Something Different

There is a very beautiful photo which has etched itself into my memory. It was taken in Iceland and showed a black sand beach and a mirror smooth, blue green sea with snow white icebergs looming up out of the water. There were also smaller stranded icebergs on the sand leading down to the water. Two things made the photo so special; first was the incredible depth of field that made it seem to go on forever.  Second was the height perspective-it looked as if the photographer had his camera sitting right on the sand when he took the photo. I wish I could show it to you but I saw it only for a moment on a nature show on television. It made such an impression on me that I’ve never forgotten it, and over the last few weeks I’ve tried to re-create it here in New Hampshire, with somewhat disappointing results. It takes a fair amount of thought and planning to create the illusion of three dimensions in a flat, two dimensional space, not to mention the often large amount of time it takes to find the scene in the first place, so I’m going to show them-disappointing or not.

We don’t see too many icebergs here in New Hampshire but we have plenty of rocks, so I tried to show them looming up out of the water like the icebergs in my remembered photo did. It didn’t really work in this river view-the rocks didn’t loom quite the way I wanted them to, even though the camera was almost sitting in the water. Now that I see the photo I think I had the camera too close to them, even though in reality it seemed much farther away.

 

This didn’t work either. I think it would have worked better if the waterfall wasn’t there, or was farther off in the distance. The idea is to have the horizon stretching off into infinity and the waterfall is too close for that. The rocks were looming a little more though. There was a drunken cedar waxwing sitting on one of them, waiting for me to leave so he could eat some more fermented dogwood berries.

 

Not really what I was after, but getting a little closer as far as depth of field goes.

In the forest this view seemed to go on and on but there are so many trees that they look more like a wall, rather than converging on a point in the distance as they really were. It’s amazing how the camera can create such a flat scene out of what was a good example of depth perspective. In this case I think if I had raised the camera up off the forest floor a bit it might have worked. It took quite a few tries to find what I thought was the perfect spot, so this one was especially disappointing.

 

This view of an abandoned road doesn’t work at all. The scene is so distorted you’d think I used a fisheye lens. Something that doesn’t help here is the fact that, though the yellow line was once in the middle of the road, nature has been growing over one side more than the other. If you want to show the yellow line the scene is now skewed, with more open space on the right side of the line than the left.

This shot has depth but the light is far too harsh and the only thing looming is an old dry leaf. Again, a long walk and a lot of time and experimentation for something that isn’t even close to what I was trying for.

Another one with some depth, but again the light was too harsh. I almost fell in getting this one-the rocks I was trying to crouch down on were small and slippery.

 

The pond weeds in the foreground help this one, but it’s not a very interesting scene.

 

This was a hard shot to get. Too bad it isn’t what I was hoping for. The camera should have been lower and even though I knew that at the time there was no way to get it there without either going for a dip or crawling around in a patch of poison ivy.

This shot of Mount Monadnock probably comes closest to what I was trying to do but it’s still not quite there, so I’ll have to keep trying.  I think a large part of the problem is that the landscape views that I’m seeing aren’t really comparable to the iceberg photo. But, because of this experiment if the view I’m looking for ever presents itself I think I’ll at least know what not to do when I try to get a shot of it.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.  ~Ansel Adams

Thanks for stopping in.

 

Read Full Post »

Local Scenery

Quite often when I go here and there searching for plants that are new to me I see interesting and beautiful landscape scenes. I always take pictures but they don’t always make it onto the blog for whatever reason, so I decided to show some of them in this post.

 

I’ve shown shots of a meadow that I visit a couple of times recently on this blog, but this is a different one that I found just the other day. Even though it’s a different meadow, it is still dominated by several species of goldenrod and purple loosestrife.  I can’t help taking a photo every time I see something like this because the color combination is very appealing.

People who have been reading this blog for a while know that one of my favorite places to hunt for plants is along river banks.  The river that is easiest for me to get to is the Ashuelot, which runs north to south from Pittsburg to Hinsdale New Hampshire for 64 miles. This photo shows boulders out of the water in this section, which means that the water level is about as low as it’s been all year.

 

I also follow streams and this one seemed especially photogenic. Sitting beside a stream out in the middle of nowhere is just about the most serene and enjoyable way to pass the time that I can think of.

 

Recently an old friend came to visit from California where he now lives and we decided to hike a trail called High Blue in Walpole, New Hampshire. At 1,588 feet it isn’t very high but it is always very blue. When I sent my friend a copy of this photo he thought it looked a lot bluer than it did in person. I’ve noticed this too and, even though I’ve taken this photo of Stratton Mountain in Vermont with 3 different cameras, the view is always as blue as you see here.  I’ve even looked at photos online that are also just as blue and I can’t figure out what causes it, other than the atmosphere itself.

This is another view looking across the Connecticut River valley to the surrounding Vermont hills from High Blue trail in Walpole. I like the various shades of blue and how they fade into one to another. I think I’ve seen this same thing in photos from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’m anxious to see what it looks like when the trees change color, and wonder if it will still be as blue.

 Last spring before it had leaves I visited this lone tree and thought it looked a bit like an elm. Now that I see it fully clothed it looks more like an oak or a maple.  When you live in what is essentially a 4.8 million acre forest any tree that stands alone is a real eye catcher.

I’ve been watching a construction company gnawing away at this hill for over a year now. I’m sure they know more about what they’re doing than I do, but I think I’d be careful about getting under the large over hanging area on the right. It’s hard to imagine what the view will be when the hill is gone.

I was disappointed about not seeing the meteor showers and grabbed a few shots of the half-moon instead. I think the craters show better on a photo of a half-moon than they do on one of the full moon.

A few posts ago I showed a photo of the church in Marlow, New Hampshire, a small town north of here. This view is of the nearby odd fellows hall in the same town. It’s a shame that the power company put their poles and wires in front of all of these buildings. You can see similar photos online where the photographer has taken great pains to “paint out” the wires and poles. I thought about doing the same but then if a tourist saw this post and came here to see the real thing, they might be disappointed to find the wires in the way.

 

This view of Mount Monadnock from Perkin’s Pond in Troy, New Hampshire is well known and so cherished by local artists, photographers and residents that the power company didn’t dare block it with poles and wires. Last fall they, at what must have been considerable expense, brought in machinery that pulled the wires under the pond somehow. I saw the machinery but never saw it in action, so I’m not sure how it worked. I imagine it was similar to the process used for installing in-ground irrigation systems, but on a much larger scale.

Another well-known view of the mountain is found on a private road that follows the shoreline of Stone pond in Marlborough, New Hampshire. The road used to be part of a large private estate and the building in the photo was once a private chapel. The Saint Francis Episcopal chapel, built in 1926, is open to the public for weddings and other events. There have been many weddings here, and many photos taken of this view.

 

 This is the kind of place I hope to visit today. Happy trails!

Boy, Gramp! Nature’s so much bigger in person than it is on TV! ~ Dennis the Menace

Thanks for stopping in.

Read Full Post »