Chasing the Light

It’s the season for top ten lists. I know I’ve read at least five top ten 2012 movie lists in addition to all the other lists that have been featured on-line and in newspapers in the last month. Last year was a signature photographic travel year for me with journeys to the Galapagos islands, Patagonia, Acadia and the Southwest all on my 2012 itinerary. I’m usually a looking forward guy and don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. But as the year ended I thought I should spend a moment reflecting on the images I made in the past twelve months and that maybe I could learn some lessons that I could apply in the future.

As I reviewed the best of the 9,000 images I made in 2013, it made sense to divide them up into two categories; people & animals and landscapes. So I bring you my ten favorite people & animal images from 2012 with the top ten landscape images to come in the next posting.

Because they were used as sustenance by pirates and then by Nantucket whalers, tortoise populations were driven to very low numbers and some species became extinct by the early 20th century. fortunately, conservation efforts in the last fifty years have resulted in a rise in the tortoise census. Most tortoises seen by tourists are on Eco-farms or in the Darwin Research Station. There are large numbers of tortoises in the wild but in areas in which tourists are not allowed. This fellow is having a snack and the concentration of the image on the head and scaly arms provide a great portrait.

This was taken in a popular city square in Quito, Ecuador. There were hundreds of pigeons being fed by several youngsters who were having great fun running through the sitting birds in order to get them to fly and scatter. We were with a guide at this time and unbeknownst to me as I was taking these shots, a thief was eyeing my camera and was chased off by our guide. I like this image because it captures the delight of the boy and also shows the birds fleeing him.

I shot this on Gardner Bay, a drop dead beautiful beach in the Galapagos. On this day we counted 339 Sea Lions lounging on the pristine white sand. They hadn’t a care in the world and were completely nonplussed by us fifteen humans walking among them.

This young lady was being pushed around town in her stroller by her teenage brother when I saw her and asked to take a photograph. I took several and then suddenly she gave me the raspberry and I snapped this image. Could her eyes be any deeper?

Nothing prepares you for the startling appearance of these birds. The feet which attract the opposite sex during mating season, are redder than you thought possible. And the light blue and pink beak colors complement the red feet. Boobys are expert fishermen and spend most of their lives over the ocean alighting on land only to raise their chicks.

As a photographer, sometimes you just have to be ready and lucky. My wife and I were on a side street in a small Ecuadorian town when across the street this young fellow was eating and walking along side a large orange billboard. I raised my camera and took two quick shots and managed to place him walking into the image while eating a mouthfull….and looking directly at me. Perfect!

While strolling down the main street in Provincetown, MA on a Saturday night, we heard disco music coming from up ahead. When we turned the next corner we ran smack into a boisterous “Pink Party” spread over the street and the veranda of a local house. The music was pulsating on the veranda and everybody was prancing up a storm in full pink regalia. We would have gone into the house but felt a little under dressed. It was crazy fun!

Here are a pair of Noddy Terns on a shelf in the Galapagos. These photographs are always serendipitous in that when the photographer snaps the shutter he is looking to get an interesting interaction between the two birds and doesn’t really know that he’s captured these striking eyes until he sees the image on a computer monitor.

The native dress of Ecuadorian women make them great photographic subjects. I shot this woman in the main square in Quito, Ecuador while she was enjoying a cup of ice cream.

Darwin called these marine iguanas the ugliest creatures on earth. Maybe so, but they are a photographers dream. The challenge for photographers when shooting subjects that have been shot thousands of times previously is to get images that are different and show the animals in a different way. I like the way these guys are lined up surveying the scene and using the proper camera settings blurs the background which allows them to stand out clearly.

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Shrewsbury, MA

“Next stop Grand Central Terminal” announced the Metro North train’s driver. We were on our way into Manhattan to meet our friends Katie and Greg to see the sights in the worlds most famously decked out holiday city. We weren’t alone. Each winter, New York City draws millions of tourists who admire the exquisite Christmas window displays adorning the stores along Fifth Avenue and flock to watch the skaters glide on the Rockefeller Skating Rink as the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree glows beneath the city skyline.

Rockefeller Center is the epicenter of Christmas magic in Manhattan. The skating rink at 30 Rock, the Christmas tree, the Sax Fifth Ave building light show, Radio City Music Hall and many highly decorated fifth avenue stores are all either within or very close to Rockefeller Center.

The Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center has been a tradition since the opening of 30 Rock (NBC studios) in 1933. The tree is usually a Norway Spruce that is between 70-100 ft. tall and sourced somewhere in the Northeast. The decorated Christmas tree remains lit at Rockefeller Center through January 6, which is the Christian feast of The Epiphany. Then it is removed from the premises and recycled for a variety of uses.

Radio City Music Hall is one of the fourteen Rockefeller Center buildings. The Radio City Christmas Spectacular is an annual musical holiday stage show presented at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The show features over 140 performers, lavish sets and costumes and an original musical score. The 90 minute revue combines singing, dancing and humor with traditional scenes in spectacular stage settings. The star performers are the women’s precision dance troupe known as the Rockettes. Since the first version was presented in 1933, the show has become a New York Christmas tradition seen by more than a million visitors a year.

At the base of 30 Rock, the skating rink is the center of holiday activity. The statue of Prometheus oversees the skaters after they have sometimes waited hours to get a turn on the rink. In December and especially on weekends, this area welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists and at times it can be literally difficult to move from one place to another.

Central Skating Rink — Wollman Skating Rink – Central Park

Gliding gracefully across the ice while surrounded by the splendid Manhattan skyline, the Wollman rink is New York magic at its best. The Wollman rink is one of two skating rinks in Central Park.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
We’re happy tonight.
Walking in a winter wonderland.

(Winter Wonderland – 1934 Bernard/Smith)

I captured this scene a few days after a massive snowstorm in New York City. The storm dumped almost three feet of snow on Central Park and changed the park into a winter wonderland.

Ornaments near Rockefeller Center — Ornaments on Avenue of Americas

These have been on display since 1993. The steel-reinforced fiberglass balls with chrome-finished caps and hooks require a complete draining of the fountain in front of 1251 Avenue of the Americas for their installation — usually just before Thanksgiving weekend.

They were designed by Stephen Stefan of the Dallas-based company Venue Arts, who says he was inspired by the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg was known for his rendering of everyday objects on a large-scale in public places.

Of course Macy’s in Herald Square on 34th St. is the location of the famous 1947 movie Miracle on 34th St. in which establishment figures question the existence of Santa Claus. The Macys Christmas windows are a must see in New York and the sidewalk lines on weekends are usually quite long.

My best wishes to you all for a joyful holiday season, a healthy new year and more peace in the world.

Shrewsbury, MA

Puffs of smoke and the screech of tires from touchdown dissipated into the darkness as my late night Jetblue flight taxied to the gate. “Welcome to Las Vegas. Your checked bags will be at carousel five” announced our flight attendant. After gathering my camera bag I shuffled off the plane with my fellow passengers and went to carousel five to get my luggage. It arrived quickly and I moved outside to get a taxi

The taxi line at McCarron Field is very organized. You get in the taxi line which is monitored and managed by several efficient folks who move you to a location where a taxi and you arrive simultaneaously. The line took a few minutes to clear everyone and I took the opportunity to once again congratulate myself for getting a great room at Circus Circus for $27.

My fortiesh driver popped out of his taxi sporting a bright yellow mohawk bisecting his shaved skull and accessorizing tats over most of his body, including his skull. And of course he wore the appropriate Megadeath teeshirt with chains that could have been used as snow chains in Minneapolis in January. As we drove to Circus Circus, I initiated a little small talk and asked what brought him to Las Vegas. “About ten years ago I lived in Indiana when my ex-wife and her boyfriend kidnapped my daughter and moved her to Michigan”, he said. He proceeded to narrate a personal saga of retribution that included breaking and entering, car chases, weapons, heavy police presence across the midwest, incarceration and finally refuge in Las Vegas. Jeez! I’ve been picked up by Travis Bickel.

We stopped at a traffic light and he rolled down his window next to a car of fully decked out young women and sought their friendship by asking several personal intimate questions. The girls rolled their eyes and windows and moved on down the road. He did this several more times at other traffic lights using pick up lines that, according to him, almost always land him a girlfriend or two for the evening. It didn’t appear to be working. My head was on a desperate swivel looking for Circus Circus.

Fifty miles northeast of Las Vegas, Valley of Fire State Park is Nevada’s oldest state park. After being in the park for a while, one gets the feeling that in some past time an ancient artistic God was challenged to decorate this land with the wildest possible array of sandstone sculptures and that he took his work seriously.

The park derives its name from the red sandstone formations created during the dinosaur age by uplifting of the land and refined over millions of years by constant wind and water erosion. It’s formations are unlike many other southwest sandstone formations which have a weathered smooth appearance from all the years of wind and water. These formations have a jagged look as if they were sandstone lava that just popped out of the earth’s crust and recently cooled.

Summer temperatures in the park can approach 120 degrees so the other three seasons are great times to visit the park.

This is an area called the Fire Wave. It’s one of the really cool locations in the park but confoundingly, it’s not on any of the park provided maps.

The Atlatl, the predecessor to the bow and arrow, was a notched stick used by ancient peoples to throw spears. You can see a depiction of it in the bottom center of this petroglyph image. It’s thought that this wall art was created about 3,000 years ago. Some of the images on the wall are obvious but others are still mysteries to the university experts. Sadly, the parts of this wall art that are reachable have now been protected with a hard plastic shell because some visitors to the park have seen fit to scratch graffiti among the figures.

This is the situation that photographers look for; shafts of light shooting across a grand landscape. In this case the main shaft of light illuminates formations in the center of the image, but there is also some light on the background formations in the upper third of the image.

I like the look of the fire raging in the clouds in this image. I wish I had found a better foreground that might have had a line of these bushes leading to the distant cloud fire.

This image and the next image are from a different state park, Coral Dunes State Park in Utah. They were both taken late in the afternoon with dramatic sidelighting.

There are special challenges involved in photographing sand dunes. Protecting equipment from the blowing sand is very important. On this day the wind was blowing a modest 10-15 mph but it carried this fine dust which will get into every part of your camera if it’s not protected. I used a plastic cover which was not 100% effective.

Shrewsbury, MA

I was seated at a booth in Escobar’s Mexican Restaurant in Kanab, Utah, when Camille approached me with her name tag and pad and pencil in hand. “What’ll you have?”, she asked. She didn’t approach me with the ingenuous greeting of so many servers….”Hi, my name is Camille and I’ll be your server today”. Nope, Camille didn’t play that. I immediately knew this was my kind of place. But it was more than the lack of the faux friendly greeting. It was the fellow diners who were all local blue-collar folks, the decor which was decidedly not high fashion, the smell from the kitchen which screamed serious chile, and the unpretentious look and attitude of the restaurant and employees. If the place ever had pretense, it had taken the train to Santa Fe long ago. The weathered look, the scarred and well used wooden tables and chairs, and the slightly tacky wall art all communicated substance and authenticity. Yep, this was my kind of place. I ordered the special; Flautas.

Settled by ten Mormon families in 1870, Kanab is a small and amiable town of about 3,000 folks in southern Utah just a few miles north of the Arizona border. It’s surrounded by the red cliffs and canyons of Escalante National Monument and is a very popular setting for Hollywood movies. It gained traction as a movie location in the 1950s when many of the Hollywood westerns made in that era were filmed in and around Kanab. Since then over two hundred movies have been filmed in the area and the town has become known as “Little Hollywood”.The town’s main drag is populated with placards and photos commemorating many of the movies and movie stars who have appeared in the town.

But for tourists, photographers and adventurers, Kanab is the gateway to some of our country’s most exciting and spectacular locales. It sits centrally among what many would argue are our country’s most beautiful national protected lands; Zion, Bryce and Grand Canyon (north rim) National Parks, Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness Area, and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

Hidden in the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Wilderness area, about forty miles east of Kanab, you will find North Coyote Buttes. North Coyote Buttes is an amazing explosion of swirling eroding and sometimes grotesque looking Navajo Jurassic Sandstone with dinosaur tracks traversing many of the formations. Among all of the wonderful formations in the area, the unrivaled rock star of rock formations is an area of roughly 5,000 sq ft called “The Wave”. The story goes that Europeans discovered the wave 20-30 years ago and made it famous. Of course, they didn’t really discover it, but the formation gained enormous notoriety in Europe and landed on the bucket list of most Europeans who visited the American southwest. Eventually the formation became so popular that the Bureau of Land Management instituted a permit system in which only twenty people a day can visit the area. Ten are awarded using an on-line system months prior to the visit day and ten are awarded by lottery the day before the intended visit. In the Spring and Summer months, the BLM office in Kanab regularly gets over 100 people entering the lottery and most days half of all lottery hopefuls are from outside the U.S.

Because of the positioning of the wave, it only gets full sunlight in the summer months. The opportune time to photograph it is either in full sunlight or on an overcast day, which doesn’t happen that often in a place that gets over 300 days of sunlight a year. So on a sunny November day a photographer needs to pick out smaller pieces of the formation that are either in full sun or full shade.

North Coyote Buttes contains an incredible diversity of colors and formations, but amazingly many visitors hike to the wave, check it off their photographic bucket list by taking a few photos and then turn around and hike out. Those folks are missing a lot. Look at the above photo; all of the muffin top formations lie in front of sweeping horizontal and diagonal lines some of which swirl around the cone-shaped formation in the center right portion of the image. It’s a great juxtaposition of lines and texture!

This is the same area as the above photo but with a vertical view. Most photographers don’t take enough vertical images.

“The Wave” is just behind these round popover like formations.

Clear blue skies are normally desirable, but not so much for photographers. We prefer some clouds..dramatic weather borne clouds if possible. On clear blue sky days, I prefer to find images without the sky. The other option is to use a polarizer filter and turn the sky a deep blue and use it to frame the main image.

There’s an old adage that if a million monkeys typed for a million years that one of them would eventually correctly type the entire Gettysburg Address, complete with punctuation! There must be a geologic corollary which states that over the course of a million years with wind, water and climatic changes occurring regularly, somewhere on earth a perfect sandstone hamburger will form. How did McDonalds miss this?

This section of North Coyote Buttes is Fatali’s Boneyard named after photographer Michael Fatali who made some striking images of the area and popularized them through his gallery in Springdale, UT.

Shrewsbury, MA

“Can I help you?” The question floated through the car window from the speaker of my local Dunkin Donuts drive through. I was on my way north for five days to photograph New England’s autumn splendor. The Vermont state website map showed peak colors for my southern Vermont destination. It was going to be great. “I’ll have a pumpkin bagel with pumpkin cream cheese and a coffee with cream” I said. I would have ordered the pumpkin coffee latte as well, but I had heard stories and didn’t want to be over pumkinated on my road trip.

Autumn Leaves

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer – Originally a French song Les Feuilles Mortes with lyrics by poet Jacques Prevért.

Here’s a lesson….be skeptical of a web site that exists for the purpose of attracting visitors to a state. Of the several bullet points categorizing the status of the colors in the southern portion of the state, the Vermont gov website checked “Peak Color”. Not “Moderate”, not “Past Peak”…but “Peak Color”. Crossing the border into Vermont it was obvious there was no color. I fact, there were no leaves…90% of the trees were bare. Based on my crack observations, I’m sending a note to the website suggesting other more appropriate categories they might have used. How about “Leaves no more” or “Leaves go bye bye” or the Humpty Dumptian “Leaves all fall down”. Any of these probably would have worked.

I set out to make the best of it by finding locations that would be great if there was color so that I could visit them next year. By just wandering around you never know what you will find.

Here’s a perfect example of kismet. The sky was overcast. There was no color anywhere so I drove to a covered bridge just down the road from here to scout it as a possible location for a future trip. I noticed this farm a short way up the road and sauntered up to it. Just as I got there the sky began to turn orange and then red behind the barn and all of a sudden I’m in frantic mode getting my camera out of the bag, setting up the tripod and trying to make sure that something was in focus. The color lasted less than five minutes. This is the magic. I’m walking around rural southern Vermont at the end of a disappointing day, thinking about where to get dinner and something unexpectedly glorious happens

Taken on an overcast day which is the best sky condition for shooting moving water and surrounding color. It provides an even light which promotes saturation of the colors.

I shot this image last year in central Vermont. I wandered around this scene for a while, took a number of shots and then settled into this scene. I set up the tripod and camera and snapped the shutter. Ten seconds later this horse, which had been behind the small structure, moved out into the open and stared at me. I snapped the shutter a second time.

Really all you need for a great New England autumn photograph is to find yourself a white church with a steeple and some colorful leaves. Then you’ve got yourself a postcard.

Taken on the campus of Mt. Holyoke college in South Hadley, MA. The breeze stopped momentarily so there’s a nice reflection of the color in the water. I also like the diagonal lines of the trees leading one’s eye to the back of the image.

“Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant

Shrewsbury, MA

A few years ago, on one of my first photographic journeys, I found myself, a photographer I had hired as a guide and my wife, Cathy all gathered on a ledge in Patagonia waiting for the sky to illuminate a great scene before us. We waited one hour; two hours; three hours; finally dusk came and we climbed down from the ledge without having gotten the shot. That scene has repeated itself in various places around the world and when it does, when it seems like we are completely wasting our time…Cathy will roll her eyes and say “I know, we’re waiting for the light!”

Over the past three years I’ve waited for the light frequently and managed to build a small business doing photographic programs for senior audiences. And it’s been wonderful. I show my work to live audiences almost a hundred times a year and each time I get live feedback on my work and the audience gets 45 minutes of entertainment. What could be better?

Still, I’ve been thinking about how to expand my base (there’s a phrase I’ll bet you haven’t heard in a while) and show my work to a wider audience. I’ve considered doing a photographic blog for some time now but have dawdled because..well, starting a photographic blog is a bit daunting. It means publishing images and commentary people will find interesting and stimulating, it means finding those images in the first place, and it means “f8 and be there” (look it up). Lastly I guess it means you have to throw some level of modesty out the window and believe that people will like what you do. So here goes…

Cemeteries & Autumn

Every New England town has a cemetery that dates back at least two hundred years and many are in the town center next to the historical church with the white steeple. Almost every day I drive by the one in the center of my town which contains an abundance of large stately maple trees that are the centerpiece of our New England autumns. Depending on the tree, the leaves can be yellow, orange or even red or a combination of all three. Photographed on a blue sky day with a polarizing filter and hopefully some wispy white clouds, the results can be a breathtaking display of color

Even though the colors may be spectacular, the graphics of an image are equally important. Notice that the leading lines of the monuments move your eye back to the orange tree blazing in the blue sky.

She has been there for over two hundred years and I imagine she has been praying all this time for a day exactly like this one!

This is the second image I shot of this scene. Initially, I filled the frame with the angel against the orange backdrop. I prefer this framing. It adds additional yellow color and also frames the shot from the upper left of the image.

Sometimes you have to change your point of view. Look up!

The vibrant blue and orange hues here are amazing and the monuments form a diagonal line into the image.

Oak Hill Cemetary, Sterling, MA — Oak Hill Cemetery, Sterling, MA

So concludes my first photographic blog post. I plan on publishing 1-2 times per month as my ability to gather interesting material permits. Hopefully you and future readers will find it worthy of your time. You may subscribe to this blog by checking the “Follow” box on the right side of this page. You will then receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Confirming the subscription will mean that you will automatically receive new blog entries.

Shrewsbury, MA

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Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening A beautiful sight, We’re happy tonight. Walking in a winter wonderland.

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Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
We’re happy tonight.
Walking in a winter wonderland.