Saturday February 26, 2011

NEW MILFORD, CONNECTICUT – A bad day in the one photo every day world. We drove up to Connecticut on Saturday morning (the weather was terrible on Friday night, our usual drive time). I packed my Hasselblad and Alpa and couple of lenses. On arriving in Connecticut I discovered that I had left the CompactFlash memory card in the computer in New York. I couldn’t shoot the Hasselblad or Alpa because I didn’t have any digital film. I didn’t have another camera with me, not even an iPhone. Warren Connecticut is rural and quite isolated – there’s really no place close by that carries memory cards.

So what to do? I drove south the New Milford Connecticut because there’s a Radio Shack in a shopping center there. The drive took 45 minutes because of road construction (it’s usually 25 minutes). This gave me plenty of time to think about how stupid I am and to plot a route back that avoided the construction. When I arrived at the Radio Shack they didn’t have a CompactFlash card. The salesman tried to sell me a memory stick card saying it’s exactly the same (where does Radio Shack get these people?). I went to the Walmart in the same shopping center and found a single 8 meg CompactFlash card hanging at ankle level on one of those displays that retailers use for the small electronic doodads that are sold in impossible-to-open plastic packages. I bought it and painfully broke a fingernail opening the packaging; installed it in the Hasselblad; formatted it and voilà I was good to go. But irritable and out of sorts. This isn’t how I had planned on spending Saturday.

New Milford is kind of a sad place. I’ve commented on this before. It’s a commercial stretch on Route 202 consisting mainly of strip malls. One of my favorite books on life in England is Crap Towns, a listing of the 100 worst towns in England. New Milford would deserve a place in an American edition. There is a village center with large Congregational and Episcopal churches, a library, a town hall and a World War I era tank – reminders of a time when the town projected greater grandeur. I’ve taken quite a few of my daily pictures in New Milford. If you search for New Milford in the search box to the right you will find them.

I was too distracted to get back into the moment so I shot the first thing that came to hand: St. Johns Episcopal Church. The light wasn’t that interesting. The church building was built starting in 1881 sort of gothic HH Richardson – the congregation is 250 years old. Shot with my Alpa Max, a 47mm Rodenstock lens and my newly-purchased 8 meg CompactFlash card.

On this day one year ago: Snow in Central Park. A nice image.