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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m flattered that Tupelo Press chose this image for the cover for this book of beautiful poems.

Not only that, but there are other books in the winter spring catalog using my photos too.

As a photographer, I usually don’t mess with the orientation of images, and I only crop if it really helps. But I also like to support creative designers. In this case I’m glad the designer took liberties with the orientation of the image. My original is here. He rotated my horizontal by 90 degrees clockwise and fit the text into the curve. Success!

And then they used it again for the catalog cover. Upside down this time. But you know, it’s better that way, maybe. The catalog cover is here:

I think this is a Blue Tailed Damselfly, Ischnura elegans. If anyone knows better, feel free to let me know.

This weeks post is a meditation on image size, among other things. I’m finding the iPad to be really helpful in giving a fresh view of images, and I think especially for images that should not be seen at a large size.

Photography is funny; on the one hand we’ve got a two dimensional image that need to live and die by what happens in that flat space. On the other hand, the image is tied to something we might see in the so called real world. And it does seem often that an image won’t work if represented larger than real life — but then again it can, and sometimes it’s better for it. But I’m finding that in looking through photos in Lightroom on the big and oh so beautiful monitor, that some look worse at that size and in that space than they do on the iPad. Of course I can give a long rant about trying to use the iPad for photography, when images are inconveniently de-coupled from the concept of files. It’s impossible to find the damn image to actually work with it or print it in full resolution or anything. What a pain!

Some of my images, for instance One Cow, Thirteen Hay Bales; Iceland, really are best at a huge size. That image is all about space, and it helps to really throw some real space into the mix. It should be a big print, about 40″ long. Postcards of Robert Motherwell paintings are a tragic misrepresentation. On the other hand, this image, also sort of about space, seems better when more intimate.
(speaking of space, it turns out that this image doesn’t work as well for me in a tighter frame. There’s something about the insect’s relationship to the space around it that is significant.

I’ll include this in my iPad images collection. If anyone wants an iPad resolution version of an image for a lock screen before I get it together to make an app, please email me.

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.