Where does the time go?

Photographs taken at the Assabet Reservoir in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Canon 7D, 500mm f/4, 24-70mm f/2.8, handheld in kayak (calm water).

Minimal Lightroom processing.   The tricky part is picking the white balance…   A topic for another day I guess.

Related posts:

1. Assabet Osprey Update
2. Abstract Kayaker Followup
3. 2010 Summer Workshops

Life has a way of throwing curve balls at you and last week our family was pitched hard and fast.   If you’ve been wondering if I’ve been on vacation the past week, the answer is “anything but” — and compared to others I’ve had it easy.

Last Saturday we headed up to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, NH to photograph some friends who race there in the LRRS series.   We spent several weekends up there last year and had a great time learning how to photograph high-speed bikes winding their way through the course while becoming good friends with a number of the riders there – particularly Larry and Chris, the core of “Slowpoke Racing” – LRRS #387 and #446.

Chris and my sister Kate are a bit of a item (not sure how else to say this) and our families share holidays together, etc.   Larry is a great guy and they are both considered to be some of the nicest guys racing at Loudon.

This year my schedule on the weekends has been pretty full and there was only one opening to head up to get some images.   Larry had changed the paint scheme on the bikes and wanted some new photographs.   They are kind enough to pick up the cost of the infield pass and feed us well, so this works out well for both of us.   My son Jay often tags along and has been doing some excellent shooting – which gives me more coverage on the track (and significantly more images to process afterwards).

So we headed up to the NHMS and found “Slowpoke City” – Larry had upgraded from a trailer and a tent to about 5 tents, an air-conditioned RV trailer, and the bike trailers.   The Slowpoke team included a few other members, Justin, Shaul, and Wes and everybody was enjoying a day of racing in the 95+ degree heat.     It was a very long day — there were numerous accidents and incidents on the track that affected a number of races.

I still haven’t scored an “on-track pass”, but we were able to get access to some pretty decent locations for doing photography and came away with almost 1800 images for the day of the team racing along with various shots of other riders.   I even tried shooting some video with the 5D Mark II through the 500mm f/4 lens.   This was an experiment that didn’t go very well, but it was fun to try anyways.  I’m always looking to push into new territory.

Normally we’d go up for both days but I had a DSLR workshop in Boston with Philip Bloom (sponsored by BOSFCPUG) on Sunday, but we had a good set of photographs from Saturday’s races that I’m sure would keep everybody happy.

On Sunday, near the end of the workshop, I receive a text from Betsy informing me that Chris had a serious accident on the track and was being airlifted to the hospital.   Details are sketchy but the news was not good: many broken bones, severely damaged shoulder, many broken ribs, at least one lung collapsed, and he’s unconscious.

And so begins a week of trying to meet all of the various commitments one has that keep the lights on while trying to be a resource for my sister and Chris’ family.   We quickly become as well-versed as we can in trauma care, traumatic brain injury assessment, insurance, and a dozen other things.  Meanwhile I’m giving lectures on Social Media, teaching kids about nature photography, photographing musicians, all the time wondering if there’s something more I could or should be doing to help.   I know that compared to Haiti or Afghanistan we’ve got it easy — but that doesn’t really seem to matter much when it’s your family that’s suffering.

Chris had a number of things going for him.  He’s built like a bulldog and healthy as a horse.  The NHMS racing officials are very serious about their job and safety on the track.   On Saturday I spent most of my day 20 feet from one of the ambulance crews and saw first hand how they dealt with various accidents on the track.  I’m sure someone was there within seconds of the incident and an EMT crew was probably 90 seconds away.   He was airlifted to Darmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, which has a Level 1 Trauma Center.  No better place to bring someone with those types of injuries.

This was a week of excruciatingly slow progress as Chris fought to stay alive and we, friends and family, doing what we can to cope and understand the situation and give comfort and support to those closest to him.   It really was touch and go there for a few days.  He was alive almost entirely due to his excellent physical condition, and initially we were all focused on his breathing and physical injuries.  The best you could say was that they had not gone in to perform surgery on anything.

As the days crawled by it became apparent that he was likely to survive the trauma to his lungs and arms, but then the attention turned to his brain — which had sustained some “shearing” type of injuries.  When someone is on a ventilator they sedate them pretty heavily, but he would be brought out of sedation occasionally for neurological assessments.  Only minor improvements were seen.  All the while his body continued to heal with his lung capacity increasing, swelling dropping, and no hard signs of infection.

Last night, 1 week after almost leaving us, Chris began to give positive cognitive signs to his medical team and family.   We don’t know the details of his condition and they aren’t really of concern to anyone beyond his immediate family right now anyways — but for the first time in a week Chris is breathing on his own and responding to questions, and those of us around him are starting to breathe a bit ourselves.

There will be a long road to recovery for Chris, but knowing and seeing the support he has received from his family, Kate, our family, his medical team, and the unbelievable caring racing community that he is a part of – we’re very optimistic.   Every once in a while the universe decides to teach us a lesson.  For a few of us, this week, it has been one word: hope.

=====  Postscript: July 29, 2010 ====

Thanks for all the comments in Facebook and elsewhere regarding this article.  It really helps to hear from folks.   Yesterday Chris had surgery on his shoulder and arm and is scheduled to leave the hospital as early as tomorrow (30th) for a rehab facility.   His progress continues to be steady and inspiring — and I hope to have more to say on his progress in the coming weeks.

As I alluded to in the article above, the racing community’s support of Chris has been astounding.   Racers and crew who have never met Chris have been sending money, donating stuff for auctions, organizing fundraisers, and the list goes on and on.   Christopher Ormonde (LRRS #617) kindly sent me a set of links to threads in the New England Street Riders forum that may be of interest — particularly if you want to become involved in any way.

Related posts:

1. Here we go again – another roaring river week
2. Pushing the limits
3. Loudon Road Racing Series

Another week, another 50-year rain storm…

I’m partly joking, I don’t know the recurrence level of this current storm but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Here’s the flow gauge of the river for the past 30 days.  We’re in for another fun few days with the current forecast having the river rise potentially 2 feet above where it is right now, but they said the last storm would reach 7 feet as well, and it didn’t quite hit that mark.

On the other hand we’re starting from a significantly higher point.

All this water means that I’ll have a chance to visit a few more of the local streams and capture some, um, “rigorous” flow conditions.

These two events back to back have me hankering to build a time-lapse movie of the river’s rise.   Today it rose rather dramatically and did so during the daylight hours.  The only problem is that it was pouring rain and we had non-trivial winds as well.  I think I’m going to poke around and see if I can build a watertight box with a plexiglas viewport, perhaps lockable so I can chain it to a tree or something if needed.  This would let me set it up for a 12 hour run and try to bring this dynamic event to life.

As evening drew near I decided the 5D needed a bath, so I headed out into the backyard to take a few images.  I nearly froze my hands off in 15 minutes — the rain must be at 33 degrees (F). Here’s a bit of video from this evening:

Technical:

Images and video captured with a well-soaked Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L.  Image was at ISO 400, 1.6 seconds, f/5.6.  Video was at ISO 3200, 1/60, f/2.8.  Both were taken from Gitzo sticks and a Manfrotto fluid head.

Image processed with Lightroom, bit of fill and black point, moderate clarity.   Video was transcoded to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip, which was an unnecessary step because I then imported it into iMovie to trim, add the titles, and adjusted exposure +35%. Exported directly from iMovie to Quicktime H.264.

Related posts:

1. Working the high water
2. Shooting in the Dark – River Solstice
3. 21st Annual Assabet River Cleanup

In the previous post on exploring the power of water I discussed an encounter with a kayaker where I decided to use long exposures rather than try to freeze the action with the intent of having some abstract images.   My brother, Pete, noted that I didn’t include any traditional visual “anchor points” in the images.  This was intentional on my part, but I thought it would be interesting to look at the images that did have some reference to solid ground in them.

If I had planned this encounter I would have taken steps to make the background even more stable – providing a more distinct visual contrast between the trees and ground and the chaos of the water.  The sequence here moves from moderately discernible backgrounds to where the they become almost as fluid and abstract as the water.  Feel free to compare and contrast with the initial set.

Technical details:

Canon 40D, 100-400mm f/4.5L IS at f/16, ISO 200 with polarizer and 3-stop ND filter.  Shutter speed 0.6 seconds for the first image and 0.8 seconds for the others.  Camera stabilized on a Gitzo tripod and RRS BH-55 ballhead.

Lightroom post-processing: White balance set to 6000K, exposure unchanged, fill 53, black point 33, clarity 80, and vibrance 25.  Default Lightroom sharpening.

Related posts:

1. Exploring the Power of Water 3
2. Exploring the Power of Water 2
3. Lightroom-enhanced time-lapse video

I haven’t done a lot of nature photography this winter.  Lots of excuses, none of them particularly good.  I’m doing a lot of other work, so it’s not like I’m getting rusty or anything, but standing by a river with a camera recharges my soul in a way that other subjects just don’t do (though, fortunately, many come close).

We’ve been finally catching up on a large backlog of podcasts here and we spent a day or two listening to “This American Life“, which along with “Radiolab” is perhaps some of the best radio ever made.  After listening to the master storytelling in these two programs I rewatched a set of YouTube videos where Ira Glass talks about storytelling and the message in the second video just whacked me over the head.  His words were about radio and video production but they apply equally to photography and really just about any creative pursuit.  These are not new ideas, but somehow hearing someone like Ira, who is at the top of his game, talk about this process was extremely visceral.  Here’s Ira’s wisdom on photography (even though he doesn’t say it explicitly):

All photography is trying to be crap.

I encourage you to watch this:

Shortly after watching this on my Apple TV I happened to visit a Flickr stream of a good friend of mine, Bob Travis, who regularly posts his photos online.  Bob is a true amateur photographer – he shoots for the love of the craft and it is integrated into his day-to-day life.   I got a big dose of envy looking at the past month or so of his images: jazz musicians, outdoor scenes, his cat (I assume it’s his cat).  They’re not all masterpieces, but that’s not the point.  They are consistently packing an emotional punch and Bob continually hones his craft.

So I got off my butt at headed outside, intent on photographing something… anything.  It was probably going to be crap but so what.  I needed to get back into a rhythm.  No car.  Damn. So short of a long hike I’d be photographing my tired old backyard.   Blaring afternoon sun with no clouds.  All the classic reasons to not do landscape photography.  Screw it.  Grabbed the 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm, and the tripod and headed down the stairs.

I wanted to push myself a bit.  I decided to stand in one spot and make as many photos as I could for an hour or so, so I plunked myself next to the river, staring into the glaring sun and a landscape I’ve photographed, quite literally, thousands of times.  The river helps because there really is always something different, but after a two decades of being at a single location there is some repetition.  Click.  Crap.  Click. Crap.

Hmmm.. what to do?   A few months ago I purchased an 3-stop ND filter for my video work (shooting video with a HDDSLR like the Canon 5D Mark II requires filters if you want to have control over depth of field since you are rather constrained on shutter speed).  Although I knew there were good photographic reasons to have the filter, I had not really used the filter for still work yet.  Bolted that filter on along with a polarizer.  In the viewfinder the reflections of the blazing sun was reduced to the equivalent of a full moon.

Cool, I’ll make a few long exposures of the river — no need to wait for a cloudy afternoon as I normally would.  There were a couple of clouds popping up so I might get lucky.  Heck, I’m just trying to make the best out of a lousy situation.  I spent a couple of hours working that spot and saw some promising images coming up on the review screen.  Later in the evening when I brought them up in Lightroom I realized I had stumbled into something I didn’t really expect, but what happened that afternoon might turn into a complete exhibit for me by the time I’m done exploring this technique and certainly will provide an image or two for my 2010 theme.

When you typically shoot long exposures of waterfalls or rivers one is seeking the misty or feathery look that is, to be fair, a bit of a cliché.  I was admittedly going for this with the filters and exposure settings, but what came back looked more like a particle collision from the Large Hadron Collider (hey, I’m a geek)…

Instead of soft light painting the image, the moving water and the strong sun was creating millions of specular highlights that traced through the image.

At a distance the images have a similar feel to the classic long exposures, but there is something different about them.  As you get closer the detailed traces of the individual drops of water and air bubbles all become visible.  Somewhat of a fractal experience in a way.  While I’m very much into documentary photography, I find abstract work to be where I get my biggest kick of endorphins.  I don’t know if others will find these images as beautiful and mesmerizing as I do, but I’m hoping it’ll touch a few others as it did for me.

My original shooting was with a wide-angle (24-70mm) lens and the magic was in the details, so I went out a couple days later with a different lens intent on exploring those details.  The 70-200mm lens was the next experiment and it produced some images that I’m very happy with, but I’ll likely push this even further with the 100-400 — although I start running into depth-of-field issues pretty quickly…  Plus I need to play more with different exposure lengths.  (Further rambling omitted.)  Of course now the weather forecast is for a solid week of overcast skies, so I’m going to have to content working on these images I’ve captured so far — and now I get to see what else I can do with a cloudy sky.

But all that technical stuff really doesn’t matter!

Whether or not these images translate to the large prints I think they’ll do well as, the lesson has been learned: get out and shoot.  Push yourself and be ready to find nothing but crap and toss it out.  But by the act of doing this you might discover something wonderful hiding in plain sight in the unlikeliest of places.

Thanks Ira!

Related posts:

1. Going beyond glass GND filters with Lightroom
2. Exploring the Power of Water 2
3. Lightroom-enhanced time-lapse video

Here is the February 2010 wallpaper for your favorite computer display. I thought I’d celebrate Valentine’s Day with a splash of red (ok, pink!

This month’s image comes from a spot just mile or so upriver of our home, an abstract of ice and water on the Assabet River in Stow, Massachusetts.

This is an image that will likely be part of an exhibit I’m assembling for later this year exploring the places “in between” – in this case between water and ice.

You can download this image for several popular display sizes:

Download the 1024×768 version here.

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Related posts:

1. May 2010 Wallpaper
2. March 2010 Wallpaper
3. August 2010 Wallpaper

A big Arctic front moved into our area today and was announced by some snow squalls that painted the landscape.  I popped out into the backyard to grab some video of the falling snow.  As the squalls cleared out the late afternoon sun popped through the clouds and lit up the snow clinging to the branches.  (The temperature also dropped about 10 degrees in 10 minutes…)

Related posts:

1. Wild Weather Day
2. A Proper Snowstorm
3. Here we go again – another roaring river week

I’d like to wish everyone a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

I’m going to be making at least one of my images available each month suitable as your desktop “wallpaper”.  I’ve made them available in a few of the more popular screen sizes, so I hope one of them will suit your needs.  January’s image comes from the depths of winter in Yellowstone National Park.

Download the 1024×768 version here.

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

Related posts:

1. April 2010 Wallpaper
2. July 2010 Wallpaper
3. August 2010 Wallpaper

Related posts:

1. 2009 Maynard Christmas Parade
2. Maynard Downtown Trick or Treat
3. Maynard Prints on sale at Gallery Seven

As we transition into the winter season the brilliant colors of autumn, at times, seem to be almost literally drained from the scenery.

These are three color photos, the first two are straight out of the camera, the third one has a few exposure tweaks and a tiny crop.

Related posts:

1. Autumn is here!
2. Fire and Water
3. Autumn Nights in Maine (in the Summer)