Category Archives: Abstract

Grass, Rime Ice, Clay Brook 2008

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.

This print is for sale here.

Water Grass, Ice, Rime, Lyme NH 2008


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…

This print is for sale here.

Nut Shell, Ice, Forest Floor, March 2012

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. 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

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,  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.

This print is for sale here.

Winter Window 2012

ice on winter window vermont

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.