Category Archives: hay bales

3 Abandoned Hay Bales, Ascutney Mountain and Low Clouds

3 round hay bales, ascutney mountain, vermont, infrared

It’s been too long since I’ve gotten to work with new exposures and push my work into the new direction. I’ve been so busy hanging shows, and some of that is printing established work. And so I was excited to launch into one of the newer files. I had some writing I’d been thinking of to accompany it.

Then this one caught my eye. I don’t know why it happens that something grabs me like this. Partly I think it is because as my skill increases, I know how I can pull something off, interpret it so it sings. When I made this exposure in 2015, I didn’t really see how this would work. Today it was pretty easy. Maybe I was grabbed by it because this morning was foggy with low clouds like this. Maybe tomorrow I couldn’t do it. It is all a mystery.

When I made the exposure above, I also exposed this one, below, and that was something I “saw” pretty quickly as a silvery and subtle and textured work and published it on the site years ago. Now it has an infrared sister.
Single Round Hay Bale Mount Ascutney, Clouds, Vermont, Black and White

One funny story about making these exposures: I pulled over in my little ancient VW Golf. One of the cameras I used was kind of big, a Nikon D800, and the other one was my Micro Four Thirds Infrared camera. So a guy pulls up in a big truck, sets up a big tripod (I haven’t used a tripod that big since I had a bellows camera on top of it), and sets up a big DSLR. I thought the D800 was too big, and I don’t know how a DSLR could get so much bigger. Maybe a battery grip added onto some monster camera? I think it was a Can-Nikon offering and not a medium format camera. Anyway, I felt like little old me with my little plunky gear, and I thought probably the scene was too common if someone else was set up there, and set up so grandly too. I figured I wouldn’t do anything with the exposures. It was mid fall, already late in the foliage season, and the colors were subtle and maybe interesting. I think it was the fact someone else was making photographs there that pushed me to interpret it as I did, all silvery textures instead of some punchy colors. At this point I’d love to see if he got anything good in that spot.

These photos are printed on Epson Cold Press Natural and are available for sale here:
Three Hay Bales
Single Hay Bale

Three Bales in a Little Hayfield, Clouds, Canaan NH

Here in deep winter, summer, sunlight, and cumulus clouds seem to hold appeal to me right now.

This was from Canaan New Hampshire, where I used to drive a lot. It’s a funny town, maybe a bit ramshackle around the edges and right though the middle, but also very beautiful. My wife lived there then, and the house she rented was probably in the most beautiful spot I ever had the luck to spend a lot of time. And that’s saying something, as I’ve been very very fortunate in that regard in my adult life.

In browsing through my not-yet-published collection in lightroom — photos that have made some kind of progress past raw camera data, but which nobody particularly has seen — this struck me. Why isn’t this one online? Here it is.

Besides all the rest of stuff I want to work on, I have a lot of good work with hay bales that wants to see the light of day, and then some of the transition of ice-to-spring camera work from the last couple of years I think will form something of a body of work.

Available for sale and to view at higher resolution 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.

7 Hay Bales, Canaan NH, 2006


I haven’t done this yet, in this photo-blog, but here’s a variation on the exposures from the last post. The last was done with the infrared camera; this is the regular-light camera, with the image as a black and white. In rendering this panorama I tried to bring to bear the sensibilities of a good darkroom silver print — good rich blacks but lots of silvery grays in between. Though usually I like infrared best for the hay bale images, I like this one a lot. Though of course it’s far from many aspects of ukiyo-e aesthetics, there is something very floating-world about it to me, an energy-of-the-land.

This print is for sale here.

Five Hay Bales, Fog and Hills Canaan NH 2006

It’s high summer, good haying weather — and the mornings are foggy here in Northern New England. Though some of the nights this summer have been hotter than usual, this week we’ve got cool nights — so good fog.

This photo is from a past summer morning; could be now but it’s not.

I don’t think I’ve posted an infrared photo here for a while, and I haven’t been exposing quite so many recently. Funny. Well, here’s one.

This print is for sale here.