On this day one year ago: Post office building on Third Avenue.
On this day last year: Roger Standt’s workshop.
On this day one year ago: Alexander Campbell, our son.
If you compare this images with yesterday’s, you’ll see that we have a lot more snow in Warren than in New Milford, which is less than 20 miles south. This is typical. Warren, and even our hillside in Warren, is at least one USDA zone colder than the surrounding towns.
On this day one year ago: Portrait of Richard Cohen for the jacket of his book Chasing the Sun.
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.
My sister in law, Francesca Barra, was with me and I wanted to show her Belgique, a remarkable chocolate and pastry shop owned by a former White House chef and his wife. We bought chocolate truffles and chocolate covered candied ginger. I have no idea of why or how this guy ended up here; his work is world class; he would be highly popular in New York or even Paris.
I took a lot of pictures in the village – this is my favorite for the day. It’s a caboose that houses an art gallery called, fittingly, the Kent Caboose Gallery. It was previously called the Paris-New-York-Kent Gallery (1984 – 2006), a rather grand name given its lilliputian size. I suspect that it was intended ironically. It was the first gallery in Kent. Photographed with my Alpa TC, a 35mm APO Schneider lens and a 60 meg Hasselblad digital back.
On this day one year ago: A doll house sized arts center near Milford PA. Photographed in infrared with my Leica M8.2.
On this day last year: Another pinhole image – this one in Milford PA.
