A walk in the woods

I returned to Great Falls recently for a morning walk in the woods. It's one of my favorite locations. A frost still clung to the trees as I walked up the Gold Mine trail. This time of year the sun is low, the shadows long, and the trees mostly bare. In spite of the temperature and the season the woods were inviting.

The image has no people, no evergreens, no snow. But I like it anyway and made it into our seasonal card for this year. I wish all of you a warm wonderful holiday and a peaceful, healthy and prosperous new year.

Gold Mine Trail

Turn around

One of the best pieces of photographic advice I've heard is "Turn around." In my mind that means: when you're working hard on a particular subject or scene, remember to look at the rest of the world too.

Once I was shooting the Potomac River upstream of Great Falls, MD. I was on a rock at the river's edge, trying to compose some foreground vegetation, the river, and trees on the opposite bank. None of it worked very well. Eventually I gave up and turned to go back to the car. Just a few feet away was a gnarled tree with exposed, tangled roots...a wonderful subject that had been right behind me as I was looking the other way.

Tree and Roots

This summer we traveled to Quebec City, Canada. One brilliant afternoon we took a short ferry ride across the Saint Lawrence River to Levis. I wandered about the ship shooting the city and the river. The sun was low and Quebec City was strongly back-lit; difficult conditions. But as I turned from looking at one shore to the other, I noticed the ferry itself.

Quebec-Levis Ferry

In the "About Me" bio on this blog, I said that photography allows and requires me to look carefully at the natural world. But photography, like the world, is limitless. There are more potential images than can ever be captured. If in our concentration on one subject we forget to occasionally look in the other direction, we will miss things. Turn around.

(By the way, I made a print of the ferry shot on Hahnemuhle Photo Silk Baryta. I've been trying out some papers and I like this one a lot.)

October at the beach

We've often traveled to Lewes, DE for fun, food and relaxation. Recently we spent a weekend with family in nearby Rehobeth, DE. I'd never seen the southern portion of Cape Henlopen, which includes marshes and the beautiful Gordons Pond wildlife area. A bicycle ride opened my eyes and I set out with camera the next morning.

But first, I stopped at one of my favorite locations in Lewes, the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal. The combination of water, plant life, and sky in this spot draws me back again and again.

Lewes and Rehoboth Canal, October 2015

The vegetation at Gordons Pond had some autumn colors. It was a sunny Sunday morning perfect for shooting (though it might have been better earlier...I was at the canal at that point.) We are fortunate to have public areas dedicated to preserving environments like this. Thanks, Delaware.

Gordons Pond

New images from an old lens

In an earlier post I wrote that I'd enjoyed working with the old Nikkor 50mm lens from my Nikkormat FT3. Alas it has gathered too much grunge over the decades to be a useful working lens, but I loved the long focusing throw and the largish aperture (f/2) and speculated I could buy a clean used version pas très cher.

My favorite place for buying and selling used gear is KEH. Sure enough they had a pretty decent selection of old 50mm Nikon lenses. I ended up with the lens pictured below. According to Ken Rockwell's terrific site on Nikon lens technology, it's an AI (for automatic indexing) lens circa 1977. It's very clean and was a bargain at $89 plus shipping. It mounts with no fuss, focuses smoothly, and is just fun to use. Kudos to Nikon for keeping the F mount compatible for all these years.

Nikkor 50mm f/1.8, circa 1977

This morning as I labored in the back yard, Susan called my attention to the light in the dogwood branch over my head (I am very lucky to have a spouse with an eye for beauty). Not wanting to waste good light I dropped my shovel and grabbed the D750 and 50mm. Here's one of the shots:

Dogwood Berries

Not bad for old glass. During our trip to the Finger Lakes and Canada, I took the 50mm out one day in Ottawa instead of lugging the whole camera bag around. I took this picture of the National Gallery of Canada with it.

Ceiling, National Gallery of Canada

Obviously I'm happy with my new, old-but-capable lens.

Summer in the North, Part 2

(See previous post for Part 1: the Finger Lakes and Ottawa)

Our next stop was Montreal. Befitting its big-city status, it offered traffic jams, construction and detours. Once settled, though, we enjoyed ourselves.

The Nikon D750 performed well. The low-light performance, aided by noise reduction in Lightroom, is very good. The altar of the spectacular Notre-Dame Basilica was shot hand-held at ISO 12,800, 1/30 sec. at f/8. I'm happy with the results.

Notre-Dame altar, Montreal

The vibration control seems to work well on the Tamron 24-70mm lens. The pulpit was shot at 1/6 sec. handheld. The wood ornamentation in the basilica is jaw-dropping.

Notre-Dame pulpit

Montreal has a botanical garden of 185 acres, including both greenhouse and outdoor areas. It is beautiful and, at latitude 45.5 degrees North, astonishing to someone from Maryland. We spent a lovely morning there. The bonsai exhibit, courtesy of China (so it's actually penzai) was a highlight but the entire place is worth seeing.

Orange Jasmine penzai

Phlox

East to Quebec. Many told us "you'll think you're in Europe" and old Quebec City does have an Old World feel: narrow, curving streets, old stone buildings, and window boxes side-by-side with monumental architecture.

Old Quebec City street

 

Quebec Seminary

I especially like the way the D750 preserves shadow detail. I used the highlight-weighted metering mode a lot. The resulting images have underexposed areas that really come back to life when you adjust the exposure and reduce the highlights in Lightroom. This Quebec skyline shows the Chateau Frontenac (left), once a grand residence for British governors and now a hotel. I shot directly into the sun. Here are the before and after results. Look how much detail I could retrieve from the shadows without blowing out the sky.

Quebec Skyline (as shot)

Quebec Skyline (post-processing)

As in past trips, we found Canada beautiful, friendly, and rich in culture and history. If you have a chance to go, take it!

Summer in the North, Part 1

We traveled north this summer, visiting the Finger Lakes, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. The weather was simply wonderful: sunny days with moderate temperatures and low humidity. Even the bugs seemed inclined to relax, rather than annoy us. 

We tasted wine, of course (see earlier post). Wineries are prolific in the region. Our first overnight was at the beautiful, relaxing Driftwood Inn on the shore of Lake Cayuga. Our hosts and the other guests (a friendly group from Buffalo) made the stay enjoyable. And the region is very lovely this summer. Field and forest were green and lush. It appeared they were having a bumper season for hay.

Pier at Cayuga Lake

Hay Wagons, Ovid NY

We drove to Ottawa to stay with friends we met while traveling in Vietnam. They have an amazing home in the middle of the city, from which they showed us Ottawa's highlights. We walked almost everywhere--I can see the attraction of city living, especially when the weather is so fine. And Ottawa is a great city, compact, clean and studded with interesting sights. Parliament, naturally, but also the Rideau Canal, opened in 1832 to connect the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. The first several locks are stacked together downtown. The canal is still in use, mostly for recreational boats. To the right of the canal in the photo is the grand early 20th century Chateau Laurier hotel. The National Gallery of Canada is housed in a beautiful glass and granite building; we enjoyed exhibits of works by Alex Coville and Mary Pratt. Opposite the Gallery, and framed here by the legs of its enormous arachnid sculpture, is the Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica.

Parliament Centre Block, Ottawa

Rideau Canal Locks, Ottawa

Ceiling, National Gallery of Canada

Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica, Ottawa

This post is getting rather long, so I'll end it here and write another about Montreal and Quebec City.

Another iPhone 5s shot

I've written before about the iPhone 5s and its camera: see this post which described how it worked out for me in Italy.

The 5s continues to be the best camera-that-you-have-with-you, at least for me. I'm never out of the house without it. True, it works best in daylight, it only produces JPEGs, and the controls are limited. There are apps that add useful features (I like Camera+ but haven't tried others) but in the end it's pretty much a point-and-shoot.

We traveled to the Finger Lakes region of New York recently. There are wineries EVERYWHERE! We stopped at one, Sheldrake Point on Lake Cayuga in Ovid, NY. There were two folks playing guitar and banjo on the lawn, kids romping on the grass, and a food truck. And wine. What more could you ask for on a beautiful summer afternoon?

You could ask for a camera. Or you could put down your wine, pull out your iPhone and get a nice shot of the late day sun across the lawn and vineyard.

Sheldrake Winery, Ovid NY