Category Archives: Winter

Christmas Lights in Botanic Garden, Denver

Christmas Lights Through Branches in Botanic Garden, Denver

A few days before Christmas, I had the good/bad luck to be in the Denver Botanic Garden at night. There was quite a crowd, and quite a few manifestations of themed lighted areas. The good luck was that it was fun with family, and I made a few good photographs. The bad luck was that I had a really nice Zeiss lens pickpocketed out of a side pouch of my camera bag in the jostling crowd. A rather devastating loss, but we go on.

I kept one lens on the camera all evening and it did beautifully. This lens, the Zeiss Loxia 50, would not have been my first choice for this evening, but it was probably the best lens I had with me for photographing the lights in the dark park. And it turned out to be perfect. I’m not sure if anything would have done better. I might have brought one of my old vintage lenses I like for their bokeh, their out of focus characteristic. I did have one beautiful old lens like that, but it was maybe to long to hand hold in the dark. I didn’t even try it. The Loxia 50 stopped down even a little would make those round balls of light have a funny pointy shape, so wide-open, all evening. It gave me a new appreciation of one of my already favorite lenses, and of night photography, which I don’t do very often. Fun!

This photo is available for sale as a print here.

Rose Hips in Snow and Fog

Rose Hips in Snow and Fog

A new-to-me vintage lens I recently acquired is over-the-top smooth and creamy in the background, while rendering the focus super sharp anywhere in the frame. It’s about 30 years old, I guess, and as good as any lens I would ever want to buy new, except that it’s not so good pointed toward the sun. While my modern Zeiss lenses have some aggressive sharpness and unbelievable coatings, there is something about this old lens that is so pleasing I can hardly contain myself. What a joy.

I bought this lens on the internet while I was traveling for my father’s funeral. In that dark time, an online vendor of used lenses was having a big sale, and I took that bait to good result. A relatively expensive lens, I might not have bought it at another time. What a weird juxtaposition.

Since I’ve had the lens, since my father’s funeral and the US election, I’ve been stumbling through the mystery of grief, which has its own rhythms and times and demands. It works without our consent or conscious knowledge — and yet it demands our cooperation in its mystery. It clobbers us, but also has some healing power. If we give it its due, maybe it gives us some insight or blessing in return. I’ve always been intrigued that an ever-recurring theme in world storytelling, mythology, religious texts, is a set of variations on the theme of the hero needing to journey underground in a dark place. Maybe my favorite is C.S. Lewis’ _The Silver Chair_, a children’s book rich in wisdom. We are compelled to go to the dark place, and there we have to keep our wits about us. We have to follow instructions (in my case my meditation and dzogchen practice). Then we gain something. It’s weird.

So this image, with this lens, is to me like the grief, somewhat, though of course I wouldn’t want to have that be your interpretation! This is of course more beautiful than the experience of grief, but that is one point; within grief there are glimpses of the beautiful world. Some murky mystery, luminous; and there is some brightness glowing. There are jewels of insight, wisdom, and growth to be found in grief, if we don’t succumb to it altogether. It has been weird for me this time, a foggy quality, something of this smooth semi-differentiated quality, not strongly articulated, a few aspects strongly etched.

I have mentioned many times in this blog my love of ukiyo-e (“floating world”); the dreamy woodcuts (and sometimes paintings) of Hokusai, Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hoitsu, Kawase, and others. I love that aesthetic in the past, and by masters who bring the tradition forward into the present, like Matt Brown. This is one of my images that feels inspired by ukiyo-e.

Luckily, I love what I do as a photographer and I don’t pine too much to time travel to ancient Japan. I love that sometimes photography can do what other mediums can’t. Both realistic rendering, and the way a good lens can draw and paint with light have their own aesthetic virtues, which sometimes can soar. I can’t do ukiyo-e woodblocks, but I can be inspired by them. I can make prints I am very happy with.

I print this image on fine textured watercolor or etching paper, or it also works well on the smooth baryta surface of my other favorite paper by Canson. If you order a print and have a paper preference, let me know.

Available for sale here…

New Ice and Rain, 2013 II

new ice and rain, vermont

About this time of year, about this kind of weather. Yes, late November has its own beauty. That year, 2013, there was more ice on our pond though. This year, 2016, of course has been record warmth, and that seems to be continuing.

This image is funny, because its big sister has been out in the world catching eyes for some years now.
new ice and rain, vermont
It has sold prints, gotten into juried exhibitions; it is even collected by a museum. But somehow today’s image, made at the same time, never caught my eye until now. In part this appreciation has come about with a shift to the full frame digital camera a year ago, and the use of premium vintage lenses with nice bokeh over the last six months. Which is to say that I have a greater appreciation for areas of an image that are not in focus, not covered by the depth of field. I like images with shallower depth of field a lot more than I used to, and in fact I’ve been making images with razor thin depth of field with beautiful bokeh as a lot of my work these days.

I guess I thought the not-quite-sharp foreground and background were more of a problem with this image than the other one. Glad I didn’t delete the file. We don’t always appreciate the best until we evolve, sometimes. Not positive, only time will tell, but I think it’s as good as its companion, in a different way.

This image is available as a print here:

http://www.lehet.com/photo/details/new_ice_and_rain_gsc_1418.html

Snowy Roof Through Frozen Window, Vermont

Snowy Roof Through Frozen Window Vermont

This winter we’ve had far fewer cold mornings than usual; each month out of the last several in Vermont has broken all records as the warmest ever recorded. Some of these recent months have broken the record by more than a few degrees. Still, we’ve had a few of these mornings when I open the shades, and I don’t know what I will find. The light and patterns of ice on the glass aren’t always the same. So quite often before I get to work for the day I go all around the windows with my camera. I have a lot of these, but this one struck me in the richness of texture and the way the overall composition worked in its abstraction. I hope to do a series of these sometime soon. Most are quite different from this one.

This photo is available as a print here.

A bit of ice from the backlog

Rose Hips after Ice Storm

Last week was pretty busy with photography. I ended up hanging a little restaurant show in Lyme, where I also took some trips to take some framed works to the Long River Studio gallery. The show, at Stella’s restaurant is a “gallery extension” show and came up at the last minute. I was busy cutting new mats and reframing pieces and even doing some printing. So this is a long way of getting to this top photo above. One of the images I re-printed last week was an older exposure of Rose Hips in Snow, and I’m very happy with the re-visioning of that image. I printed it on Canson Aquarella watercolor paper, and the texture of the paper is very nice in the softer areas of the print. That got me excited to bring to light some of the other rose hip images I’ve exposed, mostly in 2014, a year when the swamp roses had a lot of nice hips and also when we had some good ice storms and heavy rime-ice frosts on them. I hope to bring out several more of those rose hip images.

To make up for no image last week, I’m also bringing out a new-older new-ice photo, also from 2014 exposure. I liked the new-ice images from this year that I posted last time a lot, so I decided to bring forth another:
New Ice and Maple Tree Reflection

These photos are for sale as prints:

Rose Hips After Ice Storm

New Ice and Maple Tree Reflection

New Ice and Birch Reflections, Hartland VT 2015

New Ice and Birch Reflections, Hartland VT

John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (Though it turns out there are other attributions. Perhaps others said that before John Lennon). This manifests in so many ways for all of us. We can’t, don’t pay attention to everything. We try to go in some direction, but the set of blessings and curses of our choices are never quite what we bargained for.

I’ve been blessed with small bodies of water in the last 15 years. Really odd how that happened. The last place I bought, a fixer-upper that was an 1850’s farm-hand’s house had a few things going for it. One was that I could afford it, and the other was that it was near Post Pond, which was a rich spot to blossom into this stage of my being as a photographer. I knew that Post Pond was nice. I had no idea how much time I would spend there and what an impact it would have on my vision.

Then when we decided to buy this house in Vermont, it had a little pond in the backyard. Deep enough to swim in. “Maybe we could ice skate on it.” OK, that’s a nice touch. The house is has nice character and we can afford it. But it turns out that the pond has been one of my favorite things about this place. In deep winter it’s just white, and maybe not so interesting to photograph so much. In the summer, fall, and early winter it’s an ever-changing rich opportunity to photograph. I would never want to be away from a little pond or big pond or a lake as long as I have a camera to my name.

The pond is ringed with birch trees for about half the perimeter, and they are lovely in many respects. These two images have different days of new ice, and the birch trees reflected on it. In the winter the sunrise is late enough, and of course I’m close, so it’s easy to bundle up and get out there in the first light. The pink on the birches below is the sunrise light.

Blue New Ice and Birch Reflections at Dawn

These are available for sale as prints and in a more high res view here:

New Ice and Birch Reflections 2015 I

The book is available from Tupelo Press here. as well as on Amazon and other vendors.

Available as a fine print here: New Ice and Birch Reflections 2015 II

Seeing What’s Here, Letting Go of What’s There

Vermont Ice Storm Ascutney

Anyone who has spent any time at all honestly examining their mind and experience knows very well that most of the time most of our awareness and attention is not directed at the situation at hand.

So it was that I started the day of New Year’s Eve, 2015. I was looking forward to photographing at Post Pond a bit later in the morning, since I was scheduled to be in my old town of Lyme NH at 10. I figured I would leave early and give myself a generous amount of time there to photograph before 10.

Here in Hartland VT the trees and weeds were glazed with ice from freezing rain the night before. The light was soft but bright, and there was some fog and mist in spots. A good opportunity! I had to spend some time here before I headed to Lyme. I made way too many photographs right in the back yard, and heading off I was just barely going to be on time. But I still had to stop and expose the image above.

It turned out that as I approached Lyme, the ice storm was not in evidence, the light didn’t have the luminous quality that we had in Hartland. My 10am appointment was to gallery-sit at the Long River Studios gallery. After that was over I went to Post Pond, and — nothing inspiring. I could spend some time and find something, always, but it was not as it had been in my mind. There wasn’t even any ice on the water.

But in honor of my fantasy of how it was going to be, I’ll resurrect an old exposure of Post Pond — sort of how I thought it would be there. It’s kind of funny, because I’ve been wanting to go back there with my newer, higher end cameras and lenses, but that gear didn’t help with nothing interesting in front of it. The photo below (which I will not be able to print very large) was exposed with my earliest DSLR and the worst lens I ever owned in 2005. It worked out. Sometimes the situation works out if you’re fully in it.

Post Pond, Ice and Mist, Black and White

These photos are available as prints:

Ascutney Mountain Through Ice Storm Branches VT

Melting Ice and Mist, Post Pond Black and White

Spring Ice, Pine Needles 2014


At this time of year here, we get this kind of ice. Over the years I’ve tried to catch the days when I could photograph it, at first somewhat haphazardly. By now I really try to carve out some time to be with it, and I know some good places where it manifests. It’s not just any ice, but a kind of sparkly ice mixed with layers of the forest floor.

I went out looking for it the day before yesterday. I figured this would be an extra good year for it, because we had so much heavy icy melty stuff early in the season, and then a good snow cover all year. I figured it could build up underneath the snowpack, started by the early season ice. But when I got to the place where I spent so much time photographing it last year, there was nothing but bare patches of ground. The rest of the ground surrounding it was quite snow covered. Oh well. You never know. There are some other spots where I’ve found it, and maybe it will show up there when the snow melts a bit.

I looked for this kind of ice and didn’t find any, but I did have a fruitful session photographing the ice along a little stream through the woods that day, and then yesterday when I went out again. It was really an exercise in anicca, impermanence, because I knew it would be warm and rainy today — the end of that ice most likely.

This photo is available with a higher resolution view, and for sale.

Frost Flowers on Trout Brook into Post Pond Sunset

Frost Flowers on Trout Brook, Post Pond, Lyme NH

My upcoming show (Opening reception December 6 in Hanover NH!) features one wall of images of Post Pond. Though I have many hundreds of images of Post Pond, my intention for this wall was to show the hills, which form a familiar bowl around the pond, as a backdrop to impermanence and change. I started experimenting with some images and printing them, while I was printing the images to hang, and bam!: this one made quite a stunning print. Into the show it goes.

This print is available for sale and as a larger view here.