Category Archives: Staring

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Annual Christmas Parade

December 7, 2008 – 7:07 pm

Maynard’s annual Christmas Parade was started back in the late 1960’s by a wonderful fellow named Phil Bohunicky.  Phil passed away in 2004 but the parade is now firmly embedded in the culture of the town (and hats off to the Rotary Club and others who keep Phil’s tradition alive.)

Today was pretty close to a perfect day for a parade.  It wasn’t too cold (right around freezing), there was a bit of snow in the air now and then, and plenty of people came to watch.

I intended to record some audio as well and make a multimedia presentation out of this, but, alas, that didn’t work out.  Maybe next year.  Parades are tough!

A full set of photos from the parade can be found on my community gallery: community.dmg-photography.com

Here’s a sampling of a few that I particularly like…

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Looking across the Solar System - Part Deux

December 1, 2008 – 6:05 pm

The skies cleared out for the big show.

Trees 75 yards.

Moon 250,000 miles.

Venus 93 million miles

Jupiter 540 million miles

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Venus-Jupiter Conjunction

November 29, 2008 – 9:17 pm

Tonight something very unusual happened.  No, not the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the southwest sky…  What was unusual  was that there was an astronomical event and it wasn’t cloudy.  I have a pretty bad record with these things and the hope that I can observe things like this was beaten out of me years ago.

But, every once in a while Nature throws you a bone.

That’s Venus below and Jupiter above.   In a couple of nights the crescent moon will be in the vicinity. It’ll be a far better photograph than this.  It’s also a sure sign it will be raining here.

Venus is below and Jupiter is above.  Wow.  Think about it - you are looking first towards the sun at Venus (94 million miles) and then clear across the solar system to Jupiter (539 million miles).  What a show!

 

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Indianpolis, Indiana

November 15, 2008 – 3:34 pm

We had an abbreviated third day in Indiana, so I elected to stay in Indianapolis instead of driving 2 hours to someplace a bit more my style only to have to leave an hour or so later.  It was a quiet Sunday morning (the Pacers had beaten the Celtics the night before and the New England Patriots were in town for a Colts game — within a few hours it seemed like everyone was wearing a Colts jersey).  I wandered around the center of Indianapolis and looked for some interesting architecture shots.  The light was pretty unspecial, so perhaps I shouldn’t bother with these - but I rather liked some of the monuments and classic buildings they had scattered in the center of downtown.

The reason we were in town was Betsy was attending the Girl Scout National Convention.  Walking around the area, there was little doubt something was going on.

A large monument, erected in 1889, dedicated to fallen soldiers and sailors is the focal point of Indiana’s capital city.  It’s quite a sight at night.

Back when entrances said something…

And, perhaps, one of the more ornately carved buildings I’ve seen…

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A strange beauty hiding in plain sight

November 14, 2008 – 10:04 pm

While photographing the Bald Cypress trees at Muscatatuck NWR, a nice couple stopped to take in the view and we chatted for a while.  They were from the next county over and visited the refuge frequently.  I mentioned that I was frustrated that I couldn’t find the river otter and they said they had seen otter in the past on a certain trail.  Lacking any other leads, I hiked in the quarter mile or so with my equipment and hoped for the best.

Alas, I’m sure there are otter there at some point in the year - but the water bodies in the refuge are managed and, on that particular day, the pond was dry.  No otter, no way.

The sun was getting low and the stumps in drained pond/swamp were creating some nice shadows.  I had lugged the 500mm lens out there why not take a few pictures?  When I put my eye to the viewfinder it was like looking at a wonderland.  The bright sun made it difficult to see, and perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention to the scale of it all, but the entire area was a massive web.

This really isn’t unlike photographing the Badlands of South Dakota and probably a thousand other places.  Most of the time this probably just looks rather uninteresting - but when the light is just so, the landscape transforms itself into something truly special.

Oh to be here at the same time after a rainshower!

 

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Corn harvest in Indiana

November 3, 2008 – 5:10 pm

My trip to Indiana was one of opportunity.  Betsy was attending the Girl Scout National Convention in Indianpolis for a few days and I used that as a good excuse to do some photography away from home.   The Sandhill Cranes of Jasper-Pulaski were my primary subject, but I knew there would be others.

I have to say that coming from New England I was pretty much blown away by the scale of the farming there.   I’ve travelled a bit around New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming so I’ve certainly seen large spreads of land — but mostly for ranching rather than intensive farming.   I have a lot of respect for the people who make a living on the land, but that went up a notch to see where the corn flakes come from…

I was pretty much unprepared to capture the large vistas of these farms.  Below are a few snapshots that I hope capture a bit of the flavor of agriculture on the large in Indiana (a couple are literally shot one-handed out the car window while hurtling down a county highway).  I hope to return some day and try to do it some justice.

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Here’s a panorama of a few of the farms. Click on it to load into your browser.  You should be able to zoom and pan around it using the browser’s scroll bars.

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Move over old man…

October 27, 2008 – 11:16 am

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Our nephew, Matt, who lives out in the Springfield area, plays soccer in a league that has games all over Massachusetts, so every once in a while they head out this way and we do our best to try to catch the game.

Yesterday they played in Hudson, at the Hudson Portuguese Club field that sits right next to the Assabet River.  I  had just spent six hours shooting a horse show in Littleton (the subject of a forthcoming blog post) and my back hadn’t fully absorbed the Advil I had taken 30 minutes ago — so I brought a small folding stool to sit on to watch the game.

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That’s Matt on the right (#27) - he plays defense.

My brother Peter (Matt’s dad) had brought along his 5-year old son Nathan to the game as well (that’s him, below, after the game).  So I’m sitting with my little chair, a camera and monopod clicking away and Nathan winds his way between me and the camera to look through the viewfinder.   I lower the monopod so it is the proper height and soon he’s following the game through it.  I fire a couple of shots and he quickly learns where that button is.  (After a few presses I lower the frame rate from 13fps or he’ll burn through my card in 2 minutes.)

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And so we begin this interesting relationship — Nathan is aiming and shooting — finding each player on his brother’s team, taking their photo and letting me know their names,  and I’m holding down the auto-focus button and occasionally guessing what the zoom should be based on the action in front of us, and noting the shots as they come up on the review screen.  (Nathan quickly learns which button displays the full image so he can see it.)

There’s a lot of crooked photos and less than inspiring action, but once in a while he nails one:

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I manage to get control of the camera now and then, but most of the time he was shooting and asking what all the buttons and numbers meant.  (At one point I had to chide him that the shots remaining counter heading towards zero was NOT a goal.)

If you would like to see more photographs from the game, I’ve published a set on my Community Gallery (see (”Soccer Game - Hudson“) — admittedly there’s a dash of family photographs in there, but what the heck?

I won’t tell you which ones I took and which ones are Nathan’s.  The scary part is that for some of them, I honestly can’t be sure.  Good equipment?   Good coaching?  Or did I have my replacement sitting on me knee?

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By Dave | Also posted in Community, Photography | Comments (0)

A Visit to The Other Side

October 26, 2008 – 6:11 pm

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Every once in a while I put on my waders and head out into the rapids that flow through our yard.  For photography I prefer it when the water is low and tame, but this year we’ve had good flow — which is good for the river so I’ll find good photographs elsewhere.

I spend a lot of time photographing from the “north bank” and know it quite well.  It’s fun to wade over to the other side and see, up close, what has always been just tantalizing glimpses.

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I know it’s just a few square yards, but it makes you remember why its important to sometimes go out of your way to protect little bits and pieces of the land around us (and the big ones too).

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By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Fire and Water

October 26, 2008 – 5:57 pm

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Autumn seemed to fly through this region of New England.  Maybe it really did, or maybe it just felt that way because there are so many things going on.   One of the cruelest aspects of autumn is that its arrival seems to coincide with about fifty things happening at once.  Schools, businesses, civic groups, political activities that were kinda dormant through the summer suddenly burst with activity.  And outside of that whirling dervish of life in these parts Nature throws up signs that some amazing sights await us — if we just take the time to look at them.

Our neighbor, Liz, has one tree next to the river that simply lit up more and more each evening.  It was impossible not walk through our kitchen and not notice this cold fire next to the river.

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One afternoon I was there with my still camera, the next with a video camera.  (And the mosquitos were there, waiting for me — but it was worth it.)

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We’re closing up the pond for the winter.   For a change, I shut down the waterfall and put a net above the water in an attempt to not attract every single leaf in the neighborhood.   The water lily still wants to bloom every day, but it’s running out of sun…

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By Dave | Also posted in Environment, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Days Are Just Packed!

September 20, 2008 – 4:30 pm

Unfortunately, I’m not living the life of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on which the title is based — it’s a bit more literal for me this past week. Busy and rather out of the ordinary — so, please indulge me as I dip a bit outside of the normal stuff you find here.

The kids came over for the Patriot’s game last Sunday.  Sounds normal until you consider that my daughter was watching the game at our house because it was a bit closer to the hospital — and she was in the early phases of labor. A true fan, she watched the Pats win (with us occasionally chiming in “breathe, breathe…”) before they headed back to Emerson Hospital for the real fun stuff.   At 1:30am that evening our first grandchild, Damien James Cosgrove, drew his first breath of air here in our little corner of Terra.

A few pics of Cathy and Jeff’s new baby boy:

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Amid all the hubbub of a new family member I’ve been working on a number of photographic projects (when it rains it pours):

1) A presentation for the Maynard Historical Society’s meeting on Monday, with a significant amount of production work on my end.  (My thanks to Call-A-Copy Digital in town for helping with this project.)

2) Last week I received a commission from a group of regional environmental organizations to produce a print for a rather well-known person (I won’t say who it is as it might be a surprise).  The print came out great and is now in the hands of my new friends at Gallery Seven - a new frame shop and photo gallery in town.

3) Finished a picture book for the Stone Mountain Arts Center.  I’m hoping the folks there will like it (and maybe others will order copies.)

4) 20 frames arrived for my upcoming gallery show at the end of the month.  I’ll be printing and assembling that next week.

5) Tweaking the slideshow for a presentation I’m doing the first week of October.

6) And a video project has popped up - probably for next week as well.

7) Getting all hot and bothered by the Canon 5D MkII announcement…

It’s sure nice that at least a few of these projects are producing a bit of income.

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By Dave | Also posted in Community | Comments (0)
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