Category Archives: Winter

Sunset Mist, Single Ice Hut, Post Pond, 2006

There are so many factors that drive my output. Maybe the least good one is, “It’s fresh.” I’m wary of those. For example this morning I spent some time with some covered-with-raindrops Lady’s Slippers in a bog near here. (Here’s a lady’s slipper photo from last year, and another one). I think I did better at the bog this year than last year, but better to wait.

Some things that have driven my output have been something like vision. One summer a few years ago I immersed myself in Ukiyo-e prints, and they filled my mind and colored the world. It’s hard to explain, but there was some kind of internal pressure to swim in that bright water. Another time when I was a young photographer I had something like a ringing clarity in my mind for a while in the spring. It was like a sparkle on things, and it really got me going in terms of photographing and trying to print that energy, that view.

But another less glamorous force behind output is quite simply technology, though that is rather a dull way to put it. Think of a musician with a new instrument. So for example when I studied with John Sexton at the Maine Workshops in the early 80s, he gave us Edward Weston’s formula for a developer using Amidol. It seemed to me to be a kind of more luminous look, though that might have been coincidence. It might be that I used it on a certain kind of image the first time, and then I looked for images with a similar tone to use more of it. So I bought some of that chemical from the Photographer’s Formulary (I wonder if they’re still in business?), and I used it on prints I wanted to make give that sort of luminous look. That chemical drove a vision and some excitement — maybe Edward Weston was inspired in a similar way…

This image was from a 2006 DSLR in weak light, and it was pretty noisy by any standards. But it is a raw file, and I just got a new raw processor, DxO Optics Pro. In this case that software really comes through on its promise to process out the noise while preserving the clarity of the image. It was tricky, but doable. I can not only save the image, but make it quite usable. I’m thinking of printing it for a show that will be loosely based on the theme of impermanence. And part of that show will have a series of this profile of hills, with various manifestations.

This print is available for sale here.

Oak Leaf and Hemlock in Spring Ice, Vermont 2014

Oak Leaf, Hemlock Needles, Ice Vermont I’ve spent a lot of time working on these ice-on-forest-floor abstracts and semi-abstracts this spring. It turned out that the window of opportunity was pretty small this year, but I had some nice long days working it hard. The time the snow melted enough to expose the shimmery, translucent broken, leaf-infused forest floor ice, but before the ice melted was only a few days. I spent hours when I could, each day I walked in the woods. I think I mentioned last time that I’m just so tickled with my current micro-four thirds camera with some high end prime lenses for this task. I’ve been photographing this sort of stuff for 30 years with all kinds of high and low end equipment, and this is the best it’s ever been. I have a lot of images to sift through and decide about, from softer images like this that are almost like a little story — to very abstract ones I like too, where the eye moves, the depth of the image seems to go in and out of the plane, and you can get lost in the abstract journey. It’s funny; it’s something of a journey through time in making and sifting through these kind of exposures. On the day I unload the camera and look at them, they are all very exciting. But I know I should wait. After a week or two it becomes pretty confusing — there are so many images, and it’s hard to see what works. By next year it should be quite clear, I imagine. But I’m jumping the gun, diving into the confusion as I did for the last one, and hopefully coming up with a pearl this time.

In the late 80s I saw Bob Dylan in concert, and he was very good, surprisingly good for that period. Dylan had released some not-so-great albums through that period, some good songs and some not so good songs. But the thing is, if you go see Dylan in concert, he knows what the good songs are. He doesn’t necessarily perform the song that he wrote last month that might make it onto an album. I remember being really struck by that ability to be clear for the performance, to not mess around with new material he’s unsure of (even if he can’t resist putting that on an album). I assumed it was harder to know when he makes an album, how much of it is going to be good. Make it, get it down, record it; time will tell. I remember aspiring to have that clarity and discernment with my own work, and I’ve kept that aspiration mostly intact. But here I go, posting a new photo, fresh, and one of thousands of new keepers/and chaff to blow away.

This is available as a fine print here

Acorn Cap, Pine Needles, Spring Ice 2014

Abstract Acorn Cap Pine Needles Hemlock Ice

I’ve been spending too much time (considering I have work to do and taxes to work on) in the woods on snowshoes. As of Monday, there was still well over a foot of snow in the woods, but it’s melting fast.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked on this theme: the ice over the ground, revealed when the snow melts, is sparkling, full of leaves and bits of flotsam, completely magical up close. It’s not everywhere, just in some places. I used to have a good patch of it in my back yard in Lyme, and now there is often quite a bit of it along a trail in a very beautiful forest. This year though, the snow has been hanging on, and I don’t know if things are melting in the normal way. It’s so late for it to be melting. I’ve only found one patch to work, but I’ve spent hours at it over a couple of days so far this year.

One thing I realized that’s quite funny about working this patch of ice: it’s in a spot with a breathtaking distant view over rolling meadows, to distant hillsides and beyond. It’s all the more breathtaking because on the (long) walk that leads to it, the trail has been in trees for a long time. Then you get to the edge, and it is: “Wow!” It opens up. Life is more dramatic when it opens up suddenly. But the funny thing is that on Monday I went straight to work with this ice, and I didn’t even look up, I don’t think, for hours.

I don’t usually wax gear-head on this blog, but my newer gear is just so perfect for working with this subject. The Olympus 45/f1.8 and the 60/f2.8 macro are just so amazingly sharp and contrasty. I’ve usually worked this subject with a DSLR, which is tricky, because it’s hard to get enough depth of field. It’s flat, but not really quite flat. Things bump up or recede, the plane dips or pops. The Micro Four Thirds camera has just enough more depth of field if I stop down a bit, and like I said, these lenses are amazing. This is so contrasty out of the camera I should almost dial it back. Really amazing.

This print is available for sale here.

Sunrise Over Franklin Hill, Mist and Ice Fishing Huts, Post Pond, 2008

Sunrise over Franklin Hill, Mist, Ice Fishing Huts

It’s about time to glue myself to the desk chair for the rest of the winter, except for when I do a 10 day meditation retreat. In addition to a lot of printing, I’m going to work on my book of Post Pond Years. That book won’t be purely get-running-from-a-dead-stop. I’ve been working on Post Pond photos for some time now, but there is a backlog, and hopefully a story to write. Some of the already up-there post pond photos are here. And This Photo is a good companion to this image, but a bit more dramatic, less subtle. It’s of a view to the south-west, while this image above is of course the south-east. The sun sets early over those hills.

This image today was really hard! First, one might think that a nice flat horizon would help make a panorama. Actually, it often makes it a bit trickier. This was a hard panorama to put together. It took hours, actually, but I developed a few new techniques, so at least my stubbornness paid off in learning as well as the image. Secondly, it’s harder to make a subtle image like this work than a more dramatic one, like the color sunset one. To separate the subtle tones so the misty hills aren’t all just misty-muck is a little tricky.

I’ll probably post it on the real site, so it can be viewed bigger there. I think it’s better bigger and higher resolution.

The Post Pond years were a serious period of growth, both as someone trying to wake up to this life, and also as a photographer, which is of course the same thing.

I bought a little ancient farm-hand’s house that needed a lot of work in 2003, and it was about a five minute walk to the spot photographed above. I was newly divorced, my daughter with me half the time. This also was a time when my web work slowed a bit, as some bigger and more high pressure clients moved to content management systems. I got my first DSLR and started meditating seriously.
Also around that time, high end ink jet printers became affordable, so it became a possibility to make good digital exposures and also good prints. I had some time, and I lived in a gorgeous place. I went nuts. Stay tuned for more. Also, this really does need to be bigger, so I’ll link to that as soon as I can.

This print is available for sale here.

New Ice, Rain, Birch Reflections 2013

It’s funny how we resist change, and yet change makes everything possible. The very energy of life is based on change: chemical reactions and biochemical transformations are dynamic.

Just so in photography too. It’s in those in-between moments where the most happens.

And of course everything is an in-between moment. Still, some times are a bit more dynamic feeling than others, and that dynamic energy is good to ride even when it feels like something we would rather not, a change we’d rather not experience.

This was the part of the fall/winter that is a bit of “Oh noo!” here in the north country. The leaves are mostly down, the world is drab, it’s starting to freeze up. On this day it was raining. From my office window it looked horrible out. Still, a bit restless, I decided to grab the Nikon (pretty weatherproof) and head down to the pond to see what the ice looked like. Worth the trip. And so for all of riding our changing experience. From that “oh no!” bubble of resistance to actually checking it out. What is going on? Maybe something interesting.

This print is for sale here.

Ice and Moss, Meditation Retreat, Vermont 2009

Moss and Ice, Meditation Retreat, Vermont

I probably talk too much about meditation and photography, or Mind and photography. In a way, of course I would, since the two are hand-and-glove, and the main focus of much of my time and mind. Still, it’s pretty rare that I come up with, or post or publish, a photo produced during an intensive actual meditation retreat. The mostly steady two hours a day counts as a steady mini-retreat, but it still doesn’t approach the intensity of a real, long, retreat.

This is probably especially true these days, when my meditation technique is more focused on mind than on the space around. My long retreats these days are silent, with long periods with my eyes closed, and no camera with me.

This one though is from one of my old retreats, sitting with open eyes, and walks with a camera during some breaks.

This photo is to me a good representation of some aspect of mind and meditation. Even those super-quiet Zen Enso brush paintings, and other traditional Japanese and Chinese meditation-inspired paintings are also quite full of energy. I’ve said before that I find the kinetic art of Kandinsky, Klee, and many abstract expressionists to be quite representative of states of mind, and the kinds of states of mind that a meditator will spend a lot of time with. While there may be peace to be found in Mind, there is always energy, almost always some movement and dynamic quality. There is movement, and there is stillness. There is something like substance, and there is space around that. There is a figure, and there is the ground. So this seemed to me to be quite in accord with this retreat experience.

Physically this is the kind of thing that shows up after a winter when we’ve had a good snowpack, and it then mostly melts in the late winter. Lately our snowpacks in central Vermont are not reliable they way they used to be. We used to have one brown winter in maybe 10 or more, and now it seems we might get one good snowy one out of 5 mostly brown ones. It’s easier, maybe, but spooky and sad. This year I don’t hope to see very much of this kind of late February/Early March effect, but you never know. Maybe we’ll get some real snow. I’ve got a lot of these images stocked up, and maybe I’ll find more good ones to release.

But first there will be an entirely different project. With luck, the next images will be quite different. Stay tuned!

Multifaceted Slope, Shadows, Barn, Vermont 2012

Multifaceted Slope, Shadows, Barn, Hartland Vermont 2012

There are some images I have the opportunity to try over and over. This is right around the corner from my house, so I can experience and frame a visual experience something like this in many nuances: different light, different clouds and snow. In fact, I have a version of this in my camera right now, exposed about two hours ago. This one, above, was exposed a couple of weeks ago on a walk with my son and my wife.

There’s so much to love about Vermont, so much that triggers the mind to leap into other realms. What we’ve got here are some themes that work well: the multifaceted quality of many of the hills. The facets are large and small. For the larger ones, you go over a little rise, and suddenly it’s a new experience. This hill is one of the larger facets, but it also has small facets on its face. The long shadows of the trees to the west ripple along these facets.

I’m not sure if this will be the definitive image of this spot, but it’s certainly good enough to post for now.

This print is for sale here.

Wooden Path Clay Brook to Post Pond, New Snow

This has been and still is a rich vein, these recent posts of just-at-freezing point along Clay Brook in Lyme NH. There’s still lots to mine here, several really good images I made at the time I lived near there. Most of them are winter images. But here in Vermont, it’s full-tilt bird-song springtime. While it’s been an unusual and good discipline for me to linger on one theme for a while, I need a path out of here.

And this, literally, is the path between Clay Brook and Post Pond. For a stretch through some wetland, there are some boards. This day, fresh snow in big crystals covered the boards. I have a handful of cool abstracts. Here is one.

And note, this photo blog was hacked, I think yesterday. It’s back, hopefully it will hold up against attack for a while.

This print is for sale here.

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.