Tag: Close to Home

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Mare's Tails

I would be the first to admit that I struggle to handle wide angle lenses.  They cover a huge amount of real estate which makes it a challenge to control all the details within the frame.  One of the things that I’ve consciously been working on with my rocks at the waters edge project is to use a wide angle for the majority of the images, just to force me to use it and get used to it.  I naturally gravitate towards a longer lens that allows me to extract details from the whole, often resulting in an image that takes a moment to figure out what you’re looking at.  This was the case for the image above.  The larger fishing boats were at the dock in Scituate harbor and the yellow in the nets caught my eye.

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O Summer Where Art Thou

Here we are in the middle of May and in New England, we have rain for the foreseeable future.  What a difference to this time last year.  In May last year I was fortunate enough to travel to England and spend a weekend at my brother’s house.  His back garden at the time was still a work in progress and had been taken over by dandelions.  It was warm here in New England at the time and felt like the middle of summer in the North of England.  While my brother got the grill going I played around with some of the dandelions.  For this shot I picked the dandelion and managed to wedge it into the top of his fence.  The light breeze began blowing the dandelion seeds out of the dandelion head and I was able to get this shot of the action.

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Beach Rope

Although I do my best to make sure that I am up and out shooting on mornings when I’m likely to get ‘good light’ there are those days that I just don’t get it right.  This morning was a good example of that.  I had been expecting to add to my collection of photos of rocks at the waters edge but as it got lighter, or rather as it didn’t get much lighter I realized that the weather forecast of partial cloud cover must have been for somewhere else!  In reality there’s no such thing as bad light, only light that’s not appropriate for your subject.  With the even light that comes with cloudy mornings I turned my attention to the beach – patterns in the sand and anything else  could find.  I’m not sure what the story is behind this rope – how long has it been part of the beach scene?, where did it come from?, will it be uncovered the next time I visit? – but it was a willing subject on a day when I thought I was going to have to go home without making a frame.

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Morning Light

I’ve been continue to work on photographing the seashore and in particular rocks in the water.  As summer approaches sunrise gets ever earlier, making it increasing unlikely that I will hit my self imposed goal of being on location an hour before sunrise.  I enjoy being on location while it is still dark and waiting for the right light.  On this particular morning I was on location 30 minutes before sunrise, with it being almost sunrise by the time I got a shot that I liked.  Once the sun appeared on the horizon I felt it was too bright to make the photographs that I was looking to make and I headed for home and breakfast.

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Rocks and a Sun Rise

I mentioned last week the process of virtual scouting that I use to help me find interesting places to photograph and to make sure that I am there at the right time of day to achieve the photograph that I am aiming for.  The image above was the result of spending an hour or so looking at the satellite map within google maps to find and interesting collection of rocks at the waters edge.  It was then a relatively simple task to work out what days I could expect clear morning skies and what the tide would be on those days.  I arrived here when it was still quite dark.  As the sky became lighter I was able to get a better sense of the beach and how I might photograph it.  Starting on the beach I made a series of images that had me getting closer and closer to the water until the final set, of which the above was the best, where I was stood on the rocks in the breaking surf.

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Virtual Scouting

I was recently describing my process of scouting locations to one of my friends and their response made me think that it would be worth sharing here.  My process is evolving but here is how I’m currently approaching things.

I’ve been working on a project to photograph rocks at the waters edge.  My first move was to find some places where there may be suitable rocks.  For this I turned to google maps in the satellite view and at a decent magnification scanned the coast line close to home. Here’s a screen shot from google maps:

Once I’d found a good location such as the one above I plugged the location into the photographers ephemeris an iPhone app.  The app lets me work out the location of sunrise and sunset.  I realize that I could probably use The Photographer’s Ephemeris to fill the same function as google maps, and I may well transition over at some point, but I feel like I have more screen real estate with google maps than I can have with The Photographer’s Ephemeris.  Here’s a screen shot to from the PC version of the Photographer’s Ephemeris that can be found here.

Since I’m dealing with the ocean I check on the tide table to see whether it will be high tide or low tide.  There are lots of resources for this information.  Because it’s handy I generally use the iPhone app Tides.  There may be better applications for this available but this is easy and it works for me.

Then finally I check the weather using either the 10 day or hourly forecast on the weather channel website.

I’ve tried winging it many times and I’ve had spotty success.  With the process described above I’ve had a little more consistent success.

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Winter Lane

I was starting to think, hoping really, that this was going to be the last image of snow I was going to get this year and then we had more snow showers earlier this week.  Natures way of telling us that there’s still a chance of more snow yet!  I would love to visit Cades Cove in the Smokies and make my own image of the lane that I’ve seen done by so many other people.  Unfortunately my on-going commitments means that it will be a while before I get to do that trip.  Instead I continue to look for opportunities closer to home.  I noticed this lane when I was out hiking one weekend and I’ve been returning to make a series of photographs from this spot that show the changes with the seasons.  I now have two of Winter and will work in the coming year to complete the set with good images of Spring, Summer and Fall.

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Black Rock

Not too far from my home on the south shore is a curious little island.  What intrigues me the most is the building.  Is it a house, fishing shack, government outpost?  Is it abandoned?  I’ve never seen anyone there at any time of the year.  One of these days I’ll find someone to borrow a boat from and go exploring.  Until then I’ll be trying to work things out from the shore.  The light here dies well before sunset.  On this particular evening I spent a while poking around on the beach and realized that there was some nice soft color developing in the sky.  Fortunately I was able to get the color in the sky while the island was still lit by the setting sun.

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Winter Stream

After one of the recent storms I headed out to one of the local conservation areas to see what I could find.  I had been photographing one of the streams in this area before the snow and wanted to see how the snow had changed things.  Increasingly I find with areas that I’ve been to often that I have an image in mind that I want to take.  In this case I’d photographed a series of rocks in a stream before the snow storm and wanted to make some similar images with the rocks covered with snow.  The images I made were okay but as I moved on and continued to photograph the image posted above revealed itself.  This shot captured much my feeling of the couple of hours that I spent tramping around in the snow than my planned images did.  I’m pleased that I continued to explore and photograph after I came what I was after.  A reminder that regardless of what my preconceptions are, its always worth remaining open for other opportunities.

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Winter Trees, Close to Home

We’re in a cycle of one storm per week here in the northeast at the moment.  When I first moved here, over 10 years ago now, having storms that could drop 1 – 2 feet of snow was quite a novelty.  I’d never really seen that much snow before.  As a kid had always wanted to live somewhere where it really snowed.  Well I do now!

I was around the house at the end of last week for a number of reasons.  This photograph is the view from my back door – I didn’t even have to do outside to take it – just before I headed out to scrape some of the snow and ice off my roof. With more snow on the way there’ll be many more opportunities for winter snow pictures!