I sincerely hope that your Halloween was less eventful than it has been for many residents of New England. An early winter snow dropped several inches of snow on the region, leaving many without power, prompting many towns to shift their Halloween festivities to the coming weekend.
The image above was taken before the games began, while my family were looking for pumpkins for the front step. Taken with my iPhone this image was processed with my usual lomography workflow.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, my attempts to head north for some fall foliage photography this year have been thwarted. Instead I’m making the most of the local color using both my regular DSLR and the iPhone. I am working up a set of iPhone photographs made using the lomography workflow I described in a previous post. I’m not sure where I’m going to go with the project but I’m having fun and starting to develop an idea about how the photos should look rather than relying on what the presets give me. Often this means that I’ll initially process the image and then as I live with the original processed image for a while I’ll find things that I want to change. This was certainly true of the image above that was taken just in front of my house. This image is now into the third iteration of edits. I’m finally liking it as it is, although digital editing means that it is way to easy to go back and tinker some more.
I’ve been returning to the same stretch of coastline for the best part of year now, while I continue to enjoy my early morning jaunts, one of my friends suggested that I’ve gotten stuck in a rut. I would argue against that, I am after all making photographs that I particularly enjoy and I don’t feel as though I’m repeating myself. Yet, the rocks are becoming awfully familiar.
So are we all done here? That was the question that was going through my the morning that I made the photo above. It was already much lighter than I like for my photographs but the line of the rock caught my eye and I stuck around to make a few frames.
How many times have you seen something that you’ve thought would make a great photograph but you’ve kept going, thinking that you’ll get it on the way back or tomorrow or the next time your in town? If you’re like me you’ve done this dozens of times. I’m always rushing from one place to another so much so that there’s little time for those scenes that you just happen upon. The photograph above is one example of such an image. I’ve driven by this tractor on a weekly basis for over 7 years, it’s on the way to the local coffee shop, but it wasn’t until this week that I actually stopped and took the photograph. I was pleased that I did. I got a photo that I was happy with and got to meet Chrissie Dahlstrom. To see Chrissie’s version of her tractor click here.
Although I’ve had an iPhone for quite a while, it wasn’t until this summer that I finally got turned onto it as a camera. I’m very familiar with the ‘best camera is the one you have with you’ refrain but wasn’t that excited by what I saw in the results. So what changed? I was thinking about something a workshop student said last year – ‘I’ve been wrong all these years’. I realize that I have a particular idea about how my photos should look, how much processing they should see, how they should be presented. It goes on and on. Not that any of this is particularly bad. Having these kinds of bounds results in a particular look or style that in time becomes uniquely you and so I maintain that aesthetic with photos taken using my DSLR. With the iPhone however, all bets are off. I push and pull, add textures, funky borders, effects that I would never otherwise have dreamed of. As a result not only am I having fun but I’m taking photographs more regularly than I would have otherwise and of subjects that I would have normally walked by or in the case of the photograph above, rowed by.
After spending time at Lucy Vincent Beach, other Martha’s Vineyard beaches pale by comparison. That’s not to say that there are interesting images to be had here. I decided to forgo the bandstand in Ocean Park and headed down to the beach. There were a couple of piles of rocks and old pilings at the waters edge that caught my attention. The image above was one of the more successful images.
I was lucky enough to spend my first evening on Martha’s Vineyard with my friend Ginny Newton. Ginny was the winner of Yankee Magazine‘s Editors’ Choice Photo Contest in 2010 and was also a guest blogger over on the Yankee Magazine webpage. We met at Alison Shaw’s gallery in Oak Bluffs and then Ginny gave me a guide tour of the campgrounds. I guess this area is more formally known as the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association Campgrounds. In any case the little cottages are pretty neat and Ginny had some fun stories to share of staying in various cottages including one across from Shel Silverstein. The Camp Meeting Association is a religious association dating back to 1835. As one might expect at the center of the campgrounds is The Tabernacle – a really interesting structure that has dozens of stained glass windows. Because of the way the stained glass is arranged there are interesting colored patterns to be captured throughout the entire day. I had a fun couple of hours on two occasions photographing the colored light.
I’m on Martha’s Vineyard this week to attend Alison Shaw’s photography workshop. The weather has been good but we’ve lacked the spectacular sunrises and sunsets so far his week. One of the things that going out regardless of the weather is that it pushes you to go beyond the bounds of what you might think are conditions needed for great photographs. I’ve bumped up against this a couple of times already this year and again for our evening at Lucy Vincent beach. There was a decent amount of cloud cover and it got foggy as the evening wore on. The image below was my favorite from the ones that I’ve reviewed so far.
One of the things that I like about digital photography is how easy it is to try things out and get immediate feedback. I have heard people say that they are switching back to film because the constraints of using film force them to be more creative. For a while I almost bought that argument. I do believe that all innovation is a creative response to overcome a problem, obstacle or constraint. Why not instead of retreat to film use digital technology under a defined set of rules? The instantaneous feedback that digital offers can then be used to adapt, modify or improve upon what you’ve just done. This past labor day I was playing with my usual walkabout lens the Canon 24-104 but using it at the wide end of that range just to see what I would get. I had fun, answered some questions and ended up with the image above. If all my labors were like this they wouldn’t feel like labor!
I had two surprises last week at my favorite beach for sunrise photography. I had probably been photographing for 15 mins when I noticed that there was a fire further up the beach – it was still quite dark at 5 am and so hard to miss. As I looked closer I realized that there was someone sat at the fire and so I didn’t feel a pressing need to rush over to investigate further. I did have a chance to chat later – it was someone on the first night of their vacation so excited to be at the coast that they wanted to be sure they saw the sunrise and were keeping themselves warm while they waited. As it got lighter I also realized that there was a sailboat anchored in the cove and I rushed over to take the shot above. While it’s hard to tell from this image, the sailboat was probably in about 12 inches of water and must have been on the bottom at low tide. I’m not sure what kind of boat can stand that treatment but it made a nice change.
