WARREN CONNECTICUT – Boxing Day. Curiously I shot the same subject one year ago. This time I selected a different angle and camera, my Alpa Max with a short-mount 120 mm Schneider lens and a tilt adapter. Tilting is a view camera feature that is available for longer Alpa lenses. It permits tilting the lens and thus the focus plane, to either extend or shorten apparent depth of field. Here I have used it to keep the top of the sundial and the wall and the trees in the background in focus. It can be a tedious iterative process to get focus right with this technique; there are rules of thumb that help; there’s also an iPhone app that gives you a very good starting point. What I don’t like about this image is a mental mistake on my part: cutting off the bottom of the sundial.
Sundial
WARREN CONNECTICUT – It finally stopped snowing around noon. We got a devastating 21 inches of wet, heavy snow. Most of the trees still had all of their leaves so the snow collected on them, breaking or uprooting trees in absolutely record number. Power, telephone and cable and internet are out over most of the state. This is been called the most damaging storm in Connecticut’s history. We have a backup generator for occasions like this (we loose power several times each winter; without power the heating system doesn’t work; if the house gets below freezing there is massive damage to the plumbing). Anyway, I took my Alpa (with the 35mm Schneider) out after the storm cleared. Here’s what it looked like – a typical January scene on October 30.
These images exploit the amazing dynamic range of the Phase One IQ 180 back.
After the blizzardFall colors after the blizzard
It’s me again, this time at 6:03 on February 14, 1999. As I’ve said quite a few times now this is one of a series of hourly self-portraits shot with an Arca Swiss 8×10 view camera.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – We still have major snow drifts left where the roof was cleared and the snowplow pushed snow. This with my Alpa, 60 meg Hasselblad back and Schneider 36mm APO lens.
Glacier
On this day one year ago: “winter loosens its grip”. No such luck this year. We had a much worse winter.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A very gray day here. I took my Leica and a few lenses out to capture something moody. Carl Schurz Park lent itself to to these explorations – it has a Victorian feel and is magnificently sited on the East River. For some reason, though I wasn’t in the moment and wasn’t really seeing. Here’s the image that I went out to capture – I liked the curving steps, the barren tree, the background and the very subdued light, but the picture is ruined because of the overlap of the light post and the tree. There juxtaposition creates a real compositional problem, probably solvable by taking a step or two to the right or left. Oh well . . . .
Carl Schurz Park
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.
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.
