David Griffin Photography » Community

New England Scapes Exhibit

Dave — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 02:27:37 +0000

Gallery Seven, on Nason Street in Maynard, is presenting “New England Scapes”, a juried exhibition featuring over 35 local artists — including one from yours truly.

The exhibit runs until the end of July. There is an artists’ reception on Saturday, July 9th from 7-9pm which I will be attending (doing my best impression of a wallflower) and hope you can come as well.

Guest juror Carrie M. Nixon, a painter and Associate Professor teaching Painting and Drawing at Assumption College in Worcester, helped the gallery choose from an array of entries. With the high quality of artwork and large number of pieces submitted, the resulting exhibition is hung salon style. On display is an eclectic group of artwork ranging from photographs, to paintings, to drawings and more.

New England is known for its strong cultural identity, deep history and beautiful scapes. This exhibition allows for a broad interpretation of the word “scape”. There are abstracts in which some viewers may see sky while others see water. There are farmscapes as well as classic sea, city and landscapes and there is even a scape from a bar scene in Worcester. With so many images and various interpretations, viewers may be drawn back for a second or third look.

Other artists in the exhibit are Lois T. Andersen, Jim Bonomi, Barbara Burr, Fran Busse, David Covert, Karen Danstedt Roop, Roy DiTosti, John S. Dykes, Irene R. Fairley, Erik Gehring, Bridget Hanson, Lonnie Harvey, Robin Herr, Steven Keirstead, Will Kirkpatrick, Richard Lapping, Glenn Larsen, Michael Leacher, Carolyn Letvin, Iris Lee Marcus, Robin Masi, Catherine Meeks, Mary K. Mooney, Carrie M. Nixon, Niki Orphanos, Iris Osterman, Jay Pendexter , Craig Perini, Valyn Perini, Richard Perry, Paul Sarapas, Kitt Shaffer, Susan Spellman, Dennis Stein, Nora Vrublevska, Joe Wallace and Timothy Wilson.

The Gallery Seven website is: [url]http://www.gallerysevenmaynard.com[/url]. Kelli and Nick are good friends and great hosts of art in our little town. They are also dynamite framers.

Riverfest 2011 Weekend

Dave — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:31:12 +0000

Well, I hate to say it, but sometimes Nature has a way of inhibiting its own stewardship… A bunch of dedicated folks work their tails off to bring people to the local rivers and our reward is a cold, soaking rain. Sigh!

On Friday evening the sun was shining on the RiverFest kickoff reception where Lee Steppacher presented the River Stewardship Awards, honoring those who have spent countless hours protecting the rivers and the watersheds that surround them.

On Saturday morning I was out on the Assabet River (along with my son Jay, who was handling the Sudbury River) for the OARS RiverQuest — a scavenger hunt type of events that we have run for families. Those families (sanely) stayed at home while we got drenched setting up the puzzle pieces along the rivers and then retrieving them when nobody showed up. (We did get to eat some of the cookies that were baked for the occasion, so it wasn’t a complete washout…)

However it seemed like a good time to grab a few photographs of Dove Rock.

Sunday morning I ran a workshop on photographing from your canoe/kayak at the Assabet River NWR. It was misting and raining. Combined with the 6am start time I was thrilled that two undeterred participants arrived and we had a nice morning paddle on a mist-shrouded Puffer Pond. I spent most of the time talking and answering questions, but I did manage to find some time to take a few photographs — although my eyeglasses were so heavily coated in mist that it made it difficult to see through the viewfinder. I suspect my lenses were slowly succumbing to the conditions as well.

As always, a bad day on the water beats a good day just about anywhere else…

Technical: All shots were with a Canon 7D. All handheld. Variety of lenses and settings (24-70, 70-200, 500mm). Lightroom 3. Basic exposure and contrast tweaking.

Riverfest and Photography Workshop

Dave — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:53:22 +0000

This weekend, June 11-13, is RiverFest – celebrating the Wild & Scenic Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers.

They have a great website with dozens of programs for boaters and landlubbers alike (most of them are family-friendly as well). The weather looks to be pretty good this weekend (we’ll see if that holds).

I’ll be photographing the OARS RiverQuest event on Saturday morning. You’ll find me trolling up and down the three rivers around the confluence at Egg Rock.

On Sunday I’m leading a somewhat unusual photography workshop at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. The workshop will take place on Puffer Pond — so if you don’t have a boat don’t bother showing up. I’ll be going over some techniques and tips for photographing nature from your kayak or canoe. After a bit of discussion we’ll head out on the pond and make some photographs. I have to admit I’m hoping for a small group and probably shouldn’t even be mentioning it here, but what the heck.

Participants can unload on Sandbank Trail, however you will need to park by the visitor center in designated parking areas. 680 Hudson Rd, Sudbury, MA. Meet at the boat launch off of Sandbank Trail at 6:15 am.

Please try to take some time and visit our beautiful rivers this weekend.

Image above: Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Puffer Pond. Canon 7D, 500mm f/4L, 1/6400 at f/4, ISO 640. Handheld from kayak.

Take time to enjoy your rivers

Dave — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:45:23 +0000

A quick reminder (to myself as much as anybody) that warmer weather is nature’s way of saying “c’mon outside!”. Whether you are a paddler, angler, or just like to walk along the shoreline, go visit a nearby river or stream and take in the lifeblood of your neighborhood ecosystem.

Photograph of folks enjoying the Concord River at the Old North Bridge crossing, just downstream from the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers.

Technical details: Canon 7D, handheld in the kayak, 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm. 1/1250, f/2.8, ISO2500. Lightroom 3, black and white processing, lots of tweaking in the B&W mix panel (de-emphasize greens, brighten up the yellows). By choosing B&W over color and mixing the luminosities of the colors I was able to remove a lot of the distraction of the background trees and make the foreground bridge and people pop out much more. Sometimes color is a distraction.

Places In Between at Maynard Town Hall

Dave — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:15:49 +0000

An “abridged” version of my Places In Between – The Assabet River photography exhibit is now on display in our local Town Hall (195 Main Street, Maynard, MA). All eight of the photographs hanging there are from Maynard and the river flows right behind Town Hall so I thought that was an appropriate way to show a part of an exhibit.

My thanks to Sally Bubier (Board of Selectmen) and Mike Sullivan (Town Administrator) for inviting my photography into their building.

I kinda wish I had larger prints for one of the walls in the Gianotis Meeting Room, but overall I’m happy with the arrangements.

If you are in the area, stop by.

(The photograph above is also from Maynard and was in my original candidate group for the exhibit. The marker stands at the entrance to Ice House Landing, a small park near the river.)

2010 WAVM Telethon

Dave — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:41:28 +0000

Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year…. For too many years I’ve been involved with the WAVM Beacon Santa Telethon — a 40-hour non-stop live television / radio / webcast production that is staged by the students of Maynard High School’s student-run WAVM station. The money raised by these students goes to the Beacon Santa Fund.

A gallery of my favorite images from the weekend can be found on my community site: http://community.dmg-photography.com

And if you are really hungry for pictures, the WAVM website has hundreds of photographs spanning the entire weekend.

For probably the past 10 years I’ve been photographing the event — trying to capture as much of the “behind the scenes” activities that go on.

For a few weeks before the telethon adult volunteers and staff members work to “tag” items for the auction. These items are stuffed into a tiny storage room until Friday afternoon when we finally pull them all out and spread them around the library so they can be grouped and prepared for on-air auctioning.

Live music is a featured part of the telethon. Headlining Friday night was “One Seventeen” a band of MHS grads from the 70s. The dudes were tight.

Here’s a shot of a quartet called “Limelight”

My friend Vic Lalli (“Mister Vic“) brings his music class into Studio B and sings a few holiday tunes. When you are bone-tired from a week of preparation and working until 2am with technical details, pictures like this make it all worthwhile.

Students man the phone bank and take bids on auction items. They do a great job under a lot of pressure.

Here are a few of the hosts celebrating the end of the telethon. A few minutes later some last minute donations put them over the $28,000 mark.

Visitor Center at Assabet River NWR Grand Opening

Dave — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:31:46 +0000

On Sunday we marked the opening of the new visitor center at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. The center supports the eight refuges in the Eastern Massachusetts NWR Complex (Assabet River NWR, Great Meadows NWR, Mashpee NWR, Monomoy NWR, Nantucket NWR, Nomans Land Island NWR and Oxbow NWR).

A full set of my photographs from the day is available from: community.dmg-photography.com/2010-arnwr-vc-opening

The visitor center is part of a new design ethic created by the Fish & Wildlife Service. It is the first standalone visitor center that is part of a suite of standardized designs – reducing costs across the NWR system.

The celebration included hikes, bike tours, and “bunker” tours — the Assabet River NWR has 50+ ammunition bunkers from World War II. Above, Jan Wright, leads a tour of one of the bunkers just down the road from the visitor center. Over 200 people toured the bunker on Sunday.

Meanwhile, further down the path, a workshop for kids that explored pond life was led by Arthur Skura and Richard DeFlorio.

Libby Herland, Project Manager for the Eastern MA NWR Complex, welcomed the audience to the opening ceremonies.

Chief Roland Jerome, from the United Native American Cultural Center in Ayer, spoke at the close of the ceremony finishing with a blessing and drumming.

Before it was a refuge the land was a World War II ammunition dump — and before that it was home to families and farms. One of those families, the Carbary’s, turned the center opening into a family reunion with 50+ members arriving from all over the United States.

———-

Technical stuff:

Shot most of the day with a 7D, 24-70mm f/2.8L lens with a circular polarizer. Also used a 5DMk2 with a 70-200mm f/2.8L lens. I’m sure the lenses shuffled between the cameras now and then. Moving back and forth from bright sunlight to interiors I kept the cameras in Av mode with Auto ISO. (Well, except for when the poorly designed 5D control wheel rotated to another setting without me noticing.)

Not much in the way of processing (clarity +18, vibrance +18, profile lens corrections). Some of the photos from the ceremony were washed out by the sun reflecting off the side of the tent (probably hitting the polarizer pretty badly). These required extending the black point to restore contrast. The photo of the (exhibit) kingfisher looking at the crowd had a +1/2 stop localized adjustment to the bird.

Maynard Fest 2010

Dave — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 01:03:02 +0000

Probably the biggest annual event here in town happens the first Saturday of October. The morning starts with Maynard Fest. Organized by the Assabet Valley Chamber of Commerce it celebrates commerce, community and culture. They close down Main and Nason Streets and the downtown becomes one big fair from 9am to 3:30pm: vendors selling crafts, toys, and various trinkets, numerous food stands, a wide variety of civic groups from in and around Maynard, a number of local music groups performing in Memorial Park and, of course, rides, bouncy castles, and other activities for kids.

After Maynard Fest the Octoberfest starts down the street with lots of food and music — and the evening ends with fireworks. It’s a full day of fun if you’re up for it. (I wasn’t so I didn’t photograph either evening event…)

If you would like to see more images from the day, I have two albums set up. One is rather complete (some might say exhausting), with over 200 photographs from the day — the other contains 40 of my personal favorites — a handful of those are in this article.

Maynard Fest 2010 (full set)
Maynard Fest 2010 Highlights

Here are a few more of my favorite photographs from Maynard Fest with a bit of commentary.

While editing 400+ images from the day I was struck with how hard it is to catch kids smiling. Thrills and new experiences doesn’t always equal a constant grin. This fellow here was caught at the right moment:

I endeavor to make one photograph of every part of the event, but not every one is going to be a winner. So in addition to “coverage” I also try to find “iconic” images of a small town fair. For a number of reasons this one said “Maynard” to me…

The artists at Earth Changes Pottery were demonstrating their skill right on the sidewalk. I could photograph potters all day…

Springbrook Farm, just over the border in Stow, had a corner of Memorial Park with a few of their Alpacas and various goods made from their wool. These shy animals were doing pretty well considering they are normally on a tranquil farm and they spent the day next to a busy street and had hundreds of people stopping by. They are also too cute for words…

I normally seek candid images, but when I tried to take a photograph of these Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School students they just struck a pose. I’m not complaining.

We had the remnants of a tropical storm dump a couple of inches of rain on us yesterday but today was clear blue skies. Great for the crowds but really lousy for photography — the light was quite harsh and I spent a bit of time in Lightroom tweaking a lot of the images taken in full sun.

While I “made” this photograph, I didn’t take it. After a couple of minutes at this bouncy castle I knew that one of the tunnels would probably be well lit by the sun — but there was no way for me to get there without climbing on the ride. I could barely reach the bottom of the tunnel so I stuck my camera in there and fired a shot to check my exposure. I locked that in, set my focus and opened the 16-35mm to 16mm wide. I then handed the camera to the young lady in the upper left of the previous photo and asked if she would just point and shoot it at the next kid who came along. She was pretty nervous about doing this but she did it 3 times and 2 of images were exactly as I visualized them. Here’s one of them:

Fire trucks and ice cream — that’s the life!

Lots of live music all day…

… and, apparently, free hugs:

And every once in a while, another smile…

Technical stuff:

I carried two cameras with me all day: Canon 40D with 70-200mm f/2.8 L and a Canon 7D with a 24-70mm f/2.8L (for 1/2 of the day) and a 16-35mm f/2.8L (for the 2nd half of the day). Both cameras were in Auto ISO mode most of the time and either in aperture or shutter priority mode as needed. As noted the light conditions were very harsh and I was moving between full-on sun and shade/shadow constantly. In retrospect I probably should have had a -1/3 stop or so exposure compensation dialed in more than I did to take the edge off the bright sun. I had a fair number of images compromised by the wide dynamic range and I should have cheated under a bit. Metering was evaluative and center-weighted, depending on the subject and conditions.

Post processing done in Lightroom 3. I took about 450 images and tossed about 20 right away (half of them were shots of the sidewalk — I guess the release button hit my leg or something). I then did a pass for white balance — first everything at around 5700K and then I use the “spray” tool to “paint” a 7000K setting on images taken in shade or shadow. Everything got a +20 clarity and +20 vibrance — my standard tweak for raw images.

After working one image that had particularly harsh light I realized that the settings would probably work for a lot of other similar images. I dropped the exposure by 0.8EV, set Recovery to 38, set Fill to 38, and the black point to 28. This provided a base that worked surprisingly well across a wide variety of images: the EV drop and Recovery softened the harsh highlights, while the fill brought back what would normally be midtones and the black point restored the contrast.

There are always special cases and I tweaked those images as needed, but the great majority were handled with the above workflow settings.

I happened to turn on Lens Profile Correction for one image and liked what it did so much that I applied it to all of the images. A spot check of the set indicated that this was the correct decision. I may now make this part of my standard Lightroom workflow. What a frickin’ cool feature.

24th Annual Assabet River Cleanup

Dave — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 15:45:54 +0000

Saturday was a beautiful day to clean up the river and we had an outpouring of support across all of the towns. Last year weather made the cleanup a bit of a wash (if you’ll pardon the pun) but a combination of heavy floods in the spring with drought conditions heading into fall appeared to have exposed a whole new layer junk for us to attack. (It’s rather sad when you think about it…)

A more complete gallery of images from the day can be found at: [url]http://community.dmg-photography.com/2010-assabet-cleanup/[/url]

I did my best to visit the teams in Concord, Acton, Maynard, and Hudson. (I didn’t have time to visit the team in Stow or the groups in Northborough). The morning started in Concord with Betsy Stokey (recovering from a recently shattered knee) organized the teams that were going to attack the Nashoba Brook, just above its confluence with the Assabet.

No sooner did the teams get into the shallow water that a steady “clunking” sound rose as bottle after bottle (along with plenty of other junk) was pulled from the streambed and placed into the boats.

For whatever reason “glass” was the theme this year — we were pulling out bottles and other containers by the hundreds.

Tires never fail to make an appearance in the cleanup. Another sad legacy of days gone by.

This chunk of steel was so large it took 3 people to haul it to the dumpster.

Next up Acton…

Most of the Acton teams were too far up or downstream from the put-in for me to photograph them in my alloted time. There seemed to be a lot of construction debris in this stretch of the river – implying that even today people are still treating the river as a disposal ground.

Above, Bob Guba, Acton Team Leader, directs another team to a cache of tires that has been discovered.

Next we headed to Maynard…

Jim McCann empties a boat-load of debris taken from the river bed behind the Maynard Elks Club.

While these volunteers bring another full load to the offloading point.

Another group in Maynard worked behind the Powdermill Circle area.

With no lack of tires there either.

With just an hour left in our cleanup, I headed to Hudson.

And as you can see — plenty more junk to retrieve. There were several teams in town and I managed to get some photos of the groups at Wheeler Road.

At noon the cleanup wound down and the teams slowly arrived at spots in each town to wash up and get some pizza.

Here a team from Intel grab a bite after pulling hundreds of pounds of glass, tires, and other debris from the river in Hudson.

As president of the Organization for the Assabet River I’m simply overwhelmed each year with the support we get from the people and businesses that are willing to roll up their sleeves, jump into the water and get dirty with the goal of a cleaner Assabet River for future generations. This year proved that despite 24 years of doing this, often in the same spots, there is plenty of work left. Face it, 100 hours of intense cleanup is just a nibble at the 100+ years of treating the river as a waste disposal area – but each year we get a little bit closer and that makes it all worth while.

(My deep thanks to Julia Khorana and all of the OAR staff, directors, and site coordinators who made this event successful, fun, and safe for all!)

—–

Oh yea, technical stuff:

It was terrible harsh light all morning. Perfect for everyone working, except me.

Canon 5D Mark 2 with 24-70mm f/2.8L, on a monopod. Shot stills and video clips (which I hope to assemble into a short YouTube video in the next couple of days).

Canon 7D with the 70-200mm f/2.8L, handheld. Both cameras had a polarizing filter on, for both improved water color saturation and to keep the apertures reasonable for video.

All of the images above were processed by Lightroom had most have some exposure tweaking to smooth out the lights and darks created by the harsh lighting. Come to think of it I forgot to add clarity and vibrance… (I’ll fix that in the forthcoming gallery.)

Because I was moving from deep shade to blistering sunshine, most of the time I shot with Auto-ISO, and either Av or Manual (for video).

Contest! Win one of my exhibit’s prints

Dave — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:21:16 +0000

My “Places In Between” exhibit at Nashoba Brook Bakery ends at the end of August and as a way of thanking the bakery for hosting my photographs for the past few months I offered to give one of the prints away.

The bakery is running a contest/raffle and the winner gets to choose any of the framed prints*. There are 3 ways you can enter to win:

There is an email sign-up in the cafe
For Facebook folk you can “like” Nashoba Brook Bakery and then write a post on the “david griffin photography” discussion board topic.
Following @slowrise on twitter and re-tweeting “I want to win a David Griffin print from Nashoba Brook Bakery.”

The bakery will choose the winner at the end of the month, so don’t delay — September will be here before you know it!

My thanks to Jess and John at Nashoba Brook Bakery for putting this promotion together and I hope everyone will support their fine establishment while getting a chance to win a print.

All of the photographs are archival, fine-art prints, matted, framed, and ready for hanging.

* The large canvas print is not part of the contest. Sorry, it’s spoken for.