that diversion helped preserve the gorge a lot. These rocks are all still in the gorge, but there are several trees at some choke points in the rocks.
Here’s a crop, below. It’s the same file, basically, but cropped so wordpress doesn’t squish it to fit in the space.

Beech Leaf in Snow, 2012

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Beech Leaf in Snow

It’s been a funny winter here in Vermont. Frost came late, bitter cold came not at all, more rain and ice than snow, and now it seems we’re already turning the corner toward mud season.

Through it all there has been a skim of snow. One thing that has been catching my eye is the way the late-falling and blowing leaves settle on the crust and then melt down into it. Pretty cool.

I haven’t printed this yet, and it doesn’t work as well full-screen on the monitor (but it is cool way huge). I’ve had it as the background for the home screen on the ipad for some time now, and I just love it there. Hopefully it will come through well at this size and context too.

Winter Window 2012

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This is new this week. I glossed over it when reviewing images, but it had enough of a rating to make it onto the for-review files on the ipad. Then it looked so good on the ipad that I decided to try it as a lock-screen image. It looks so good as the lock screen, I had to come here and put it up as photo of the week.

It got me thinking more about photos as something we see differently with different modern viewing methods. It’s a funny thing. While as a fine-photographer I have to take the print, or the possibility of a print, as the basic ground of what makes a “real photograph,” I also have to consider the glowing computer monitor, which is really quite a different thing. And for some reason a smaller hand-held glowing screen is yet another thing altogether. I don’t completely understand why.

I’ve been looking at a number of images as possible iPad-keepers, and it’s interesting. There are certain qualities that make them work for these purposes, lock screen and home screen being quite different. They also need to work when suddenly cropped by an orientation shift. Very interesting.

I’m working on programming an iPad app to present my photos, and this gets me thinking I’ll also need to create an app with images that make good home screen and lock screens for ipads and iphones, and make the app with possibility to get them to the camera roll or photo collection, so they could be used this way by any user of the app. Something interesting to think about, on the back burner.

Stream and Snow, 2009

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We had a bit of snow last week, and I was out with my camera with my iPod on, making exposures in the fresh morning. After some uncannily good photographing-in-the-snow music, Bill Frisell, shuffle play on the ipod gave me a talk by Jack Kornfield. That, too was just right. He was talking about the way things are, in both mind and the world: Things arise, and then they go away. There is space, and then there is something happening in it or appearing in it, and then there is just space again.

When I was young, a real influence on my work, among many others, was Wassily Kandinsky. In some ways it might be hard to see any relationship in this image, and it’s something that only clicked for me when looking at his paintings in the Guggenheim in about 2005: his paintings are like mind. There is space, gap, peace, and then there is stuff happening within that — maybe pretty wild. Probably pretty wild and full of energy at times. There is always some silence around any noise. I thought, “Those paintings are like meditating!” I don’t know if Kandinsky ever meditated as such, but it seems to me he knew about mind and energy.

Way back, just starting with photography, I really wanted my photos to be infused with the energy of the world, and there was the challenge to make that happen. I wanted the energy, but I didn’t understand about the dance between energy and space. I’ve always understood that there was some mysterious resonance between the way things appear, the way we feel, and that a two dimensional surface could be an interface to that resonance. That was the magic I wanted to tap into, to work that interface.

Now I think of it more as Chogyam Trungpa might describe it: Ordinary Magic. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And deeply magical. Our minds work this way, and the world works this way, and we are all mixed up together in it. It just goes along, the most ordinary thing, and the most profound thing.

This photo was not made in the new snow last week, but my experience out in it, and the audio track, made me think of this image to post. The funny thing was that I was late for something when I stopped to expose this image a few years ago, my life moving wildly along the road, stopping for a stolen moment to trip the shutter. The other morning, taking time and enjoying some peace, I don’t think I got any photos with quite this quality. It’s funny, we can only be in the world as it presents itself, appreciate it as we can. Like the stream above, like the energy in a Kandinsky painting, like our minds and life, things arise, and then they change just like our thoughts and moods. There is stuff happening, and there is also a context for that, a bigger frame.

It’s really too bad to post this image so small. There’s all kinds of nice texture in the snow that gets lost, and the patterns of the shadows seem to get lost in jpeg compression artifacts, even though this is saved at a decent quality. Since I can’t post the whole image at a decent size, here is a detail, below:

Gorge, Icicles, Hole in Rock, Cavendish VT 1980

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Gorge, Icicles, Hole in Rock, Cavendish - by John Lehet

It’s been a long time between new images here, and that’s because I’ve been sticking to my resolution to keep doing scans of old sheet film. Since I completely spot and go through each scan pixel by pixel to have a good, printable file ready, it takes a dauntingly long time. Maybe I’ll get back in the groove now. I guess I may be spending more time in my office.

In spite of the time it took, it was really an amazing experience going through the scan of this 30 year old film. 30 years! How have I even been alive for that long, yet alone doing photography? There is something quite magical about film grain, something really only an old-time photographer would ever spend much time with these days. This image, scanned at high resolution, is full of compositions within compositions when the full scan is viewed at a full zoom level. So in spite of all the time, I enjoyed revisiting this image I used to print in the darkroom back in the silver days.

This is from the same spot as the last post, also in Cavendish, Vermont.