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We spent the weekend at DAR State Forest out in western Massachusetts - mostly kayaking at different spots. I did take a few photos at the campsite. This one is obviously processed a bit, but I think matches the feeling of the mixture of light and campfire smoke more than the original image does.
We had a party here over the weekend (a baby shower for our daughter combined with a family picnic) and pretty much the week beforehand was spent getting the yard and house ready. I was working in the backyard, literally covered in dirt and sweat, happened to look up, and saw the biggest downy feather I’ve ever seen.
Dirty, sweaty guy aiming his camera at the sky — yeah, I’m sure my neighbors think I’m nuts.
I’ve passed this small swamp maybe 200+ times over the past few years and I often find myself saying “I should see if there is a picture in there”…. (I am all too aware of the fact that many places look much better at 30 mph.)
How many thousands of people drive by each day and never even see the possibilities?
A couple of weeks ago the light was nice and I wanted to get out and feed the local mosquito population, so what better place than a swamp? I’m not sure about these pictures, and I think a few more return visits are in order. It has promise…
Our wildflower garden has finally come into bloom. A warm, unusually still afternoon with soft light beckoned me to the backyard with a macro lens.
By the end of the summer I hope to complete a mini-project playfully entitled “Bathing Beauties”.. Here are a couple of models getting wet..
We’ve been receiving reports that the Osprey had returned to their nest in Westborough and have been itching to get out there and see them ourselves. It has been a slow and bumpy start to Spring here in New England and we never seem to be able to synch up with the weather. But yesterday it finally edged out of the 40’s and, despite an increasingly stiff wind, we headed out to the far side of the reservoir to see what was happening.
The Osprey pair have indeed settled in. I managed to catch a shot of one of them grabbing a branch and bringing it to the nest. Later one of the birds, presumably the male, delivered a fish as well.
All in all, a good start for these birds.
My observation protocol keeps me a good distance away from the nest site during these early months. Once the nest is established and occupied, we can test the waters for edging a bit closer. Last year proved to be a big surprise in that the adults were extremely skittish (in past years they were always rather tolerant - leaving me to believe that at least one of the birds is new).
Between the wind and the lack of good light, it was no fun out there - but it was still great to get back on the water again after a long winter and we’re looking forward to many more visits. (The forecast has the temperatures back into the 40’s again in a few days, so it’s not going to be a cake walk…)
We received yet another snowfall yesterday. The northeast is on track for a record winter snowfall-wise. I’m not sure our little town is near its records, but up in northern New England, they are getting buried. One town in Maine is over 140 inches and there are weeks to go.
Such is our fate, so the climate models are predicting. Snowier winters and drier summers will increasingly become the norm for New England.
Our river, the Assabet, went to flood stage a week or so ago after snow and rains piled on for a few days. Not so long ago winter in my backyard had the river running slowly and nearly frozen across. In recent years it looks more like the spring thaw - in February.
With luck, in a few weeks time, we’ll be putting our kayaks in the river and start to paddle our way into spring.
Today is the day where the phrase “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute” comes to life:
8a - Snow on trees, heavy clouds, “freezing fog”
8:30 - Hazy sunshine, slight breeze
9a - Sunny
10a - Partly sunny
12:30 - Turns dark, windy.
1pm - Thunderstorm, snow squall, near white-out conditions
1:30 - Sunshine
3pm - Blue skies, windy
3:30p - Sky turns dark again
4pm - Snow squall, gusty winds
4:30 - Sun peeks through
4:40 - Clouds
5pm - Sunset,
6pm - Thunder, windy, snowing
6:30 - strong winds (20-40 mph)
When the sun peeked out in the afternoon I tried running downtown to take a picture of the clock tower lit up against the storm clouds. The sun, literally, disappeared while I was driving up the parking garage — a span of 3 minutes. Augh!
Like a lot of places in New England, we get our fair share of snow. Typically it arrives in one of two ways:
1)kinda like rain, but accumulates on the ground
2)accompanied by a lot of wind (your classic Nor’easter)
But every once in a while Nature decides to give you a gift, and yesterday we received one here in Central Massachusetts. The amount of snow varied greatly based on where you were, so I wouldn’t want to say that it was “just right”, but it wasn’t a dusting and it wasn’t 2 feet… The amount of snow wasn’t the important part it was the quality of the snow and how it fell. It came down gently and was just the right temperature to stick together a bit. The result: we’re walking in a winter wonderland.
Just to make things even nicer today it’s cloudy again with a few flurries, so the scenery will be around for another day. Tomorrow the forecast calls for sunshine. That’ll give me about 90 minutes of nice light and then we’re off to the melting races…
Well, it is supposed to be the dog days of summer (and I’m sure they’ll be here soon enough) but the past few days here in New England have given us a taste for Autumn (my favorite season).
With nighttime temperatures dipping into the low 40’s and strong north breezes, it would be difficult to ask for a better weekend in the middle of August.
By sheer chance, this amazing weather was coupled with the opportunity to see the Indigo Girls in concert at the Stone Mountain Arts Center. We’ve seen Amy and Emily play at Great Woods, Harbor Lights in Boston, and the Tsongas Arena in Lowell — these are shows with thousands of people attending. To get an opportunity to see them play to about 200 of us was really special. As if to underscore that point, about halfway through the show Amy Ray noted that it was so small that perhaps we should just “go around the room and introduce ourselves to each other”.
I’m not a people-person, but I do enjoy watching them. This concert had another wonderful dynamic that wasn’t on the stage. I don’t know if it was by chance or design, but the audience was somewhat divided between “SMAC audience regulars” and “Indigo Girls Fans”. When I say “SMAC Audience” I really mean “people who probably haven’t seen Indigo Girls in concert before”. I best think of an Indigo Girls concert as “going to church”. There are times when you sit, times when you stand, times when you sing, and times when you let the rush of what’s happening in front of you penetrate your soul. It helps if you’ve been to church a few times.
Since we’re long-time veterans of several Indigo Girls concerts, and we happened to be sitting smack in the center of the room — we were getting as much entertainment from the looks of the right-hand side of the room looking puzzled at the left-hand side of the room as we were from the music coming from the stage. The former, were sitting and watching a great concert like good New Englanders are supposed to do. The latter were singing verses of the songs at the tops of their lungs, dancing in the aisles, cheering wildly after a favorite song, and just having a great ole’ time. The demographic of the latter, by the way, is overwhelmingly female. It’s an unusual kind of church - but it’s a church nonetheless.
(In case you were wondering, there was no photography allowed during the show — so I only have words to share.)
Betsy and I had decided to stay over at the Frost Mountain Yurts for the weekend — another fortuitous decision. When we left the concert a few hours ago we looked up and the stars were very much out on this moonless night (SMAC is, as they say, in the boonies). A 10 minute ride to the yurts and we’re in total darkness except for the Milky Way overhead. We don’t get this kind of a show back home in Maynard. The light pollution from Boston and the ‘burbs takes away most of the subtle night sky. We get glimpses of our galaxy on exceptionally clear nights, but it takes a power failure to have anything approaching what they have out here. As if it was a reminder that we’re not as far out in the boonies as you could be, a strobe light from a nearby airfield would occasionally brighten up the horizon.
We couldn’t see the Milky Way from the yurts so we hiked back to the trailhead, with camera, and I set the camera on the ground aiming straight up and took a few 30 second exposures. (Note of frustration: Canon’s 1DMkII placement of “bulb” exposure isn’t where it is on most other cameras — it’s actually a special exposure mode (like Av, Tv, M). Sigh!)
Astrophotography is a whole other level of difficulty. Turning subtle levels of dark gray into stunning images is hard work — and certainly I’m not up to the task. But I hope you get a little sense of the grandeur that floats above our heads during the summer months.
