Pumpkin in the Rain

I went out from the house this afternoon looking for "water photos" and took a quick shot of the film of water on the patio tiles at the main entrance to our house.

 I glanced to my right and saw a pumpkin lying on the tiles underneath a glass patio table, and the most interesting thing about that was that drops of water had formed underneath the table. The result was that the drops (each drop) formed a lens that captured the pumpkin perfectly. I began to move the camera and change my point of view and so came up with the second shot, which seems even more abstract and surreal that the first one!
No filters were used here, these are straight shots from life. I'm thinking the second one could be better in a vertical format... hmmm......

Bar Harbor During "A" Block

Dan and I took our classes to Bar Harbor this morning for some "on site" artwork and photography. Getting the studetns out and giving them the "real world" to work in seems to make a difference. We'll see what they got fro images and if there was anything that Dan's students can use for reference.

Here are a couple of pictures that I liked, one of the water fountain at the top of the "Green" and one of a fire hydrant in the middle of town. Water related items, I believe!

Tonight Before Supper

Yeah, I know, it's "dinner", although as I was born and raised in a small coastal town here in Maine, we always called it "dinner & supper", not "lunch & dinner" as the "folks from away" tended to say. So I guess I'll stick with the title.

The first picture is one of the house where Jen grew up, across the road from where we now live. I was a bit nostalgic for some reason this afternoon and so it seemed important to me to photograph that house. We were married to  the left of the house, in the back yard under a huge silver maple tree during the remnants of a hurricane, Doria I think it was called. Although the timing doesn't seem right, it makes a great story.

The next one I struggled a bit with the balance between the sky and the water. The water was so beautiful, as only water can be, but the sun bouncing off the bottom of the clouds also fascinated me, so rather than look at an asymmetrical balance of sky and water I split the difference and held the land mass in the middle. The beauty of the light on both subjects caused me to share their importance as subjects of the shot.

Finally, as I often find myself doing, I was drawn to the water. Using the camera to describe water is so amazing! If you compare these last two pictures just on the basis of f-stop and shutter speed, you can see that there is a difference in color, and with the reflected sun as a light source I'm not really sure which is more accurate. What really caught my eye as I was taking these was how much more the water looked like it was actually a thick layer on the rocks in the slower (blurred) shutter speed photograph (bottom).

Gelatin Prints from Haystack

Man, the time sneaks by so quickly... I just got the chance to "ink" some of my prints from last weekend at Haystack, and then I took a few pictures with my cell phone. The images are only about four inches square so they are actually bigger than "life" on the screen. I enjoy the color play with gelatin prints and it seems that each individual print usually is a pleasant surprise. I resorted to a few of my "old" stencils... those shapes that I have used before in a number of works and that I feel are still "valid" to my mindset and creative process. I like to "name" prints, but I haven't really gotten that far yet with these.

Geese at School & a Beautiful End to Day

I got a phone call during first period with my digital photo class and it was our school bookkeeper who saw geese on the lawn on her way into school. I took the class outside armed with telephoto lenses and we got a lot of great pictures of the geese. Here are a couple.

The day ended gorgeously with a cloud reaching for the moon over the bay!

Busy at Haystack

... so I had very little time beyond the studio sessions to look at or investigate school work or the interweb. The one time I felt the need to use technology, wait there were two; one was to look up the difference between a monotype and a monoprint (got it quickly on Wikipedia) and to listen to Pandora while I fell asleep last night. That was it, I'm really, really tired, so I will post one iPhone photo for tonight then I will get some Haystack stuff up this week.

Sunny Sunflowers

I've been intending to shoot some pictures of the sunflowers in the upper garden for days now, and I told Kiley when we were leaving for work this morning that I would do it tonight when I got home. Well, the day turned out perfect and the sun was beautiful when I got home so I went up to the garden and shot around fifty pictures. The one above I thought I would use to update the banner on my school website, and the rest were my "fab four" from the group.








I'm always telling photo students to get used to "paring down" their photos and know what to look for to find the best and how to correct composition weaknesses by cropping, and I realize that I do it all the time!

Homage to David Patterson

I saw the late afternoon sun poking into my studio, was tied up working on the computer, and then realized that was beautiful light I was looking at and I should go out and photograph the bay before the light was gone. I thought of David Patterson's beautiful wide-angle landscapes http://storiesfromhome.wordpress.com/ and remembered to bring a wide lens to get all the reflections on the water. It was almost dark, but I got a few things (30+ photos) I liked, mostly wrapped around the color. Everything was that bright orange tint, even the background light. I didn't do anything with these, although pulling out some detail from the shadows on those reflected shots and a bit of cropping here and there might improve them. I did try one in a grayscale as I was interested in what the light really was like and I think it is fascinating how that when you remove color from an image you become so much more aware of the actual light properties. When I got in the house, Jen was shooting the sunset with her iPhone, and she had gotten a great shot of the sky reflected in the house windows!

Out on a Rainy Day

The diffused light was kind of striking today, but I had an urge to go to the shore and shoot some pictures, I just waited for a while until the tide went down. I got a couple of things I liked before I even reached the shore, though.

The "ducky" and the "gargoyle" caught my eye as I went by the front of the house, and after taking a few dozen versions of the next two shots, I settled on these two.

Glider Ride

My old (like me) college roommate and I went on a glider excursion out of Trenton Airport this afternoon. We had an 11 a.m. flight scheduled, but the fog gave us an impenetrable 300 foot ceiling so we waited until 3 p.m. and got up literally to 5500 feet. While we were extremely cramped for space, which would have been about right for two 10 year olds, we crammed into the space and enjoyed the flight. Being pulled into the air by a "beefed up" Cessna at the end of a "string" was interesting, but even more so were the views that presented themselves as we swirled through the heavens.

Having grown up in the area and knowing the coastal region pretty well, I had an excellent sense of where we were at our highest altitude, but as we descended the terrain seemed to become a little less familiar coming around Lamoine until we got to the Jordan River Golf Course and followed along route 3 and back toward the airport.

I did have the chance to get a long shot of our house (just to the left of center, above, near the water at the end of the big field) but a lot of the photos were very effected by the small scratched up canopy that was covering us. It was hard to get good angles and avoid reflections and aberrations. The wind roared as we got up to speeds well over one hundred miles per hour and the centrifugal force pulled on us when we turned. It was a blast and thoroughly entertaining for almost an hour! 

What Happened to the Sun?

Today started wonderfully, with the sun rising and beaming in the East, and then, almost suddenly, the clouds moved overhead, the sun disappeared, and the temperature dropped. (That sentence seems to have an awful lot of commas.) Most of the day rained, stronger at some times than others, but pretty steadily, and then this afternoon just before sunset the sun came out and all was well except for the temperature remaining pretty much in the 60's. These photos were taken of Cadillac Mountain from my living room window with a 75-300 mm telephoto lens at both ends of the zoom range.

 

I'm kind of excited that my college roommate Dennis is taking me to the Trenton Airport for a glider ride tomorrow. I'm in hopes to get some great photos and I'll post some tomorrow!