Pro-crastination

 

The title is hyphenated because I am a *PRO* at crastination. It has been months since I have posted here. I have been thinking of posting but what finally inspired this was that procrastination seems to be a theme today. A couple of the comics I follow were about procrastination then a post by Kirk Tuck in my Feedly blog collection chimed in apparently in response to one that Michael Johnston had posted that I read belatedly after reading Kirk's. I then procrastinated by posting some photos on Facebook and doing the daily exercises that I seem to manage only occasionally. Finally, I came back to the computer only to be confronted by a "Peanuts" series on the subject so I guess the universe is telling me to get my self discipline act together.

It goes even deeper though. I have been asked to be on a panel about what it requires to be a successful photographer and they are talking about success in the business sense. In two words, 'I'm not'. I was a successful photographer in the army where that was my MOS (military occupational specialty). In just three years I rose to the rank of E-5 and was in charge of a lab. I have been a successful art photographer in the sense that I have had work accepted into exhibits and even a handful of one-man shows. I have been a success at creating high-quality images, a point of pride for me.  I like doing things well. Aside from the army however I have never 'made my living' exclusively from photography and I spend more on supplies every year than my print sales earn.

There are several reasons for that, procrastination being one. To be economically successful one has to spend way more time on marketing than any other aspect of the creative process. As much as 90% of your time by some estimates. I have an intense dislike for marketing and it takes very little at all to divert me from it. I make sporadic efforts at it like updating my portfolio on Zenfolio (something else I haven't done in many months), making new notecards and prints to take to galleries (I have made new cards but haven't delivered them), and contacting prospective new galleries.

Aside from Kirk Tuck all the pros I am remotely acquainted with make the bulk of their income from publishing, Brooks Jensen - Lenswork magazine, Guy Tal - writing and running workshops, Chris Dodds - running workshops, or by doing things like shooting weddings/family gatherings/events. In small-town America, local photo studios are pretty much dead. With the surfeit of cameras including those in phones, there is very little market for formal portraits. I have dabbled in doing some of those things and didn't like doing them. At this point, I am old, retired and only want to do what I enjoy.

The bottom line is that I have redefined my success in photography as making enough from it so that I can keep doing it and still pay all the other bills because, in the end, I do it because I love doing it. I would be happy to sell you a print though if you see an image here or on FB or Zenfolio that you really want to hang on your wall. If you'd like to help keep me doing it, contact me about buying a print or some notecards. Or you can go to my Fine Art America site if you want a commercially printed copy. They will even print them on all sorts of 'merch' as the YouTubers call it, shower curtains, shopping bags, phone cases, you name it. I'll put the links down below.

To purchase a print (or a whole bunch of prints) go to:
https://jimbullard.zenfolio.com/

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/james-bullard

or send me a message detailing what you want, image, size, etc. The ones you get from me are archivally printed by me and (other than notecards) are signed. I will reply with my current prices.

Have a great day.

Exploring the Clarksboro Trail

 The Clarksboro Trail on Tooley Pond Rd. is named for a small community that existed around there in the 1800s. I have looked in my St. Lawrence County histories (Hough & the 3-volume Landon set) but find no reference to it consequently I don't know much detail about when it existed or how large it was. I have been told that it was an iron mining operation. The photo above is the start of the trail on the Tooley Pond Rd which runs from DeGrasse, NY to the vicinity of Cranberry Lake.

The trail follows a rough and rain-rutted old logging road up a fairly steep incline. The photo below looks down that road. It is not a promising start to the hike.

At the top of the incline is a clearing that served as a staging area for the loggers and if you look to the right there is a blue disk trail marker on one of the trees. After going through a copse of trees you come into a blackberry patch which is a bit confusing due to a web of herd paths created by berry pickers. It is even more confusing coming back out. I ended up bushwhacking back to the clearing on the way out. I was probably paying too much attention to the abundant blackberries and not enough to trail finding.

After re-entering the woods it isn't far to "the wall", a 70' high rock face. This is a 3 frame stitch panorama that really doesn't do it justice IMO but I didn't have anyone with me to provide scale. 

I shot a horizontal panorama which makes it look curved. It isn't. It is relatively straight.

In a large crevice high up on the right was a twig nest, perhaps for a Peregrine Falcon?

It did not appear to be occupied. The trail turns left along the base of the rock face and follows the contour of the land around and upward.

There is some impressive stonework on this section, the stairs in the photo below, and 2-3 shorter ones above it.

Beyond that and near the top was a lovely stretch of woods with ferns. The trail turns sharply right in the ferns and from there, it is fairly level to the two overlooks at the end of the trail, the first being a right turn that takes you past a glacial erratic and the other straight ahead.

Past the boulder is the viewpoint. It is a nice view at any time of year but I suspect a spectacular one in autumn.

The second overlook is to the left and can be reached by a herd path but it requires going down a fairly steep rock face which might not be a good choice if it is wet. In any case, it is only a short hop back to the trail and then to the right. The view is similar. I forget which one I found this small birch on.

As with any trail, you see different things going back down.

This thistle was in the middle of the logging road.

My AllTrails app failed to record the stats for the hike. The trail is not on AllTrails and the app insisted that I had gone to Sinclair Falls which is on the other side of the road. It is a fairly short hike that is not difficult. The rock face alone is worth the hike. The steepest bit is the old logging road at the start. I will be doing it again and I may make a video of it. Enjoy.

All the photos were made with an Olympus OMD E-M5 III and a 14-150 mm lens. All processing including panorama stitching was done in Adobe Lightroom Classic.

30th Anniversary as a 46er

 On July 17th of 1993, I completed climbing all 46 Adirondack High Peaks with an ascent of Whiteface Mt. in Wilmington, NY. I was the 3232nd person to be recorded as a 46er. In the 3o years since then, the total has risen to over 13,000. On the 15th anniversary of completing the quest, I drove up the Veterans Memorial Highway, and while on the summit I decided that I should commemorate the day every 5 years. On both the 20th and 25th anniversaries two 46er hiking friends joined me in climbing. This year only one, Dave Allen, was able to join me. These photos of this year's hike were shot on a GoPro with the exception of two which my sister-in-law shot on her phone as Dave and I reached the summit.

The trail from the Weather station HQ dips through a small valley and then goes up, straight up, where the Marbl Mt, T-Bar lift once was. Marble Mt is a sub-peak of Whiteface as are Lookout and Esther.

And more up. Imagine going up this for almost a mile and that is the start of the hike. That is what you do here. This is the toughest part of the ascent because it is steep and unmaintained with loose rocks and roots with no switchbacks. Just straight up.

After almost a mile the trail levels off onto the summit of Marble Mt and joins the trail from the Wilmington reservoir. That trail comes in from the left in this photo. We hiked that route on the 25th anniversary, It isn't as steep but starts much lower on the side of the mountain and is farther to walk.

We wandered over to the left a short distance to see the view. The smoke from wildfires in Canada was blowing over the area severely reducing the visibility and we could smell the smoke.

Turning right at the junction the trail heads along a ridge that connects Marble Mt. to Whiteface Mt.

The ridge goes up and down over rocks and roots through a stunted forest. It's a hard life for trees up here.

There's more up than down and this goes on for nearly 2 miles before you get to steep climbing again.

Along the way, there is an old shed where ski patrols stored rescue toboggans. 

When we did this hike 5 years ago they were finishing up work on this ski lift for the Whiteface ski area, It is right next to the trail and the "Lookout Loop" ski run crosses the trail in two places.

The lift was running and I mused that maybe next time we could ride up to this point, jump off, hike the rest of the way to the summit thus skipping all that we had hiked to that point, and then reverse it to get back down that way. Dave liked that idea.

The trail goes up more seriously from there until you reach "the wall" which is a retaining wall for one of the hairpin curves on the Veterans Memorial Highway.

The trail turns left along the base of the wall and heads up toward the Highway.

Where the wall ends you have to scramble up the rocks on the left and continue.

The trail parallels the Highway for a while with views of the road and the mountains behind you.

It wasn't quite so smoky on this side and we could see Esther Mt. (right over the deadwood) and the hump on the right edge is Lookout Mt. where there was a lodge/snack bar for skiers back when the ski area was on this side of Whiteface.

A short distance farther on you get a view of the summit.

Dave and a couple who were heading back down (they had passed us going up) looked off toward the other side of the ridge where there was considerably more smoke.

Looking down through the smoke at the ski area.

It is pretty open the rest of the way up.

Dave and I arrive at the summit. Photo by Kathleen Bullard with her phone...

She and my brother Pete drove up the highway to give us a ride back down. Thanks, guys. This makes around 8 times I have climbed Whiteface and going back down is always the hard part. You are tired after the ascent and gravity is not your friend going down. I have only fallen and injured myself (minor scrapes) twice while climbing, both times while descending. Dave and I are both in our 70s and we are already 46ers so we get to ride down but if you are doing it for the record to be a 46er you must hike both ways for it to count.

The summit photo by Kathleen.

It was an awesome day in spite of the smoke.

Thoughts on Camera Manuals

 

I got an invitation this morning to see an online seminar on focusing when using the newer OMD cameras including the E-M5III I used for the photos in this post. There is a lot I like about the OMD E-M5III, the four-thirds format, the small size, and weatherproofing that make it ideal for hiking, and the fully articulated LCD, but what drives me nuts on all Olympus (now just OMD) cameras are the digital menus. They are way too complicated.

I 'grew up' on 35mm and 4x5 press/view cameras. A lot of photographers complained about the complexities of camera movements but those were peanuts compared to today's computerized cameras IMO. The guy presenting the seminar went through all the menus and submenus that control how the camera autofocuses in rapid fire. There are lots of them and he was a fast talker, so much so that some of the commenters asked him to "Slow down". They were having trouble keeping up with his rapid-fire delivery at the same time they were trying to follow along with their own cameras as he had suggested they do. I got so lost I gave up.

He told how to set the focusing target for different situations, how to move using dials and buttons, how to change the function of the dials and buttons to do different things, and how to reset them to the defaults. I found myself longing for the days when a shutter release was a shutter release, the aperture ring was the aperture ring, a focusing ring/knob was a focusing knob, and I wondered why anyone would want to switch them around. To me, using your camera should be an intuitive act with practice. Switching the controls around just complicates your process so that you have to spend more time thinking about 'how' to get the photo and detracting from your attention to what you are photographing.

Okay, I get it. I'm an old guy, the modern world is complicated and I am really trying to understand the bazillion (exaggeration) settings on my camera but the main menu has 6 items and the submenus go from A to J. I should also mention that there are 4 "A"s, 2 "C"s, 4 "D's, and 3 "E"s. Each of those has a sub-submenu of 5-8 settings you can choose from with at least on/off but many have 3-5 choices. 

My strategy is to set up a camera to do what I want it to do in the simplest way and leave it there. Which means I have to understand all this just once. I have a manual on Kindle but I'm not fond of ebooks for technical information. They are great for books that you read from beginning to end but if you have to flip around a lot, "see section 5 of chapter 4 for how to reset..". All this is to say I wish I could get tabbed hard copy manuals for digital cameras. Several decades ago I had a friend who was a professor of writing and he claimed that the biggest need was for technical writers, people who could explain things in simple terms that the average person could understand. Our increasingly complex technology has made that need even more urgent and I don't see that need being filled.

My New Old Book

 

I got a new old Elliot Porter book in the mail today, "The Place That No One Knew". Elliot Porter was and remains a major influence on my photography. I bought the book of Adirondack photos when I was in college mainly because of my attachment to the Adirondacks but I was taken by Porter's intimate approach which was a contrast to Ansel Adams' primarily grand views of Yosemite and the western landscape. 

The bird photo is a tip of the hat to Porter. I wasn't aware of it at the time I bought the Adirondack book but Porter's early work was photographing birds. He rigged up a 4x5 camera and flash in trees next to nests and fired them remotely, a rather complicated process. He died in 1990 and to my knowledge never used a digital camera the first of which date to 1988. I shot the above photo handheld with an Olympus OMD E-M-5III using a 14-150mm lens. I can only imagine what Elliot would have done with such a camera.

Porter's later work centered on the landscape and he published over a dozen coffee table books, some of which were reprinted in abridged format by the Sierre Club, the most famous being "In Wildness is the Preservation of the World". About 10-15 years ago used copies of his books were relatively cheap on eBay and Amazon so I collected 5-6 of them but his Glen Canyon book was too expensive for my budget at the time. I spotted the one I just bought listed at $90 for the hardcover and except for some discoloration of the dust jacket is in excellent condition. Trade paperbacks of the original (not the smaller Sierra Club editions) seem to be running $125 and up.

I went looking for "The Place That Nobody Knew" because a Facebook friend shared a post about Glen Canyon that referenced "Glen Canyon, Images of a Lost World" by Tad Nichols, a book that I bought in paperback around the time it was published. I have no memory of what I paid for it and there is no price anywhere on my copy but I was shocked to find that they are selling for $500-$1200 on the web. No, my copy isn't for sale. Tad Nichols was making his B&W images at the same time that Elliot Porter was working on his Glen Canyon photos and Elliot appears in one of Tad's photos.

Below is another Chickadee photo in memory of Elliot. Both photos were made yesterday at the feeding station on the Bloomingdale Bog trail. I did a side trip there after dropping off photos for the Adirondack Artist Guild juried show which opens next Friday, March 24th. Like Elliot's later work, they are landscapes, not birds. The show will be up for a month. Check it out if you can. https://www.adirondackartistsguild.com/

 I have been asked to donate the use of some of my photos to the Town of Stockholm website (where I used to live until we bought our current home) but... I am more than a little lax about identifying my images with location much less township. So that means scrolling through my catalog of 58K+ images to see what photos I have that were made in Stockholm. Inevitably, being easily distracted I see other old images from all over that for some reason I never did any post-processing on that I think 'That was cool. I should work on that one.' This is one of those sidetrack images that I just spent some time on. It is a contrail over the cliffs that overlook Chapel Pond. Four million-year-old rock and a 21st-century supersonic jet fighter. Now to get back to scrolling.

 Today I am pondering. Not the photo below, which has nothing to do with this post. I included it because a photography blog should have at least one photo 'just because'. Or maybe its inclusion does have something to do with my pondering. You can be the judge.

The photo was made during one of our really cold snaps a couple of weeks ago. When we get temperatures in the single digits or below zero F, frost makes some neat patterns on enclosed but unheated parts of the house like the garage or the enclosed porches. I should maybe keep this a secret but the bright circle is not the moon. It is one of the lights inside the garage reflecting off the glass (I shot the photo from inside with a macro lens). It looked like the moon shining through the window so I deliberately included it.

This post was prompted by two things I read today. The first was an article on why we tend to be less open to contemporary music as we age. That was on a subscription-based site so I won't link to it. The other was on Kirk Tuck's blog <https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2023/02/it-was-black-and-white-day-in-downtown.html>. Like the gallery owner that Kirk talks about encountering on his walk, I am 78 so the comments strike a chord with me, particularly "been, there, done that, a thousand times".

In regard to both music and photography (including my own). I think those "thousand times" are what makes us more discriminating with age, and less ready to be excited by contemporary iterations of what we have experienced or done ourselves so many times already. At the same time, we get comfortable with those earlier experiences which become harder and harder to top in terms of originality and quality.

There is also a tendency to get stuck in a rut and I find myself fighting the rut more and more, going back to the same places to hike and make photographs. The pandemic only worsened that tendency on my part. Currently, winter is weighing on me and keeping me from venturing too far afield. Here is a wish for an early spring and some fresh inspiration.

I'm Back

It has been almost 2 years since I last posted. The pandemic and other things bummed me out and I basically forgot about the blog. Sorry. I'll try to be more diligent. I went to see the Ice Palace in Saranac Lake today and to visit the galleries. Northwind was the only one I managed to see. AAG was closed (lunchtime and I didn't get back there until after closing), Tim Fortune is away and LPCA is only open Turs.>Sat. I did visit my brother. On the way home I took a detour to Norman Ridge where I got the best photos of the day except for one I shot of Moose Mt. from the highway in Gabriels. The Moose Mt. photo from Gabriels is the first one.