Category Archives: black and white

Light Through Leaves (x3)

Apple Orchard and Maple

I was walking past this little orchard one day, my wife walking fast and getting ahead of me on account of my photography. “Wait! Just one more!” This panorama. Worth exposing…

Oak Tree and Vermont Hills

Another recent one, above. I went out that morning because there was a heavy frost/light snow with fall leaves still up. I was looking for a certain kind of image, with the potential everywhere I looked — but I don’t think I managed to realize it in a good composition. This was near a little stream, not particularly the drama I was looking for in the open spaces. The field in the background is indeed covered with frost, and these leaves were indeed red with light shining through. Somehow this black and white version is the best photo though. Also the images I exposed just after this were also good, along the stream. You just never know. You look for one thing, but you find another.

Stone Wall, Light through trees, Maine

And this one above, also of light coming through trees, I’ve been meaning to put up on the site for a few months now, since exposing it last spring. I was driving past this wall and just glimpsed the wall and the light coming through the trees, late light, and I turned around and circled back to it.

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.

Before Church, Paris

This is a scan from medium format film, breaking any recent continuity this blog may have had.

This image was awakened from the vault by my daughter’s current trip to Paris. I loaned her a real camera and showed her how to change the aperture and exposure compensation etc, so I’m excited to vicariously imagine seeing Paris again.

This was in the mid 90s, this guy, getting his pants adjusted by his mom, is now hopefully a grown man. I don’t know if this wall or anything looks remotely similar anymore, of course.

That trip in Paris I carried a heavy bag with a Pentax 6×7 medium format camera, light meter, monopod, and a couple of lenses. Crazy.

I may have a handful of photos of the week this week — we’ll see. This one took a lot of time because of all the film spotting, taking up far more bandwidth than I had planned. I’ve got to get busy, because I’m hanging a show in early October at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Off to work!

This photo is for sale and can be viewed larger (and in retina) here.

Black and White Sheep on Curved Road, Iceland, 2007

This follow’s last weeks post with a curve. Somehow this image bumped a long line of work that is jostling to see the light of day.

I had looked at this in my catalog carefully in the past, but as a color image, and I abandoned any effort to bring it to light. This morning, bumping both other photographic efforts and client web work I need to do, this grabbed me and ran with me all the way to photo of the week this afternoon.

This image can be viewed at higher resolution, and it is now for sale as a print.

Curves on Fjord Edge, Iceland

I’ve been putting together a lot of panoramas from files lately and finding a lot of gems I hardly knew I had.

I had tried putting this one together in the past, but somehow I didn’t have the chops to pull it off, or I couldn’t get my mind to visualize it properly. I thought it didn’t work. This time I think it really works!

This image is for sale and can be viewed in higher resolution here.

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.

Dandilions on Hill, Hartland VT 2014

In some places, people apply broadleaf herbicides, and the result is a uniform lawn, perfect in its way. But, environmental considerations aside, I think it’s a poorer world for that. The conformed, uniform lawn may be pretty in its way, but as I say, it’s less rich.

Sometimes as a gardener, I don’t always appreciate the weeds. But each and every weed is in its way a beautiful plant, or at least worthy of some respect. It’s an energetic presence clinging to life quite tenaciously. And if we catch it before it goes to seed, it can go on the compost — future riches for the soil.

Sometimes as a man who works with his mind, who works on his mind, I don’t always appreciate the mind-weeds. Or all the thoughts, about to go to seed in the wind like dandelions. They land in every corner and create more mind-weeds. But, catch them early, right onto the compost pile, and it’s a richer mind, full of more energy and possibility. Each mind-weed is a stout specimen in its own right, with its own beauty and strength and a part of the whole landscape. We can accept the whole, and it’s a beautiful thing.

No, we don’t just mow them down or poison them. We respect them and work with them. They flower and go to seed; the seeds blow away, and there are so many places they can land.

This photo can be viewed larger here.

Uncut Hayfield, Norwich VT, July 2014

Uncut hayfield Norwich Vermont

I’ve been very busy printing some difficult prints, so of course, like a squeezed balloon, the pressure bulges out somewhere else. That seems to be the way I work; I get a lot of energy for something besides where the real pressure is. In this case, I took my scanner apart and cleaned the inner glass, which had been unusably crudded up with film from the outgassing plastic. I hadn’t really been able to scan any of my old sheet film in years. So yesterday I went down a rabbit hole, scanning all kinds of sheet film from the early 80s, when I was young and skinny and Serious About Photography. Yesterday, I re-fell in love with black and white film, again. The subtle silvery tones and haze of light graininess: Oh! I swam in the silvery tones as each scan completed (they take a long time, at high resolution with this big film). It was rather like darkroom developing, turning on the light after the film comes out of the fixer to look.

I used to print softer and more subtly than the Pop! that is more compelling and in easy reach with modern lenses and sensors. I remembered that in a good way.

Yesterday for a few hours I was 22, and the world was made of silver crystals and light. “I’m going to be a photographer.”

Damn, all these years later, I AM a photographer. Most of my life I’ve lived this vision, and it’s made me richer in spirit, if poorer in purse.

So anyway, I will be posting some of those (and other!) scans someday, but in the meantime, I would also have been pleased to get the image above, back in the film days. It’s kind of a bridge, a subtle silver smoothness from the old days, married to a modern snappiness of tone that I would have been pleased to pull off in those old days too.

This print is available for sale here.

Four Hay Bales Panorama, Canaan, NH, June, 2007

As it seems to go sometimes, I was looking for another photo to post when I came across this. I don’t know why it was never posted or published before.

This was in the time when I was driving a lot, and a lot of that was between Lyme NH and Canaan NH. Both had great opportunities for Hay Bale Landscapes. Later in the summer I got inspired to make hay bale landscapes as a primary subject in a trip to Iceland, but at this point it was just the way things were sometimes. Sometimes the clouds and landscape came together, and it was while there were hay bales.

This uses the very subtle color shift available in an infrared image to tone the basically black and white print.

This print is available for sale here.

Haying, South Woodstock, 2014

Last summer I had a bit of time on my hands while in South Woodstock Vermont, and they were haying across the road from where I was. The sky was a mix of space, summer cumulus clouds, and some cirrus — of course in rapid flux. I made a fair number of exposures, but so far this is the only one I’ve come to publish, I think because of the combination of clouds and also the object in the foreground. It’s mundane, no doubt a bit of farm flotsam, but the way it looks like a bed-frame in that space causes a bit of a nice extra jolt. Since this was put together as a panorama from vertical exposures, it has nice high resolution.

I have some new winter work to publish, but oh, right now, for a sky with summer clouds and the smell of fresh cut hay. Right now we’ve got real cold and wind, like in the old days, and it’s too cold, even for me, to be out with a camera. Time in photography can be spent combing past exposures and photographing the ice on the inside of the windows in the morning.

This photo is for sale and can be viewed a bit larger at this link.