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.
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Category Archives: Staring
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Bathing Beauties
June 20, 2008 – 2:48 pm
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..
First Osprey contact for the year
April 10, 2008 – 10:08 pm
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…)
March Arrives
March 2, 2008 – 6:38 pm
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.
Wild Weather Day
February 10, 2008 – 1:25 am
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!
A Proper Snowstorm
January 15, 2008 – 7:35 pm
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…
Autumn Nights in Maine (in the Summer)
August 19, 2007 – 8:06 pm
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.
January 3, 2007 – 9:12 pm
Normally photos of snow in January aren’t what you would call “distinctive”, but we haven’t had a normal winter season here by a long shot. Here’s our backyard on New Year’s Eve with a (temporary) bit wintry coating of snow.
How did you spend your New Year’s weekend? Me, I started re-cataloging my photos. I recently switched my photographic workflow and cataloging from CaptureOne / iView to Apple’s Aperture. It was also an opportunity to bring more of the archives into my current standard. 33,000 photos later and I’ve got the past 4 years now available at my fingertips. The next job is to tag all of the photos with keywords — that’s Betsy’s new daytime activity.
I had to head back to my real job yesterday, but ran into a short delay. I was reading the morning news in the living room and noted that the sunrise light was just great. But, alas, there wasn’t anything to take a photo of. A few more minutes pass and another burst of light — I headed out to the deck. Looked around. Gorgeous conditions, but the backyard just didn’t have anything calling out to me. And then….
Two double rainbows in a little over two weeks! I hope this means good fortune or something.
Paddling on the Assabet in December
December 17, 2006 – 9:15 pm
Winter doesn’t officially start until December 21st, but we’re nearly there and we found ourselves drawn to the river this afternoon. Normally this would be a hard decision, but temperatures in the 50’s made it a little easier to justify.
We found this Great Blue Heron hunting in the shallows by Honeypot Hill in Stow.
Chasing Rainbows
December 16, 2006 – 7:25 pm
We were in New Hampshire and Maine this weekend for the first annual Stone Mountain Christmas Show. We’ve headed up to the foothills of the White Mountains for several years now for the ancestor of this event - Carol Noonan’s Christmas Concert at the Little White Church in Eaton, NH.
Usually we stay at the Inn at Crystal Lake, but we didn’t get our reservations in soon enough. Tim and Bobby were kind enough to point out another inn in Chocurua: The Riverbend Inn. The inn is, not surprisingly, at a bend of the Chocurua River. Sadly there wasn’t any snow (indeed we debated opening the windows for the night) - but it was a quiet yet convenient place to stay for a couple of nights.
We drove up Friday night (in the fog) and planned to do some random photography on Saturday before the show. The weather, for a change, cooperated with some dynamic skies. We were headed towards Center Harbor when it started to drizzle and the sun was peeking through the clouds. I instantly remarked that there should be a rainbow behind us. We’re never headed in the right direction. Sure enough, 42 degrees off the antisolar point it was there. Little did we know the show that was to come…
We came upon a nice landscape with a gentle rainbow arcing up from it. It was fading in and out as the weather and wind kept things constantly changing. I wish I had a slightly higher vantage point and I would have been thrilled to get a nice reflection… No such luck.
We headed into Moultonborough to visit a quirky little country store there and when we came out we saw the rainbow behind a tree in the front of the public library. I ran and grabbed my camera, but was gone by the time I came back - only to reappear a few minutes later. Meanwhile, Betsy had scoped out another vantage point by the town building. A few minutes later the sky, sun, and rain created one of the most intense rainbows I’ve ever seen — including the fainter “double rainbow” — which had me scrambling for my 16mm lens.
I’m not sure how many fender-benders this caused, but people were lining up in parking lots and pulling off the road to witness this wonderful show of nature. Betsy and I travelled around the area a bit hoping for some better views, but none were to be found.
The ephemeral nature of rainbows makes them all that more enjoyable to see and they were a quite a challenge to photograph.