WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’m suffering under the curse of a long New England autumn. That’s right, I said curse. Since September 25 I’ve posted no fewer than ten images where the main subject is New England autumn. That’s a lot of yellow and orange foliage of really dubious artistic merit. It’s not like I can discern a development of a theme – the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Autumn is a bit like a sunset: it comes around periodically for all to see. It’s unlikely that I’m going to have a deep insight, a personal epiphany or add to the richness of human knowledge and experience by photographing brightly colored leaves. I promise not to do this any more, at least not without more of a theme and purpose. But . . . what I happen to have for October 23 are images of . . . fall foliage. Here you go with number 11:
Yup. It\’s Fall Foliage.
Leica M9 with 90mm Elmarit lens.
On this date one year ago i was shooting in infrared on a dull, rainy day in Oregon: October 23, 2009
WARREN CONNECTICUT and BROOKLYN NEW YORK – We started out the day in Connecticut (with power restored) – photographed a neighbor’s cornfield in the rising sun. We drove back to New York to attend an engagement party for our son in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn.
Cornfield; Leica M9 and 1954 Dual Range Summicron lens.
WARREN, CONNECTICUT – I occasionally experiment with odd or eccentric bits of equipment to help keep the daily photo grind fresh. For the last few days I’ve been shhoting with a 12mm rectilinear (as opposed to fish-eye) lens on my full frame Leica M9. This lens is so wide that it’s a miracle that it even forms an image. When I say wide, I mean that I often find myself having to crop my knuckles out of the frame. Ultra wides offer huge depth of field so near-far compositions with everything in focus are possible.
I’ve sworn never to post pictures of pets. Why? I’ve explained this before. Pictures of pets remind me of the millions of pictures in online forums the read something like this: “This is my cat Wallace taken with my Canon Superturbulator 600 mm lens. You can see every whisker!” Lonely guy stuff. Nothing better to take a picture of than the pet cat. Anyway, this is my second exception in almost a year. Basil, our Norwich Terrier, wandered into the frame as I was exploring near-far. Leica M9 and Voigtländer 12mm lens.
WARREN, CONNECTICUT – I’ve grown up in a landscape tradition of photography, where, like paintings of landscape, everything is in focus. Edward Weston accomplished this by stopping his lenses down – shooting at f64 to compensate for the inherently narrow depth of field of his 8×10 inch medium. One of the threads that I’ve been pursuing on this blog is exploration of the out of focus portions of the image (for example in my September 5, 2010 posting). The quality of a lens’s out of focus image is referred to as “bokeh” or “bo-ke” which is the Japanese term for blur. One of the lenses in my Leica kit is 35mm Summicron version IV (made between 1979 and 1997) – a lens that it known as the “bokeh king.” Think of shooting with this lens as riding with the king. It’s probably my most used lens.
Here’s in image from our garden in Warren, Connecticut:
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Well here I am in Warren for the Fourth of July. A quick personal inventory: Maria, my wife, is in Capri at a literary festival (no kidding); our son, Alexander is in Puerto Rico on vacation proposing to his girlfriend (she said “yes” so she’s now his fiance); our daughter is in Southampton with an old friend of hers. So I’m here by myself doing the lonely guy thing. After the excitement of Ecuador this seems dull. I picked up a different camera hoping for inspiration – not much came of it.
Sunset Warren
