Category Archives: summer

Moving Slowly with Character Lenses

Dune Fence Sunset with bicycle

This summer I’ve been testing and using some vintage manual focus and manual aperture lenses. They make some good lenses now, for sure, but they also used to make good ones in the past. Also, one modern lens I have now is a modern lens, with modern coatings and all, but it’s from Voigtlander’s “Vintage Series.” It’s extremely sharp and brilliant over most of the frame at least, but there’s just something special about it.

I had that Voigtlander lens on my camera as I was walking slowly along the beach at sunset in about the third or fourth day of having pneumonia, and I sure was moving slowly. I had walked longer and been out longer than maybe I should have. So walking slowly, I saw this, and I had just the right lens on my camera for the situation.

Roadside Chicory, Car, Vermont

I’ve been quite busy using and testing some of these vintage and character lenses in recent weeks, now fully recovered from that pneumonia. Working hard at photography.

So on this day I had to drive to take a show of photographs down in Lyme, New Hampshire, where they were hanging in Stella’s Restaurant as part of an annex show for Long River Studio Gallery. I had my cameras with my, and Lyme was a place I used to photograph a lot, so I left early, driving slowly, with some extra time. It turned out I didn’t make it to Lyme to photograph before my schedule time for the show de-hanging. I stopped along the road in Vermont in my own town. I passed this patch of blue chicory flowers along the roadside and I stopped there to work with it. I tried a few lenses, starting out with a modern Zeiss, but then I put on an old 80s lens, which was the lens that the late Jane Bown favored for her portraits. It’s pretty good, but a little soft wide open, and it has great bokeh. Often, to get these old lenses I’ll go through a series of apertures, starting with wide open. This allows me to get to know the lens. For this image, I was right by the road, and I had just reset the aperture to wide-open, hence the shallow depth of field and crazy bokeh balls. Standing there with the lens set like that, I heard a car approaching, thought, “what the heck,” and raised the camera, quickly (manually) focusing on the foreground flower. As the car approached I tripped the shutter. It worked.

It’s funny, both of these lenses would certainly be rejected by anyone purely looking at lens tests, looking for optical perfection by modern standards. And I myself would have been that one rejecting them about a year or less ago. But something about this spring and summer is loosening up, a bit of wildness is creeping in, and here we are.

These photos can be viewed at higher resolution and purchased as prints:

Beach Fence at Sunset with Bike

Roadside Chicory with Car, Vermont

Dandelions 2016

Dandelions Sunset Hartland Vermont

A couple of years ago I made this successful (for me — I can’t remember offhand if I’ve sold any prints of this) exposure and then very good print of a hillside with dandelions, below:

2014 dandelions vermont barn

I’ve found dandelions to be a compelling subject since I lugged a 4 x 5 view camera around (and I have a distinct memory of stopping by a meadow and setting up my tripod and big camera to photograph them after a very significant event — meeting Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche — in 1982).

Still, it’s a bit hard. They are luminous; they glow, they are full of detail; and they whisper poignantly of impermanence. Even if you’ve got a good composition, you’ve got to pull off the photograph. I was a bit surprised and heartened by that good print from 2014.

Since then I’ve got a crazy high resolution sensor with good dynamic range on my main camera, and I’ve got some brilliant lenses. Zeiss and Voigtlander — some of the most brilliant and full of character glass I’ve ever been blessed to use. Not only that, but I live near some good dandelion hayfields here in the hills of Vermont. This year I’ve gone a bit crazy working with these plants. Some think they are weeds, but I think they are a prize beyond price, but only for that very short while, until the wind blows, the rain dumps, or the first hay is cut.

Another one:

Stone Wall and Dandelions in Vermont

These photos are available for higher resolution viewing and for sale as prints:

This Dandelions and Stone Wall print is no longer on the site, but you can email me if you’d like to buy a copy.

Dandelions, Hill, Sunset is for sale.

Dune Fence and Shadows, Beach Grooming

Dune Fence and Beach Grooming, Jersey Shore

I was staying near the beach, so I had the chance to go out while the shadows were long and the light was soft. I’ve been meaning to publish this one for a while, and I finally got the spur to work on it.

Photographers out there may have heard that Google is giving away their Nik collection of software for free. I’ve been using Nik Silver Effex for some time. If you’re careful not to get too carried away with its power, it offers some nice additions to a straight conversion to black and white, some ways to get the tones just right. Silver Effex has been crashing on me a lot lately anyway. I was working on making an output file for a print that sold the other week, and it must have crashed 30 times or more, and it was a large file to reopen each time. Ugh.

So I took this news as an opportunity to move on. A new one I’m trying, called Tonality CK, does not crash. So I’ve been taking it out for some trips around the tone poems. This is one.

This photo is for sale on Canson Rag Photographiqe paper

Two exposures: Pine Tree by Former Cranberry Bog

Pine Tree by Former Cranberry Bog

not-infrared, from D800e full frame

Pine Tree by Former Cranberry Bog

exposed with infrared-only camera

A few weeks ago I had a chance to make a collection of small matted/bagged prints for a flip-through bin at Frog Hollow in Burlington. They only wanted infrared prints. That’s a little bit of a funny restriction for me, because I usually consider the infrared to be more like an extension of my palette rather than a separate realm. Anyway, I was very glad to have the chance to do it, and I treated it as a little show. Usually in a show I’ll work from a range of prints that I know work, to something very fresh, new to me. I take it as a chance to stretch out and push myself, which is funny, because I can do that any time. For this show, this image was one of the new ones, and I was very happy to see it come out of the printer. I printed it on Canson Rag Photographique, a slightly textured matte paper, just a little smoother than etching paper, but still with a very nice tooth.

After that I was printing some things with a different ink set in the printer, for “luster” paper rather than matte. Then when I had to switch inks again (a process that is a little expensive) for a print sale last week, I decided to print that infrared print bigger on the different luster paper (Canson Baryta Photographique) to see if it would have different qualities. Yes, a very nice print indeed.

In the old days, when I carried around a view camera with a bellows, dark cloth, and boxes of film-holders, I used to also expose infrared film. It was a tricky and squirrely business back then, often failing. So even if I “saw” the image as infrared, I would also expose some regular sheet film as well, just so that I might get something, or in case it worked better on black and white tri-ex or plus-x or T-max or whatever. That’s a habit I carried forward, but the difference now is that the infrared isn’t always the hardest to manifest. At least last year the most difficult camera I used was the Nikon D800e full frame, trickier to get a good image than with the good reliable Olympus or even the infrared. Often on a given subject I might work with three cameras.

I looked through my catalog to see if I had made the exposure with the full frame rig, and I had. And I got a good one! With the infrared reading informing my vision, I rendered this as black and white. It’s very hard to decide which of these I like better. I think for a small image, the infrared might have it, but the full frame version has much more detail, and it will make a much better large print.

In a previous blog post I wrote a bit about how I am letting go of my notion that each situation or scene can only have one definitive print. More and more I’m opening up to letting it be OK to let any particular vision expand a bit into its various facets.

The black and white non-infrared version is no longer on the site, but let me know if you’d like a print.

The infrared version is for sale in various sizes here.

Bee on Globe Thistle, Mondarda, Vermont

The Bee Balm (monarda) has rather run away this summer, but I couldn’t bear to try to tame it. I’m finding that the brilliant red is providing a handy backdrop for all kinds of subjects. I think I am going to try a whole series about this bee balm running wild. I just found out that I will be exhibiting at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon NH this October through December, and I think the bee balm series might be something to try printing for it.

This image proves to me some things I already know so well: you can make a photograph in natural light once. After that any attempt to improve or recreate it are rather iffy. It seems like it should be more than possible to refine a vision, but it’s tricky.

This particular image was one of the first of about 200 images I made of this subject. Over a few day period, the bees were reliably working this globe thistle, and the red monarda backdrop wasn’t going anywhere. I tried some different lenses, tried optimizing the aperture for the blur of the background, even making some of those 40 Megapixel monsters that my micro four thirds camera can do with its sensor-shift technology (and those are good because the colors are often better and truer). Still, I think this might be among the best of the batch. Subject to revision. We’ll see.

This image is for sale and can be viewed in higher resolution on its page.

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.

Dandelions and Stone Wall, Hartland VT 2015

dandelions and stone wall

I may have mentioned in the past that the original intent of this blog was to post brand new work. As I’ve also often mentioned, I think: I’m often too chicken, or too smart, to do that. It seems like a really good idea to let an image settle with time, to become a thing itself and detach itself from the remembered experience of being in the situation.

On the other hand, it is good to be excited about new work, and I’m doing a bunch of new work that I find exciting these days, of course most of it not posted yet.

I’ve often attempted to get the silhouette of a stone wall with the woods or meadow as a sort of figure/ground subject switch. I think this is a successful attempt at this, with dandelions to continue from last week.

This photograph can be viewed in higher resolution and purchased 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.