Tag: Scituate

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Shooting at Home as Though it Were Away

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In writing about getting ready to photograph on the road I realized that I don’t bring that level of rigor to shooting close to home and I should. Home for me is Boston’s South Shore, a region that many people, perhaps most people, zip through on their way to Cape Cod, or Martha’s Vineyard and yet there are lots of great places Hingham, Cohasset, and Scituate among them.

In looking for local photographers that fueled the fire for me I realized that the south shore is underserved by the kind of photographers and photography that I like. The Focus Gallery does a great job of highlighting Boston area photographers with perhaps Cindy Vallino and Mike Sleeper being the most local of the locals.

I do have one book on my shelves that has been good for getting ideas about potential locations – Boston’s South Shore and a quick search on amazon shows another couple of books that I ought to have on my shelves. My major tool for researching potential locations has been a combination of the satellite view tool in google maps, the photographers ephemeris and of course doing the leg work of driving to check places out. I’ve written about this kind of virtual scouting before and you can see the process that I use by clicking here.

If you do live in a location like I do, where there is relatively little in the way of resources to draw on you’re in a great position to explore the area both virtually and in person and find unique locations that few others are photographing. Go for it!

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Wide Angle Distortion – Does this Lens Make me Look Fat?

Over Labor Day weekend I spent some time playing with my regular lens walk around lens, Canon’s 24-104, but using it at the wide angle setting. I know that wide angle lenses can cause distortion and have particularly noticed curved horizons as the a byproduct of working with the wide angle. Converging verticals and keystoning are also other hallmarks of a wide angle lens.

I’ve read all this in books but hadn’t really internalized it until I made this image:

Sort of annoying because I wanted to include a big open sky.

Keeping the sensor parrallel to the lighthouse resulted in this:

A little better. When I got this home I used the function within lightroom to correct for the lens used and got this image:

I looked at this for a while but couldn’t put my finger on what was the problem with it. Then it dawned on me. Correcting for lens distortion made the lighthouse ‘chunkier’ than it actually seems in real life. There’s a lesson for all of us in that – be careful with automatic settings. They work great the majority of the time but not always.

I finally decided on how I wanted the image to look and came up with this:

Tons of fun and some good lessons.

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Labor Day Labors

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!

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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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Nailed It!

The older I get the more that shiny and new has limited appeal, with the exception of new camera gear of course!  The bag that I’ve carried files around in for the last 5 or 6 years has had all the rough edges worn off, my 10 year old jeep gets me where I need to be be when I need to be there.  I have a hankering for a new SUV, a mid-70’s Ford Bronco but that’s another story.  So it ought not be a revelation to me that the things that catch my eye are those things with character.  That was the case when I was out for a walk around the harbor in Scituate when this well used telephone pole caught my eye.  It’s clearly see many posters in it’s time and will likely see more in the future.

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Minot Ledge Lighthouse

I spent an hour or so photographing at a cove along Jerusalem Road in Cohasset last week.  You lose the light there long before sunset and so I was on the road home when I couldn’t help but stop to make a few images of Minot Ledge Lighthouse caught in the warm light of the late afternoon sun.

Minot Ledge Lighthouse celebrated it’s 150 th anniversary last year.  Known to some as the ‘I love you’ lighthouse because of it’s 1-4-3 flashing cycle, the 150 year old lighthouse is now up for sale under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act.  Hopefully the next owner will maintain and preserve this part of our coastal heritage.

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Scituate Sunset

Sometimes I head out with a clear idea of the photograph I want to capture.  Other times, I don’t have a good idea.  On those days I’m not sure why I even head out of the door, especially with the kind of weather we’ve had here in New England in recent weeks.

After finishing up at the conservation area, and getting the image that I showed last week, I headed over to Scituate harbor.  I’m not sure what I was expecting – the sky was white, heavy with more snow, and so I had low expectations of making any photographs.  Nevertheless I drove over to the harbor to take a look.  I was surprised when I got there.  The sky had begun to light up and was drawing quite a crowd.  Although the photograph doesn’t quite do the scene justice it looked as though someone was shooting a giant laser into the sky.  Pretty amazing!

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Michael Brandon

I was surprised to hear on the news recently that a fishing boat from Scituate had been involved with a freighter and badly damaged.  I was even more surprised to hear that the fishing boat was the ‘Michael Brandon’, one of the boats that I have photographed regularly during my visits to Scituate harbor.

I wish the owner Thomas Bell the very best of luck in getting Michael Brandon back in operation again and I for one will look forward to seeing her reclaim her place in the Scituate fishing fleet.

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Morning at the Harbor Breakwater

I continue to explore the coast and harbors close to home looking for different viewpoints.  On this particular morning I was on location while it was still dark and as the sky began to lighten ventured beyond the warmth of my car.  Overnight there had been a light dusting of snow, most of which had been blown away but some remained, to provide highlights to the buildings and rocks.  Unfortunately what I took for snow on the breakwater was actually a layer of ice.  Waves washing up and over the breakwater had left the breakwater with a thin, but very slick coating of ice.  My first confident step onto the ‘snow’ put me very quickly on my back.  Fortunately neither me nor my gear were worse for wear and I was able to make this image.  I was however much more careful as I returned to the car!