Every working day I drive slowly across the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge.  It is a brief trip spanning the river just below Fort Clinton where the American revolutionary army belted a huge chain just below and across the water to stop British warships from any further northward progress. Just beyond the bridge is West Point. (Sometimes I'm saluted on this bridge by cadets on their morning run, the most polite and respectful young adults you could ever want to meet.)  

There are no end of mornings that take one's breath away with their beauty here.  Clouds, mist, fog, wind, haze, snow, rain, and all their nuances are stunning, but while driving, not possible to photograph.   Today (May 28th) I didn't have to make the trip due to the Memorial Day holiday, but I did anyway just in case. I didn't think it likely there would be much to see as day dawned in warm haze.  I nearly turned around to go home when I saw fog in the distance. Yes!!  So, I finished the trip.  Here are three from the two rolls I used. If I could stop every morning that seduced me visually, I'd go into debt buying film.  (Yeah...I know...I could shoot digitally for next to nothing.  Sorry...not interested.)

The party tent images below were made adjacent to this photograph.  The Bethlehem Steel Works was an enormous industry in its time.  This photograph was made at the end of the sprawling acres of stacks, and 'ovens' that cooked the raw materials, separated the metal ore from other ingredients, and blended metals to finally make steel. In our era of sterile virtual realities, it's important to remember the gritty, sweaty, smokey, industrial sinew that once polluted air and water, but rolled out the material that built this country. 

It has not only been a while since I've posted a photograph here, but an even longer while since I've posted something new.  These three images were made on April 29th, in Bethlehem, Pa. beside a marvelous relic of rust belt industry, a steel mill.  It is awesome in scale and complexity, but I just didn't have the time before the concert we had come for to photograph it with the intimacy that can only come from time spent. But, along side the mill, there was a party tent that had been set up for an event yet to occur, and was completely available visually.  In the time we had to wait before the concert, I was able to burn two rolls of film.  Here are three from those rolls.

I should title this photograph, "From a Winter that Was"  This past one definitely wasn't!  I felt a bit sorry for all the ice fisherman who used to sit on their stools on frozen Walton Lake.  It did freeze, but thawed in a bit more than a week, and never was thick enough to support fisherman, skaters, or much else.  The issue in question is "global" warming, not local warming, but if this year were a portent of things to come even around here, it's a major shift in the climate.  I hope not, but who knows?

I enjoyed a wonderful adventure on Friday, April 6th.  We met up with a small group of painters at the Southlands Foundation, Gentle Giants 4H club farm in Rhinebeck, NY.  The painters (OH RATS*) had arranged to have one of the Belgian horses, (Turk), and a couple of donkey's available for them to paint.  I tagged along with my cameras, and had a grand time ranging within and beyond the paddock where the painters were painting.  We will return here (have an open invitation) many times, I think. A splendid place!!

*Old Hudson River Art and Truth Society. 

The two photographs below are from 2005.  They were made with my first view camera (ToyoView45D), and a very modest entry level lens (Rodenstock Geronar 210).  I had also just acquired an enlarger for 4x5 negatives, and couldn't wait to print these two.  But, the full negatives had problems I didn't know how to solve, and they have never been scanned or printed until now. (these are scans, but prints to follow immediately).  I have a sense of what to do with the prints that I didn't know back then.  The challenge is to achieve in the darkroom what is so ridiculously simple in Photoshop, but nothing I do there isn't a legitimate darkroom technique as well.  We'll see how well I do!

 

If you've visited this blog over time you've seen this waterfall before.  I've visited it for over 30 years, and always enjoyed it whether making a photograph or not.  This subject is done to death, of course, but, like portraits of people each is different.  Sometimes the image is a boring cliche, and sometimes it's a bit more than that because there's an inherent design that transcends the subject.  Whichever of those two possibilities you decide this exemplifies, I've decided it's more the latter than the former.

One great thing about film is that it's easy to keep forever.  Were I accumulating digital files, I don't know if I'd even be able to load one that's ten or more years old unless I'd updated the software I'd need to do that as often as necessary (and hope the file was uncorrupted as well). 

The 'graph below is a negative scan from a 2000 photograph.  I never printed it because I thought it was too 'unfriendly' with as much dark as it has.  But....now that I tone prints in thiocarbamide and selenium, the color changes that mood, and I've decided I like this well enough to print next week.  It's also cropped a bit from the full negative (another bit of progress from what I did 12 years ago), and I've noticed that this kind of photograph has now been done by a lot of people (probably had been then, too, of course, but I didn't know). 

Painters become better painters over time as they accumulate, and develop skills.  Yet, their creative vision most likely was there from the beginning and only needed refinement and added scope. The camera, though, nails the image as well earlier in one's development as later.  So....I don't feel that this 'graph is any less current in a way than if I had just made it.  I just 'see' it differently now than then.  Make sense?

It's been a weird, wimpy winter, and now we're experiencing a dramatically early spring.  LOVE IT!!  On Sunday we went out to the Rogowski Family Farm in Pine Island for their farm breakfast which was a real treat, and then meandered home slowly.  Not far from that farm the road crossed the stream below, and we parked a bit up the road and walked back with our cameras (3 people, 4 cameras just to keep the weirdness in play...).  I shot one roll of film from the bridge, and selected these two negatives to scan from the ten on the roll.  It pays to 'work' a subject, because, had I only taken two or three images from the bridge, I doubt I'd have gotten the two below. 

Being drawn many times to the same place is either a sign of perpetually clinging to the familiar, or being perpetually curious to discover nuances of difference the familiar undergoes from one visit to the next.  I hope my affinity for the falls at Beacon (NY) is of the latter sort, but I'm okay with its being of the former if that's the case.  Different here is the use of the P67 rather than the Mamiya TLR, and my surprise at the extensive sprucing up the site has undergone that has undermined its charm to a notable degree.  I've sort of made this same photograph before, but there are enough differences that I'm not reluctant to post it. 

I suppose I'm grateful for this year's mild winter, but it has been a big disappointment visually.  Except for last weeks light, and very brief snowfall (see last week's post), this winter has been dull and drab even in sunlight for the most part. So, I'm sharing a photograph from a golden autumn of several years ago when I was able to spend a few hours at a local farm with my very first view camera (a Toyo View with 210 Geronar lens).  Though this is a negative scan, I've now learned how to print this in a way that will be quite close to what you see below. 

This past Friday brought us our first modest snowfall so far this winter.  What made it special visually was that the air was enough above freezing for there to be fog, and a kind of misty drizzle persisted throughout the day.  For monochrome photography, those are among the best possible conditions.

We drove out to Montgomery, NY where I was eager to visit the horse farm again with snow on the ground, and that's the image with the trees and fence.  (There are several posts below of this scene in different conditions.).  The second image was made just around the corner from the first at a town park that has a lake, benches, and this little dwarf pine. Irresistible!  Best of all, though, was that I never had to shovel a single flake, and all had melted from the driveway by the end of the day.  Yes!!

These two photographs fulfill a very long standing hope that I would one day be in this place with my camera ready, and with the light doing what it's doing here.  The row of foreground trees grow along a little brook that bisects a meadow.  The mountain behind them is still a good way off, and when passing clouds very briefly subdued light on it, I was (at last) prepared to make the photograph.  It might seem surprising, but landscape and nature photographs can be as challenging as street, or sports photographs when the success or failure of the image depends on the critical timing of a "decisive moment". 

I came across this odd boulder in a stream that runs beside a fairly busy rural road.  There are a number of pull-outs along the road that seem to have been cleared for fishermen who park there in droves during the 'season'.  The stream is quite rocky in a lot of places, and I walked with great difficulty on a bed of medium sized stones that brought me to this formation.  I haven't a clue to how the pool in the rock was formed except for the possibility that it was the result of a chunk that may have broken out of the larger host boulder.  I suppose eons of freeze and thaw would do that, but it's cool to see however it came to be.

Winter here so far has been more like early spring.  Temperatures have been in the 40's to low 50's during the day, and not much lower than the mid 20's at night. I guess I'd like a beautiful light snowfall, but, in truth, I'm really happy to not have to shovel any of it at all.  Still...winter's events have their aesthetic appeal. October's surprise snowfall, and the crystaline coating of ice that usually happens at least once each year can be gorgeous.  But...it hasn't happened this winter so far, so these images are from last fall, and a prior winter that was much more severe.  On balance for me, photographs of winter's "charms" are a lot more appealing than their reality.

I've driven past this sculpture for a couple of years,  and never stopped to take a picture of it.  But yesterday, with just a few frames left on a roll of Delta 100, I couldn't resist.  It sits on a lawn in front of Brakewell Steel Products, in Chester, NY, and is about the coolest thing Ive ever seen that a serious business has put out for public enjoyment.  The sculptor is not named, but I guess he or she is an employee of the firm.  There are a couple other sculptures there as well, but they're not where I can get near them.  Too bad, though, 'cause the work of this artist is a lot of fun!

I should probably not make this post so close in time to my previous one, but the photographs below were made yesterday, and are not old work revisited. 

It's not often that I find scenes close to home that quickly resonate as strong photographs.  What's too familiar can easily inure me to not  'see' what's there.  But, this horse farm is different, and not very close by.  It offers vivid and graphic views that make photography very appealing.  I've long wanted to include a horse, but they rarely cooperate, and patience for that is essential.  I am happy with these three 'graphs, but eventually there will be a couple more from here that I will like even better...come back from time to time and check...!!

It's interesting to revisit negatives I made years ago.  I'm a better photographer now, but the images I made then still attract me albeit subject to revision.  The revision in this is a cropping that I've thought about for a few years.  I once bought into the notion that the entire negative was "sacred" even to the point of printing the rebate along with the image to prove the authenticity of the original vision.  I've long since abandoned that notion as being a silly kind of virtuoso artistic macho that doesn't serve artistic growth .  It was necessary when contact printing an image from a large, or ultra large negative, but certainly not when enlarging from a medium format, or 4x5 negative. 

I made the photograph below in 2001 at Watkins Glen.  I was amazed at the gorgeous gorges, and deeply impressed at the power of water to sculpt rock that during the brevity of our lives looks to be utterly impervious to erosion. 

It's winter enough that being outdoors for long periods of time with the camera isn't too appealing.  I know people go to Iceland, Antarctica, and a host of other places with snow and winter weather, but at the moment where I live the winter is visually boring, and drab during the few hours a day when I actually could make a photograph.  So...I've been looking through piles of older negatives for ones that I've not gotten around to assessing, and what's below is one of them.  It' was taken in a park that has gone through a major renovation, and this view is no longer there.  It seems to be a sad symptom of what we in America all too often insist is necessary to justify the expense of rehabilitating a public space, that it be given a purpose which, in rural areas, is usually sport related.  So, here is a scene gone by.

One of the "art" imperatives of this era is the series.  It's not enough that there are a dozen excellent, interesting, but disparate images..."they must be related" is the mandate of  the current arbiters of artistic practice.  To make a lone, one off image is to demonstrate a lack of artistic vision I suppose.  Still, there is merit to the discipline of making related images that form a coherent body of work.  I have seen some dreadfully contrived, hurry-up-and-finish examples of such work that have been published, but an authentic series takes a lot of time. Seasons, and years may pass until a group of images exemplify genuine variations on the theme.

So here is yet another of my multi-year series of black dirt region photographs.  They have that region's trademark homage to irrigation canals, furrowed land, and dark rich soil.  The photographs that comprise this ongoing series are all similar, but unique.  Here is one more. 

I have resisted, and will continue to resist surrendering my years of practice with traditional photography (film and wet darkroom) for the convenience and immediacy of digital 'imaging', but I'm about to make some adjustments nonetheless.  NOT to using a digital camera, but to printing on our Epson 3800 printer, and preparing files in Photoshop from film scans.  The image below is the reason for this resolve.  It's flawed.  There is an unacceptable lens flare on the film, but I really like the negative.  I just don't have the chops to get rid of it in any other way than with Photoshop, and I will use this negative as an etude in the digital process.  It will also open the door to printing on the multitude of gorgeous papers there are to try, and the vast and subtle array of toning possible with inks.  The wet darkroom will be with me for as long as the materials to use it exist, but I think it's time to add another couple tools. 

We live only 50 miles or so from NYC, but it's far enough away to be quite rural in some respects.  Farming is still prevalent, especially in the rich, black dirt region that is so distinctive for its' onion growing.  Yet other crops are common here as well, and other parts of Orange County are very active agriculturally.  I don't know what crop is being protected here by the plastic sheeting, but it looks very labor intensive. The sheeting continued for acres and acres, and I'm sure the young plants will thrive with this kind of attention.  The other field is fallow, I assume, and the dead plants will help renew the earth here.

I've not posted here for a longer interval than I like to allow, but there's just not been worthy work to offer.  What's below is an image from 2010 that I haven't cared much for because I hadn't figured out how to render it until now.  What you see is a digital approximation of what I soon will do in the darkroom that I expect will satisfy me.  It's interesting to reflect on the creative process that, for me, involves a non-linear progression from the inception of an idea to its' final rendering months, and even years later.

I used to live a few miles from where I stopped last week to make this photograph.  It was taken from a little park in Peekskill (say that fast a few times!) just beside the Indian Point nuclear reactor...and I mean BESIDE the reactor.  I could have thrown a rock at one of the out buildings.  The Hudson River is rather narrow here having just made a sharp bend from due north to sharply west for a while. This is why there are some serious issues with its' effluent which is much warmer than the river's normal temperature.
But, those issues aside, the afternoon light was diffused in late autumn haze, and quite beautiful and I enjoyed being there after many years away.  

A mile or two from our house is a field that's been vacant for as long as I've known it.  Recently, I guess, it changed owners, and the new landlord is clearly a Christian.  It's easy to drive past this scene and not notice the crucifix (or small sign  "God's Little Acre" ) because the value of the cross is so similar to the surrounding grasses and more distant trees.  But, I did, and stopped for a while to make this photograph. 

In mid/late autumn the trees revert to their skeletal selves.  The endless patterns of symmetry that one discovers that were never designed for aesthetic satisfaction by nature, are nonetheless truly rewarding to discover and uncover.  A well known artist, speaking about portraiture, said something to the effect that portraits of others reveal the artist more than the subjects.  I'm certain that is true about the kind of photographs that I'm drawn to appreciate and to make.  Here are three.

I sometimes take the same route home that I take in the morning (there's an alternative), and do so because there's no toll, and because the latter part of the trip is though Harriman and Bear Mountain State Parks.  For too much of the year the morning drive is in darkness, but the afternoon drive isn't, and the scenery is gorgeous in every season.  The two pictures below were made in a little park that sits beside a Hudson River inlet.  The inlet is barricaded by a railroad bed that was man made to accommodate the Hudson Line and goes all the way north to Poughkeepsie and beyond. 

And, here's another image that simply celebrates the new lens I bought from KEH.com.  It's a 300mm f4 one that was listed in LN- condition, and seems to be just that.  The thing is tack sharp even at shutter speeds slower than 1/30th when mounted on my very sturdy 'pod with the massive Manfrotto ball head that weighs about 4 pounds and has the mass to steady a lens of this focal length on a 6x7 camera.

The extraordinary October 29th blizzard we experienced here in the Hudson Valley of New York was unseasonable, unwelcome, destructive, and beautiful.  The destruction was from the weight of the snow on still fully leafed trees that were in peak color and not destined to fall for a week or more.  The beauty was from the clingy, wet snow that girded limbs, branches, twigs, and leaves.  Were I a color photographer, the yellows, reds, and oranges of the autumn color show that were set off in bold relief by the snow would have been a real treat.  Still, the monochrome of it all was beautiful to me.  This is a scene from behind our house. 

A week after the blizzard, all was back to normal (except for post storm repairs), and I was again enjoying the glories of the autumnal show.  But, despite its not being particularly vivid in a seasonal sense, I decided to stop at Iona marsh on the way home from work a few days ago . It's a tidal marsh that, were it not for the mountains that rise beside it, could be mistaken for an ocean side marshland. The tide had drained the water and all it would have contributed to making a photograph.  But, I really liked the stalks, stems, seeds, and branches that I found rimming the big muddy, and decided they would be just fine as portrait sitters.

The upper photograph is yet another in the series I've made at Round Lake, one of two lakes less than five miles from home.  The other lake never seems to call me visually, and I've rarely photographed it, but I feel, out of fairness, that I probably should try. The lower image, therefore, is from Walton Lake, the 'other' lake. Perhaps it's the easy access I have with a parking lot, a dock, and no traffic to interfere, but Round Lake has become a favorite place to visit, just sit and watch, and when conditions are favorable, to photograph. Walton Lake is less accessible, and not so easy to get to, but it needs to be attended to.  Mission!!

Autumn in New York's Hudson Valley is over the top gorgeous.  It doesn't last very long so even going to the movies on the weekend is not a good idea unless it's pouring rain with gale force winds and maniacal zombies lurching toward your front door.  These two images were made on Sunday, October 23rd at a little river near Harriman Park that just two months ago was a raging aqueous nightmare during and after Hurricane Irene. It's back to its' gentle, quiet little self now, and a pleasure to visit.