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Low Tide, Down River. April 6, 2012

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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So I got out through the swift current with hip boots, ski poles and a good deal of patience and concentration; after waiting for visual low water, I was still amazed at the power of what looked shallow from the road.

Once I was at the gravel bar, the Deerfield was glowing in the rising blush of the setting sun, its cobbles showing their serpentinite-green roots through the silvery, slithering water.

I set up low, glad to have the hip waders on as I knelt in the shallows and contorted myself to get a working view of my camera’s LCD screen at 10X.  That part is necessary to get the best out of Elliot; the interplay of tilt and focus and exposure, coupled with the complication of arranging hand-held graduated filters, requires a view of the process beyond what appears through the view-finder.

The results were predictably mixed, and most of my haul went directly into the Round File (that’s trash,  for those of you who remember waste baskets.)

Here’s what emerged as the keeper from this effort:

Courtesy of Elliot, with about six degrees of tilt, and a pair of stacked/staggered hand-held graduated filters for a total of six stops of cooling that sun.

Once again, my hat’s off to the right gear producing the desired results.

Well, that and a little elbow grease.

Evening Light. February 9, 2012

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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Here’s a shot not of the warm light of evening when the sun comes to us through lots of atmosphere and the red wavelengths predominate, but rather of the reflected atmospheric light which characterizes the half-hour after sunset:

This is taken looking out across a meadow in high Shelburne, with southern New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock visible on the left skyline.  It’s worth noting that this expanse of exposed ground is entirely atypical for Western Massachusetts in early February.

If one has a tripod and can snag a long exposure (this one was 2 seconds,) the camera will often pick up more of the Earth-shadow/pink-band effect than is obvious to the unaided eye.  Here I used a hand-held 3-stop graduated filter to balance the weight of the sky and ground, though it cost me the “shadow” part of what was happening on the eastern horizon.

Oh well, you give a little, you get a little…

 

Sun Through Clouds. January 13, 2011

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.
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As I was coming back over the hills this afternoon, the sun was struggling to break through blowing patches of mid-level clouds as winds whipped snow-burdened branches and filled the air with glistening crystals.  Six f-stops of graduated filters brought down the sky enough to capture this shot of a field in Windsor:

…and a bit later…

[I’m vamping for some space here

because these two pictures look horrible together,

though they look good separately,

so  I hope you’ll scroll through the site

and view them independently]

…this one of the forty inches reported in Savoy:

Both of these were timing challenges; to precisely position grad filters, the sensor needs to be exposed for “live viewing,” and can be damaged by straight-on sun shots, so most of the set-up had to occur while the clouds were thick enough to totally obscure the sun, with the final capture occurring just as the disk of the sun became apparent through the thinning clouds.

At any rate, the snow was deep, the light was fun, and once again, I dug it.

Boston And… Beyond! November 7, 2010

Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature, Love and Death.
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I had a chance to get to Boston today to visit my younger daughter Ursula, who is in her last year at Boston University.

She’s a sweetie, and I enjoyed her company immensely as we drove around Boston on our way to a nice Indian lunch.  I’m not a “city guy,” but I absolutely love Boston, as does Ursi – it’s a relatively intimate mix of the Very Old and the Very New:

Tree-lined boulevards surround an array of sky-scrapers, making walk-abouts feel cozy, while an abundance of waterways soften and enliven a cityscape punctuated by copper-trimmed tenements and brownstones:

Ursi would be happy to live there after college, and her ongoing gig at the Boston Globe seems like a pretty good foot in the door.

Our lunch was scrumptious and surprisingly affordable for city fare – $16 for the two of us, with take-home to boot!  Ursi was pleased:

It all ended too soon, as Ursi had schoolwork to dive into, and I had designs on photographing the coast before the sun got too far gone.

After dropping her back at her apartment I headed north, more or less.  But there are virtually no straight streets in Boston, and as I should have learned from many other such seat-of-the-pants navigational extravaganzas, “more or less” is a low-percentage move in Beantown, invariably devolving into a tour of curving cowpaths and (I kid you not) one-way cul-de-sacs.

Don’t ask.  Even if I could explain, it wouldn’t help.

Eventually I found my way to Rte. 93 North, then 95 East to Gloucester on the North Shore.  I’d hoped to get there in time to scope out the harbor for photo ops and find some lovely patch of publicly accessible and quintessentially rocky Atlantic coastline, but by the time I finally spied the ocean it was nearly five thirty, when the happy coincidence of low tide and sunset was slated.

I asked a gentleman walking his dogs if there was a legal place to access the shore (it’s largely private, and wandering through the grounds of these old-money mansions is looked upon unkindly.)  To my relief he pointed me to a spot “just around the corner,” two lefts and park on the right.  Simple enough, I thought, thanking him and heading off.

Ten minutes later I hadn’t seen the side-street he’d named, and took a chance on a turn which looked only vaguely promising, and came upon a secluded beach from which the last stalwart souls were just departing.

I jumped out nearly at a roll, doffed my jeans and slipped into a pair of hip waders, then grabbed my camera bags and literally ran down into the briny shallows, mentally calculating swing angles as I plopped Elliot down in the soft mud of low tide.  I muttered something uncivil about the low light as I fought with the finicky focus of the tilt-shift world, then escalated to genuine obscenities as my camera battery went dead.  Fortunately I had a spare in my pack and, casting caution aside, I threw the whole bag down in the draining sand and rummaged frantically through it, scoring and making the switch with speed engendered by desperation.

Then, with the light rapidly fading, I got a few quick shots off, hoping without conviction that the focus would be fair and that my hand-holding of up to three graduated filters at a time would produce the fabled Desired Result.

I was pleasantly surprised with my haul, which isn’t as crisp as it might have been with more time, but it is what it is.

Low Tide under a Black Sky:

I got some sky color reflected in the sand by ditching the polarizer at the last minute.

The wind was picking up and the waves seemed to be intensifying as a patch of clouds burst into Heavenly hues of pink:

Over my shoulder a light show was developing behind a spit of pink granite; I grabbed everything and dashed farther down the beach to catch it:

It was intense but brief, fading in minutes to mere placid loveliness:

Then it was just about light enough to pack up and head home, hoping I’d have something to show for it.

I’m not displeased, considering the rush-job and frantic antics of the evening.

And so ended a great day of friendship and photography, two of my favorite things!