I decided to end the year by listing the blogs I follow. Most are photography blogs (surprise). I'll start with them.

I checked Guy Tal's blog frequently in the past and recently subscribed through Google Reader. Guy and I think a lot alike about photography and while I don't believe in only exposing myself to those opinions that I agree with I also think it doesn't hurt to know that I'm not alone in my views. Besides Guy takes some great photos that I enjoy looking at.

Another recent addition to my RRS feed that I had looked at occasionally is Kathleen Connally's photo blog A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. She presents a very nice collection of photos of rural Pennsylvania. She doesn't seem to have any agenda except to show off the area where she lives and does so with affection and skill.

Absolutely Nothing is probably more portfolio than blog. Like Kathleen Connally, the photographer, Tristan Campbell puts the latest photo on the home page and then moves it to an archive as a new one replaces it. The photos are of England though. I'm a sucker for landscapes and these are good ones.

Chris Orwig's Flipside is a personal/professional blog where he posts his latest family photos along with some professional work. I first "met" Chris via Lynda.com where he has some tutorials. He is a photo instructor at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. On any given day you are as apt to see photos of his young daughters as you are a portrait of a renowned surfer.

David duChemin's PixelatedImage blog is often philosophical. He also has some interesting and inexpensive ebooks that he sells through his site and is the author of a couple of 'real' books as well which can be found on Amazon. David's work is more in the photojournalist/National Geographic tradition.

Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider is for the techie in me. It keeps me up to date with Kelby Training & NAPP (Association of Photoshop Professionals) with some personal touches.

Jim Richardson's Working Photographer blog has a list of photographers he's jealous of. I find that hard to believe because I'm jealous of Jim Richardson. He does a lot of work with National Geographic and beautiful work it is.

TOP (The On-line Photographer) is an interesting mix of reviews, photography news and opinion. Mike Johnson has been writing for and editing photo magazines for many years and carries on in this eclectic blog.

Lastly PhotoPreneur is about making money from photography, something I don't do well and need to do better next year which just happens to start tomorrow.

If you follow this blog because of the photography perhaps one or more of the above might also interest you. I'll list the non-photo blogs I follow in a later post.

Happy New Year.

A Touch of PTSD

Those of us living in the Northeast are a bit nervous about freezing rain. Eleven years ago we had several days of it in a row in what became known as the Ice Storm of '98. We went without power for a week and were among the lucky ones. Some rural areas had no power for up to a month and areas of Quebec were without power for up to 6 weeks.

I well remember being afraid to walk out into the yard because the ice was breaking limbs from the maple trees which came down with a crash every few minutes. If you were hit by a falling 4" thick limb that would be bad enough but add an inch or more of ice and they were really dangerous. The 35 maples around my acre lost about 50% of their limbs in that storm and it took them about 10 years to recover. We lost a couple of them since the storm, in part I suspect because of what they suffered then.

We had freezing rain in the early hours of this morning. It wasn't nearly the scale of the Ice Storm of '98 but after an experience like that your mind jumps back and you hope it doesn't turn into another 3-4 day storm. This one was mild. Maybe ⅛" of ice. Enough to make everything slippery and a few things picturesque. The photo is of a vine on one of the garden trellises. We had a couple of different sorts of vines planted there and I'm not sure what this one was.

The Littlest Christmas Tree

About 20 years ago Diane was working for Ames Dept Store and they gave each of their employees  an evergreen to plant. It was a single stem with needles, no side branches at all. We stuck it in the ground and it did nothing for about 2 or 3 years then it grew a few side branches (small ones) and then stalled again seemly a permanent dwarf. I moved it to the front of this flower bed a couple of years ago, intending it to be a temporary home but it seems to like this spot and has started to grow again so... I guess I'll be rearranging the flower bed to accommodate the tree as it grows. It seems a shame to disturb it again when it has found a home it likes. Today Diane suggested that we put some lights on it for the holidays. While we were out shopping I bought a string of 50 lights and strung them on it when we got home.

Bloom Where You Are Planted

Photographers, especially landscape photographers like me, often feel they have to go off someplace special to make photographs. Photographs of something iconic, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite or the like. I used to tell my photo students to shoot what was around them and though I do make several trips each year an hour or so South to the Adirondacks I also spend a fair amount of time photographing the flowers in my own garden and the sights around the tiny hamlet where I live.

This morning, after several grey mornings in a row, the sun was brilliant but we left the cellular shades down because it was -6ºF and was projected to get up to only about 9º. The shades help retain heat. They also glow nicely as the sun shines through them and I was intrigued by this light on these objects in the livingroom.  As I looked at them and the light, I decided I wanted to make a photograph. It needed a square composition, so it is cropped, and the extremes of brightness required three exposures which I combined in Photomatix using the exposure blending option. I also added a pseudo film edge as a border.

As I'm sure is the case in most people's homes, all the objects have memories attached for Diane and I. The clock in the upper left came from our daughter. She bought it for herself but one of her cats insisted on jumping atop it and knocking it off the wall. I fixed it for her the first time it got broken but after it got knocked down again she gave it to us. The finial from the bottom is still broken and is behind the large cow next to the clear bottle. I bought the two bottles in an Adirondack antique shop while I was in college. The Buddha came from a visit to Diane's parents. Her father took us to a flea market that he occasionally did some work for. The owner, Pete, had a woman's hat on it and it was painted all black. We bought it (but not the hat) and I repainted it copper and gold. I also built the small stand for it. The plant is one of Diane's. If it were up to me to look after them they'd all be shriveled and dead because I'd forget to water them. The small bowl in front of the Buddha's stand holds shells and pebbles from Leo Carillo Beach in California which we visited one Thanksgiving when our son and daughter-in-law lived in Thousand Oaks. The blanket chest everything is on was inherited from my grandmother who inherited it from her parents. I think, though I'm not absolutely certain, that my great-grandfather built the chest.

The moral, if there is one, is that you need not go far to find subject matter.  Don't reserve your picture taking to special occasions. Use photography as a way to look more closely at the world around you every day.

Holiday E-Card Time

Best wishes to one and all regardless of the holiday you celebrate. The traditions of Christmas go back centuries before December 25th was adopted by the Roman Catholic church to represent the birthday of Jesus. The 25th of December was celebrated by early Romans as the rebirth of the sun after it "died" on the shortest day of the year. The traditions of gift giving and decorating homes with greenery in this season go back to even earlier times. Today we have several religious holidays clustered around the solstice and Christmas is a civil holiday as well as a religious one. So whatever your religion or beliefs, may you find joy in the beginning of another trek around the sun.

Shameless Commerce

I have created a series of four Adirondack posters which I am selling as archival prints. One of the series appears above. The others can be seen at either my Picasaweb galleries or my Photoshelter galleries. The price is $80/poster. They are signed on the face in ink and on the back in pencil with an ordinal number and the date. They would make a nice holiday gift for someone who loves the Adirondacks or just loves the outdoors. They can be mailed in a tube to your home. If you live in NY state I have to charge 7% sales tax. For the holidays I will absorb the postage. I take Paypal. You don't need a Paypal account and you can put it on your credit card. Email inquiries and orders here. Please put "Poster" in the subject line so your message gets through my spam filters.

Christmas Wish Lists

A friend asked what was on my ""Santa list", things I want for Christmas. My first response was that I didn't have a Santa list but upon more thought I decided there were things I'd like, things like world peace, an end to hunger, health care for all, a meaningful job for everyone who wants one. Those aren't in Santa's bag though.

There are things I'd like for myself too. I'd like to be in better physical condition, more like I was 18-24 months ago before I got off my regular diet and exercise routine. I'd like to have more people buy my prints which would result in me having more funds to pursue more photography.

The problem with all the above, not just the first group of wishes but the personal ones as well, is that they aren't things. They are conditions and conditions can't be given to you by anyone else. You have to create them for yourself or in the case of the first group contribute whatever you can to create them.

So my real Christmas wish is that we would all remember that the things we give and receive for the holiday, no matter which of the several holidays that fall around the winter solstice, are only symbols of our real desires for conditions that will only come about through our actions. Or as Gandhi said "Be the change you want to see in the world".

Happy Thanksgiving

I went out this morning and wandered around the yard in my shirtsleeves. We are having a mild day, overcast but quite pleasant. We were able stand only 5-6 feet from the bird feeders and talk to a woodpecker as he ate from the suet feeder. Diane wondered if he was the same one who rapped on the house this summer every time the feeders got low. The chickadees flitted about as if we weren't even there. They are so used to us that I can stand within an arms length and they will continue feeding.

Dinner about one. I have to go and work on today's project, a storm window for the kitchen window over the sink. I hope everyone has a great meal and much to be thankful for.

When I first began doing digital photography the available image browsers either didn't let you apply keywords to images or if it did they used a proprietary format that other software didn't recognize. Eventually software publishers realized that the numbers of photos being generated by digital photographers required more than just "looking through" an archive to find a particular photo. A standard format was created and cataloging software was born in place of mere 'image browsers'.

I have used Adobe's Lightroom since it was first offered but I had scanned and shot many photos prior to getting Lightroom so I am still playing 'catch up' on the process of adding searchable data to all my older images.

I'm up to spring of 2005 on my catalog organization project and am starting to run into folders of images that I had done some cataloging & organizing of on a random basis in the time since first getting Lightroom. I'm also playing with some older files making new 'creations'. Anyway here's one that I morphed from a 2005 photo that I shot and never did anything with at the time. I liked the cloud reflections on the water with the little lily pads and stump as counterpoint but the straight shot came off as too detailed, too much surface litter breaking up the cloud reflections, too cluttered. I simplified it in Photoshop and now it works IMO.

Convergence of Ingenuity?

That is what a friend called it when The Online Photographer blog referred its readers to the site of a photographer on the West coast who was making tondi (art speak for round, also sometimes called tondo) images that were similar in flavor to some work I had been doing (see my "Ways of Working " post on Nov. 7th). Now I encounter another example in the Newsletter of the Photographer's Formulary. This involves another 'thread' of work I have played with but haven't shown anyone previously, photos of car details (hood ornaments, radiator emblems, rear view mirrors, etc.) like the one above. Mostly it is old cars, they're so much more visually interesting than the new ones, but I have shot a number of new car details, mostly headlight and taillight images. The compound faceting of the reflectors and lenses is very abstract and interesting.

Convergence of ingenuity is when two or more people independently have the same or very similar idea at the same time. With all the people taking digital photos these days I'm sure it is happening a lot in photography.

Shredding Leaves and Ear Worms

In my last post I mentioned that I’d been chewing up leaves by running over them with the riding mower several times. There is one corner of the yard though where there are more trees, thus more leaves and the mower ended up plowing them instead of mowing them.

I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade

So I had to rake them and run them through the shredder. I’ve been at it for two afternoons and this morning.

He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade

So I’m picking up bunches of leaves, with hearing protectors blocking out everything except the now muffled roar of the shredder and a song that keeps running through my head in an endless loop.

We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves

I did listen to that album on a few days before...

Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus' garden near a cave

But I’ve no idea why this song is the one that shredding leaves brings to mind.

We would sing and dance around
because we know we can't be found

I don’t hear it in my head the rest of the day, but this morning after I woke up...

We would shout and swim about
The coral that lies beneath the waves

As soon as I thought about finishing the leaf shredding job, it popped back into my brain

We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do

My timing was great. I finished the pile I’d raked just as it started to rain. There are more leaves around the edge of the yard that I should rake and shred though. I wonder if the song will be back when I do.

I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden with you.

We'll see in a couple of days when I start on another batch of shredding.

*excerpts from Octopus's Garden by the Beatles

Fall Chores

I spent part of the afternoon chewing up leaves, yum, yum. We have 30 plus maple trees around the perimeter of our one acre and they drop a humongous amount of leaves each fall. I used to rake them all and pile them in the back yard to compost but the supply of compose out stripped my need and after we got a riding mower (our son noted that happened after he left home) I decided to just mow over the fallen leaves several times and chew them into little bits that would decompose almost immediately into the lawn. That works pretty well if the weather cooperates and this year it is being very cooperative. It was cooler today than the last few days but it was still in the mid-40ºs and dry which is the more important part.

In the process of my chore I noted a couple of photo possibilities, the latter of which is represented here. It is a cedar tree which fell in the backyard directly toward the house but it wasn't quite tall enough to hit the house. The bark is coming off and there are some very neat insect burrow patterns underneath. They remind me of tribal tattoos I've seen in photos of some aboriginal people. Markings of the Cedar tribe perhaps?

Summer is Back

It was a very mild today for this time of year. The temperature was in the high 60ºs which is as warm as most days were this summer. I'd wager that I could count the days it was warmer than that on my fingers and toes. I could count the days we had over 80º on my fingers, possibly on the fingers of one hand. After breakfast Diane said it was too nice a day to stay inside and suggested we take a walk on the Stone Valley Trail in Colton. I agreed and took my camera of course.

On the way down the gravel road to the trail we met a couple on horseback who were enjoying the weather. Later, along the trail I saw the shape of the rock shoreline from the trail above the river and thought it might make an interesting photo so I went down to the shore. When I got down closer ...bonus... from the lower angle there was this great reflection of a pair of cedars growing among the rocks in mid-river.

We got home in time for lunch then I chewed up leaves in the yard with the riding mower. Mowing over them beats raking them any day. I have more leaves to do but the warm weather (not quite as warm as today) is expected to last for the next 6-7 days.

Follow-up on Yesterday

I watch several other blogs and this morning Chris Orwig posted an interview with Jay Maisel who is one of my role models. I've never met him in person. I first encountered Jay via a series of videos that Epson put out and I run onto interviews and his photos from time to time. I admire several photographers for different reasons. Jay's great quality is his attitude toward photographing and his ability to communicate his joie de vivre. The audio interview at jay maisel / interview is a must listen.