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Lost And Found. June 4, 2012

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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The Deerfield river is widely known as a great trout fishing venue.  It’s fast and cold and relatively clean in the reaches here and above, and has rebounded from it’s Irene Make-Over with astonishing speed.  The section immediately above Charlemont is a catch-and-release area, no bait-fishermen please, and as such is a popular float-fishing destination for several fly-fishing outfitters.

The cardinal rule of Catch-and-Release is DO NO HARM so that returned fish survive and thrive.

So it’s a little bit karmic that this trebble-hook spinner, decidedly not  kind to fish (and frequently fatal) was lost among the logs and rocks just above town:

I hope it was his last one, and that its parting ended someone’s day of fun.

This is from Elliot, tripod-mounted within a foot of the rocks (yes, I was lying down on the job!)  Eight degrees of tilt, with a hand-held reverse-graduated ND filter.

TMI for most of you, but food for “inquiring minds…”

A Visit To The Bridge… May 18, 2012

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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…of Flowers, of course!

I’ve been photographing here for enough years so that I now seldom bring my camera when visiting.  Our town’s art spaces and galleries are full of images from here, some magnificent, some pretty OK.  And frankly, I’m not looking for a place in that queue.

But still, whenever I’m in town I find the short walk across the Bridge of Flowers to be irresistible, and if  I don’t have my camera with me I regret it.

So the challenge becomes to take a photo I haven’t before, to see things a bit differently.

Enter Elliot, and the prospect of limiting  the area of sharp focus rather than increasing it.  It’s counter-intuitive for me, as I usually try to extend my depth of field in my landscapes, but the distinctly non-planar landscape of The Bridge demands a somewhat different approach.

Well, enough words, and on to the images from yesterday, some more pronouncedly limiting focus, some laying a plane across petal-tops.  All the result of my undying love of The Bridge.

The depending blossoms of Solomon’s Seal:

A blossom on a bush peony which would easily fill both of my hands:

Alliums, thigh-high and beaming:

Azaleas (at the far end of the A’s):

A sprig of blue lupines:

…all taken on a breezy day, with a great deal of effort expended to counteract that fact, except for in this image of wind-whipped wisteria wound around a bit of superstructure:

I courted both the stasis of the woody vines and the kinetics of the dancing leaves, and am happy with the take-away.

All of these were hand-held, experiments as it were in tilt-shift photography, and encourage me to get back there with a tripod and attempt to do it right.  A more deliberate approach might yet yield fresh images.