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Arch Guitar. May 31, 2012

Posted by littlebangtheory in music.
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At Northanpton’s Tuesday Market this past week I was delighted to find that they had entertainment.  Not John and Mary singing folks songs, but Peter Blanchette playing his own creation, the Arch Guitar.

Now, if you’ve been reading for any while you know I’m an old softy, so I’ll just admit to crying in public.  This was some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, and certainly the most beautiful music I’ve heard from three feet away.

Mr. Blanchette is world renowned, and on the brink of flying off to Europe for another widely anticipated tour.  And if you’re selling out classical guitar venues in Spain, you might just be considered to have made it.

I asked permission, then stepped around the bowl where people were dropping change and dollar bills to get these shots:

This creation of his, the Arch Guitar, is the sweetest monster I’ve ever seen, with eleven strings and a fretboard you could launch planes off of:

This man is a genius, pure and simple.  Know his face:

…and, if you have three minutes, hear his genius:

I spent longer than this dialing in these photos, but given the entertainment, I wasn’t in a hurry.

Again, Elliot delivered, hand-held and unfiltered.

Great good luck to Peter on his upcoming tour.

And thanks to Elliot for his hard work, and to YOU, my readers, for humoring my divergences into things which are hard to categorize.

 

North Pond, Savoy MA October 14, 2011

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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It rained again all day at work, letting up a bit at the end, and I thought things might have an interesting look up at the ponds in Savoy State Forest.  So I went up there, threw on a pair of waders, and wandered around the shoreline of North Pond, stopping and hunkering over my camera when the rain thickened, setting up and shooting when it lightened up.

I was fortunate that the breaks were relatively crisp, allowing me to use hand-held filters without them getting overly wet.

The results:

A reflection and sedges in between bouts of wind:

High Country granite catches a maple leaf in a cove:

With each bout of wind a floatilla of fallen leaves paraded across the surface, passing through my tripod:

This little parting of the clouds brought a stiff breeze and a steady parade of surface confetti in the waning light:

That was a four second shot, and with the light disappearing and the rain returning, I made my way back to the car.

And that’s what I got.

Mother Nature 1, Little Tikes 0. September 4, 2011

Posted by littlebangtheory in Love and Death.
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As local lives pile up under bridges, I found this shot at the confluence of the Chickley and Deerfield rivers, where the Chickley runs under the Tower Road bridge and the CSX Railroad bridge:

That one’s courtesy of Elliot, in case you didn’t spot his signature depth-of-field.  This mess is where the Chickley used to be.  Great oaks and pines are interwoven with pieces of the farms and their people upstream, and rapidly drying into a cement of silt.  The cleanup will be a monumental effort, though the desperation has diminished with the passing days.  Unless, of course, you’re amongst the many families who lost everything, in which case recovering will be much, much slower.*

* UPDATE – This monstrous Log-Clog is now gone, though the bridge hasn’t reopened.  Thank You to the people who did that work.