WARREN CONNECTICUT – Birches in good light taken on a walk with Basil the Norwich Terrier with my Hasselblad 60 meg back and Alpa TC with a 36mm Schneider APO lens. This combination helps make relatively prosaic landscape look important.
On this day one year ago: Post office building on Third Avenue.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Looking through my collection of camera gear I noticed an Olympus flash unit that I had bought a year or two ago because it is compatible with my Leica. It’s been pretty much unused because I prefer the available light with the Leica look. The flash unit, it turns out, is fully compatible with my Panasonic GH2 – the through-the-lens metering works perfectly and (unlike the Leica) it is reasonably fast. I ‘m not great at on-camera flash so I decided as an exercise to do some landscape with it. Here’s an example for Warren. The idea was to use the flash to balance the lighting of the tree trunk, which is under large evergreen Euonymus branches and is thus dark, with the house. The lighting in this photograph is actually too balanced to be pleasing. The quality of the images from the GH2 continues to stun me.
On this day last year: Roger Standt’s workshop.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I don’t usually shoot with long lenses. As I’ve noted elsewhere my most energetic work tends to be shot with wide angle or very wide angle lenses. But having a Panasonic GH2 and a 200mm-600mm equivalent lens has encouraged me experiment a bit with telephotos. Here’s the view from a friend’s building site over looking Lake Waramaug and Hopkins Vineyard.
On this day one year ago: Alexander Campbell, our son.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – After three inches of new snow overnight we had a bracingly cold and clear day in Connecticut. Have I mentioned that this has been the coldest, most snow-covered winter ever? But at least I feel that I’m back on my daily photo game again after a rough day yesterday. Taken with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and a 35-90 zoom lens. I’m using the Hasselblad rather than the Alpa because the external battery that I bought to power the digital back on the Alpa doesn’t seem to have enough capacity in this very cold weather. A common issue with batteries, but disappointing nonetheless. Basil the Norwich terrier snuck into this one, creating another exception to my “no pets” rule on this blog.
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.
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.
KENT CONNECTICUT – This is Presidents Day so we spent the day in Connecticut. We drove over to Kent, a good-sized village that’s a 20 minute or so drive from Warren. The name “Kent” is an example of the lack of imagination of the English settlers in this area. Not even “New Kent”. Perhaps “Kent-On-The-Tundra” would have been better, recognizing the colder climate here.
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.
WASHINGTON CONNECTICUT – Â Today we went to a service at the Washington Congregational Church – our daughter and her fiance were with us. They are planning on getting married here next year. After the service I photographed the interior. Â I’ve done many exterior images of this building on these pages: Under the portico. Washington Congregational Church exterior. Washington Congregational Church detail. Taken with my Alpha Max and a 36mm Schneider lens. Two frames stitched.
On this day last year: Another pinhole image – this one in Milford PA.
