Rambles

I remember laying in the grass as a child gazing up at the ever changing shapes and variations in the clouds. That fascination has never left, I still find the landscape of the sky an endless source of  inspiration and delight. The image I put up today on my home page, “Maple, Pine and Cirrus”, is a reflection of that. Combined with the grounding branches of the trees below, the feathery cirrus clouds create intriguing patterns and relationships. It’s those patterns that I found the most interesting which is what prompted me to convert the image to black and white letting those elements control the image rather than the colorful greens and blues of leaf and sky.

One disadvantage of still photography, of course, is that it only captures a fleeting record of one brief moment in the constant changing of those relationships. Still, it is a memory preserved and with any luck a pleasing composition chosen from many possibilities. I’ve been teaching some photography workshops over the past few summers in the course of which the participants are all out shooting pictures in the same rich but necessarily limited setting. I am always amazed at how differently those students “see” the same environment. Even photos taken of virtually the same subject come out as very different images. And it’s not a result of different people shooting different cameras, it’s a difference of how we look at the world.

We’ve been having an unusually wet and cool spring up here in the northeast this year and as a result haven’t been doing as much paddling or biking as we would like or as much as we’ve done in past years. Not so sure that’s much of an excuse,

Bullhead Lily against reflected blue of the sky.

but the fact is we haven’t really been paddling or biking until this week – at which time we have managed to get in some of both. Now that the ice has been broken, it will hopefully continue.

High water from the rains allows unusual access

Another area that’s been a bit neglected is the taking of new photos. Here it is Spring, the season of new growth and blossoms (both providing appealing photographic opportunities), and I’ve done very little shooting. All through the winter, a challenging time for picture taking anyway, I meant to get to the rather daunting task of going through my photo files to cull out ones that aren’t really worth keeping. Shooting digitally, it’s amazing how quickly one amasses large numbers of files. But I got bogged down with that too. I have managed to institute a somewhat successful new policy, however. For most of this year, I have been culling the most obvious rejects from every shoot immediately after I download the files from the camera’s memory card. I’m probably not as strict as I might be, but I’m definitely storing considerably fewer files than I was before. There’s no question that storage memory has become quite cheap, but there is really no reason to store bad images. Now, there’s still that little backlog of accumulated photos going back to 2004.

Drobo on my desk.

On the subject of storage, the storage/backup system I’m using is a thing called Drobo. It was heavily publicized and promoted about a year ago and was getting good reviews. I went with it. Now I hardly see it advertised at all and see little mention of it in the media. Makes one wonder about the choice. It’s working just fine and does what it’s supposed to do, but is it loosing favor in the marketplace? And if so, what will that mean for those of us who are relying on it? Perhaps another cautionary tale about being too early in on a new technology. Could Drobo be an other BetaMax?

Welcome, I hope, to a new and hopefully better way of keeping an up-to-date set of entries going.

This has been a week we could have done without. It was a week of loses. The closest to home was our wonderful golden, Mac. Lose of pets is never easy and sometimes makes you wonder why you put yourself in that position at all. But then you think of all the years of joy and companionship that comes with it and the lose is a bit easier to accept. But I won’t include a photo of good dog Mac here because that strikes me as a bit maudlin.

So, onto more pleasant aspects of the week. Let’s see now, what would they be… Not the rain, which has been rather incessant, except for Wednesday which was gorgeous. And not the temps, unseasonably cool. And not the lack of exercise, too wet for biking. I guess one would be a visit from local friend, Phil Gallos, who is working on a project he calls “How Many Artists Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?” (Check out his website)in which he is photographing a number of regional artists of all stripes. Monday was my turn. So here’s a shot I got of him photographing me photographing him.

Phil on shore as I shoot from a kayak

Another good thing that happened this week was the chance discovery of a lovely little patch of Jack-in-the-Pulpits growing near the house. The home page image is a close-up of one in full bloom. I have no idea how long they’ve been there, quite some time I would assume; but this is the first I’ve noticed them. So much for observational skills.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Now all I have to do is find where the morels hide. Here’s hoping the coming week is better.

Burdette

June 12, 2009:
I am just back from a few days on the island of Bermuda. Weather there was lovely, as it usually is, but it seems a strange time of the year to be leaving the Adirondacks to go anywhere. Granted, the temps were warmer in Bermuda than they were in the mountains while we were gone, but warm and humid isn’t necessarily my favorite thing – had plenty of that in Texas years ago. There were a couple of hot, humid afternoons in Bermuda I was thinking fondly of cool mountain air and even cooler mountain lakes.

A new sport that seems to have Bermudians excited is Surfing. It was definitely THE thing to be doing on Saturday. It looks like a lot of fun and like it could get pretty thrilling (ie. flying through the air well above the water doing loops).

Beautiful day for a picturesque sport.

I declined to give it a try. Maybe another time. For this trip we contented ourselves with a little body surfing. No broken parts and nothing more serious than a bathing suit full of sand.

I spent most of my time there, while I wasn’t being just plain lazy, wandering about with camera in hand. I was again fascinated by one of the birds that grace the shores of Bermuda, the Bermuda Longtail. They are so beautiful in flight. But birds being the challenging subjects they are, my success was limited. I spent my time on the beach trying to get shots of them in flight.

Graceful Longtail soars above

As we were leaving, I watched some flying below us and wished I had thought to get some shots of them from above. They have lovely markings.

They like to fly in groups

Burdette