WARREN CONNECTICUT – So if the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, what’s the day after Thanksgiving? Purging Day? Leftovers Day? Cold Turkey Day. Try to Get Some Exercise Day? Get the Hell Out of the Kitchen Day? We’ll have to work on this.
My disposition has dramatically improved, foto-wise. I got out in good morning light with a tripod, my Alpa Max and the usual suspects in terms of lenses, filters and so on.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took a walk today in Central Park looking for storm damage with my Alpa TC and 35mm Schneider lens. The camera provoked a number of conversations. There were a lot of tree limbs down, but nothing very dramatic. I needed up shooting a pretty conventional rocks and trees image but the high resolution medium format files make it seem important:
Central Park
I’ve taken this picture before, actually quite a few times. Here for example is an olive tree from the Pelopnnesian Peninsula taken in 1970 with my twin lens Rollei 2.8F. The tree was probably a couple of thousand years old when I shot it. I hope the intervening 40 years have been kinder to it than they have been to Greece in general.
Olive tree 1970
Here we go with the “Its all about me” part of this post. I’m now actually embarrassed that I started out posting these things, but having started I need to finish. Here’s 7:01 AM on February 14, 1999.
WEST CORNWALL CONNECTICUT – I spent the morning exploring the Northwest corner of Connecticut with my Alpa TC and a Schneider 35mm Digitar. The light didn’t cooperate – it was one of the cloudy days with a high, bright sky. This from a bridge of of the road in West Cornwall that parallels the Housatonic River. I ended up leaving an empty camera back by the road. Someone picked it up and dropped it off at a local cafe, the Wandering MooseWest Cornwall
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’m getting a little impatient with early spring here – it’s indistinguishable from winter in other parts of the world. Here I’ve taken a picture of a birch and our barns, wonderfully detailed by my Alpa TC, 60 meg Hasselblad back and 36mm Schneider APO digitatar.
Birch
WAREN CONNECTICUT – Here we are in Warren doing the same thing that I often do in Manhattan: look up. We get a structural view of the deciduous canopy. In the summer the leaves almost totally obscure the sky. I’ll take more of these as the trees leaf out. Taken with my Alpa TC, 60 meg Hasselblad back and my 36mm Schneider APO lens.
White oaks and sugar maples
On this day one year ago: Forsythia. This winter was much worse than last. The Forsythia are no where near blooming.
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.
Tree up close
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Here we are after a snow storm. Again. Lovely light and rapidly moving clouds made this image of illuminated trees against a dark background possible. Taken with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and a 300mm lens.
Warren Connecticut
