Acadia

We haven’t had a particularly pretty foliage season in Central Massachusetts.  Not to my eyes at least.  Luckily, we had an opportunity to spend a few days further north in Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island, Maine.  They were not so unfortunate!  I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such intense color, so of course I spent a good deal of time working in black and white.  We were with Tony Sweet and Susan Milestone and a bunch of very nice and quite talented workshop participants.  I always learn a lot from them, probably because of their depth of preparation, their knowledge and their positive attitude.  Tony has an ability to articulate the creative process and rationale that I always find inspiring.  He has a wonderful way of validating the imagination, something I need a dose of every so often.  I recommend them highly if you’re looking for a workshop experience.  You won’t be disappointed.

But, no thousand words today though, on with the pictures.  (And I swear, I did not touch the saturation slider on these.  You get up early in the morning and shoot late into the evening with Tony.  Mother nature is the one manipulating the colors at those hours, but that’s sort of her job so…)

From Eagle Lake at sunrise

Along Duck Creek Road

Boulder Beach at Sunrise, in the rain

From Thunder Hole (It really does sound like Thunder)

From Cadillac Mountain

Acadia National Park is about six hours north from our home.  I can’t believe it took us this long to get there.  It is a big Park, and I would recommend either going with a guide, or doing some serious research before hand, during the day time!

Tech Note:  I hate writing about gear because it’s basically irrelevant at this point.  But a number of these images were taken with the Nikon Z7, Nikon’s new entry into the mirrorless market place.  For whatever reason, none good, it seems to draw a fair amount of criticism on the good old internet, particularly from those who have never used it.  It seems to be a tribal thing, or a way for “influencers” to generate click bait.  It’s sad that all you have to do these days is make something up and it becomes fact.

I thought the camera performed exceptionally well.  I’ll be using it a lot for video as I have grown very tired of taking along a second system.  The still image quality, video quality, still and video autofocus, all worked beyond my expectations.  And we really did land on the moon in 1969.

Photoessay: Searching for a Mood Under the Highway

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving.  We did, it was great spending time with family as always.  I had much to be thankful for this year, including a more experimental attitude.  Why not?

I’ve been exploring the Blackstone River area in Massachusetts over the last few months.  It is striking just how much psychological as well as environmental territory the River covers.  Though it remains quite polluted from centuries of exploitation, stretches of the River are quite beautiful and natural.  Other stretches are, more complex.  No stretch of the River though, at least that I have traveled, requires more effort to understand than the Blackstone Valley Bike Trail in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the River originates.  Along this two mile or so stretch you will see the River, a super highway (Route 146), an active freight train yard and line, as well as legacy tracks, a Walmart and Sam’s Club, trees being cut by a beaver, beautiful small falls and rapids, trash and signs that say stay away from the water for health reasons.  It’s all right there.  Nature and civilization crash into one another at top speed in places and this is one of those locations.

I have photographed there for months, searching for the right way to capture the feel of such a complex place.  I’d used most every technological trick I could think of, but ultimately wasn’t satisfied.  I decided to go back and try again, this time with black and white film.  Digital is just capable of making pictures that are too perfect for this location it seemed to me.  Nothing about this location says “perfection.”  This work, like this location, is incomplete and some of the images you see here may not survive the next cut.  This is where things stand though at the moment.

Shooting on film is interesting of course.  I realize that the look can be replicated in software using a digital means of capture.  But that somehow doesn’t seem quite right at times.  What is really different about shooting on film is the process.  You do indeed slow down.  You have to for economic reasons if nothing else.  For a time, you have to step away from the technological (rat) race.  It’s quite refreshing.

Tech Notes:  Shot on Kodak TMax and Ilford Delta films using a Nikon F6.  The later, for my money, remains the finest 35 mm camera ever made.  Negatives scanned on a Nikon 5000 film scanner and finalized in Lightroom/Photoshop (You can’t really escape the technology can you.)

New Bird in Town – D810 Comments

I’ve blogged here on numerous occasions about urban wildlife such as the blue heron’s that frequent Elm Park.  (Elm Park is located in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts).  Today, however, we found ourselves confronted with a heron of a different color, white.

I did a bit of quick research upon returning home, looking at questions such as “what is the difference between a heron and an egret?” and “what is the range of the white egret, or heron?”  Alas, my efforts were somewhat frustrated.   According to Wikipedia the difference between heron and egret is largely terminological rather than biological.  Egrets tend to be white.  If you google the two terms and check on images, you’ll see the same kinds of images.  My bottom line question really was:  are they new in town?  Memory tells me yes.  They are very common in the mid-Atlantic and further south, but I don’t recall seeing too many in New England.  Someone educate me if my memory is off, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Photographing these birds is relatively easy.  You can get quite close if are are respectful and quiet. After all, this was in a downtown park, not exactly the middle of the marsh.  Herons also don’t seem to be easily distracted from their work, which is fishing.  Unfortunately for this fair specimen, he was having little luck.  We watched him for quite some time and he was coming up empty beaked, every time.  Herons are usually better at their jobs than that.  This one may need to step up his game.  The best shot is often one with them flying in or out, or exhibiting their catch.  This guy stood there and though his forays into the water were very graceful, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

It was tough to get another interesting shot until a well timed flock of geese flew across the scene.  He was actually startled for a second, but the incident did give me some background that was badly needed.

 

 

It will be interesting to see if his presence in the Park is a trend or an outlier.  Or, as I mentioned above, is only of interest because of my failing memory.  Regardless, I do wish him good luck fishing.  He needs it.

Tech Note:

Much as I dislike the kind of photographic gear discussions that take place on the internet, I did want to mention that these shots were taken with Nikon’s newest DSLR, the D810.  I’ve been a Nikon user for many years, and really enjoyed the image output from the D800.  If you print large for exhibitions, all those pixels are useful.  Plus, the D800 has incredible dynamic range, very useful for nature work.  However, it always felt to me like it was really a studio, tripod camera, and handled more like the medium format cameras it has been replacing.  I also like to shot more spontaneously from time to time.  The D810 now makes that possible.  In many different ways, Nikon fixed things that weren’t broken, but made it hard to really relax with the D800.  The grip is better, the shutter is much quieter, the shutter mechanism does not create vibrations that undermine the high resolution power of the images, the video features are improved, etc.  In this case, all those pixels allowed me to crop heavily into the image.  These are all the equivalent of a 100% crop.  Obviously I should have had a longer lens, but alas, I did not.  I could go on and on, but others are doing a much better job of actually reviewing this piece of gear.  If you have a D800 though, it may not look like a worthwhile upgrade.  It actually may be for some people, particularly those desiring to make the D800 a real “go to” camera.  Again, I dislike tribal gear discussions.  All cameras these days are quite good.  It really boils down to trying to find the one that does the job you need, and with which you can be most comfortable.  That is likely to vary from person to person.

Portrait of a Hawk – Another Couple in Elm Park

In my last blog I mentioned being provoked to think about the meaning of my work in the context of the on-going reconstruction of Elm Park, in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.  I had bumped into a couple who had questioned the value, financially and otherwise, of the Park and its reboot.  We bumped into another couple today, quite a different experience.  These two young folks, sitting on one of the benches at the Park were chatting like, well young couples do, and probably enjoying the more moderate temperatures.  We happened to be passing by, pursuing yet another reflection shot, when we were joined by the individual you see here.  He landed not too high up in a tree, perhaps thirty feet from the four of us, and commenced to screaming at the top of his/her lungs.  In case you are not aware, hawks can really let it loose when they have something to say.  I think the young couple was amused or annoyed (their attitudes may have broken down along gender lines, I’m not sure), but I had the sense that they were thinking that it would be OK if I were to act like an annoying photographer and get the hawk to fly away, leaving them to get on with their business.  The ability to be annoying is of course is a key competency in photography, so I hit the shutter.

I’m not a wildlife photographer.  I would never want to do anything that required that much work; and the hours?  Forget about it.  But this individual’s stare got under my skin a bit.  My wife and I talked about that look, trying to figure out what it means.  What was the screaming about?  There was another hawk in the area that seemed to be working closely with this one.  Hawks scream for a few different reasons and it is a scream.  It is a basic form of communications.  It may have been part of a conversation with its mate.  There may have been another errant hawk in the area, from another family.  I can anthropomorphize almost anything, so I kept thinking about a comment by the famed wildlife photographer Frans Lanting.  I can’t remember the quote, but in effect, he was making the point that animals in the wild routinely live with the experience of desperation.  They struggle every day with the unceasing need to balance the hunt for food with the loss of energy that is required by the hunt.  If they do too little, they starve.  If they do too much, they run out of energy for the hunt and die.  All that, and they have to raise a family.  It’s a tough way to make a living.  This is an image of a hawk on duty and for me, you can see it in his/her eyes.

The hawk flew off to join its partner about 50 yards away.  The mission of the annoying photographer was accomplished. The couple returned to their chat. Another day in the Park.

Technical note for photographers:  This image was taken with a Nikon D600.  The D600 is Nikon’s cheapest and lightest “full frame” DSLR.  I rarely talk about gear in the blog.  I’m far more interested in technique and art making, and most modern cameras are so good, it really doesn’t matter which one you use.  You should use the equipment you like.  In this case though, I have to make an exception for this camera.  This is a good camera that I don’t think gets the respect it deserves.  This image was heavily cropped.  I was only shooting with a 200 mm lens, which may seem like a very long telephoto lens to some, but it is nothing for birders.  The image was not sharpened in post-production.  The level of detail that can be recovered was, for me, stunning.  The autofocus was spot on.  The bird was nearly in silhouette, against a bright sky, but I was able to recover all the detail in this ISO 400 shot, without generating any noise.  This crop has about 5 megapixels left in it.  I bet I could print it at 13 by 19 and it would look great.  The high quality of the image from the sensor, the accuracy of the autofocus and the light weight form factor lead me to recommend this camera highly. There was a notion going around the net that the sensor was always going to be dusty.  I had no such trouble and the camera store where I bought it, E.P. Levine’s in Waltham, said that dust on the sensor was not a problem.  I have no affiliation with Nikon.