I’ve never looked twice at this field. I’ve driven by dozens of times and never paused to spend a few minutes. I don’t know what was different this time. Maybe the clouds, maybe the colors in the trees, maybe that patch of blue in the sky, who knows? Something caught my attention enough to make me pull over. Maybe it wasn’t even in the landscape, this poke at my mind to stop and stare. I don’t know, maybe you can see it.
Nikon D800 Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48mm f/8 ISO 100 5 image HDR
One of the things I like about our national parks is that they make visiting easy. This view of Jordan Pond is a short walk down a rocky path about 100 yards from a parking lot. It’s a wonderful vista showing the North and South Bubble Mountains in the distance. Being an easy trek, waiting for a photo opportunity can be lengthy and fraught with challenges. While I knelt at the edge of the shoreline for half an hour, peering through my camera, scores of people wandered through the area. I realize that the world doesn’t revolve around me, and by now I have learned a modicum of paitience, but all I needed was about 30 seconds of uninterrupted sight across the lake. A few people felt it would be great to walk out on the rocks and see what they could see from there. One family actually had their two toddlers join them on their quest. I was splashed at and had rocks thrown at me from children whose parents barely chided them if they even noticed at all. Oh well, I digress. Technically the pond is really a “tarn”, which is a mountain lake or pool formed in an area excavated by a glacier. During the last ice age the Wisconsin Ice Sheet dug through Acadia to form this 150 foot deep basin. The water for the nearby town of Seal Harbor is supplied from Jordan Pond so no humans or pets are allowed in the water (yet evidently they are allowed to torture photographers).
Nikon D800 Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm f/14 ISO 100 5 image HDR
June brings opportunities for lighting scenes I don’t get to see often during the year. Driving around servicing clients after 5PM, at this time of year yields hours of daylight, and very special sunlight indeed. If I took this picture while the Sun was high in the sky the bottom half of the horses would be deep in shadow and the trees would have dark holes where the sun couldn’t reach. Late in the evening, when sunshine skirts the Earth, light spreads out across the landscape bathing objects in warmth and beauty.
This picture is from the West side of Marsh Creek State Park looking East over a horse farm towards the lake. The Sun was setting at my back (a bit to my left) lighting the horses, lake, boats and picnic area on the opposite shore. The only thing I needed to compensate for was my shadow, so I raised the camera high above me on the tripod, and chose a focal length to get a little farther away.
Nikon D800 Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 @ 50mm f/16 ISO 100 5 image HDR
I’ve been busy all weekend and the weather isn’t supposed to be cooperative all week, so I thought it would be a good time to share most of the Paris pictures. I’ve been hard at work since we returned in mid April removing tourists, tweaking exposure values, aligning images and reliving the trip to Paris through pictures again and again. Most of the pictures will be posted on the Smugmug site if you want to see them, but here on the blog I will be posting my favorites this week. These are the pictures that I hope show you not only how beautiful the city is, but how you need to see it for yourself.
The picture below is the view looking out from the Louvre. Beneath the giant glass pyramid is the entrance to an amazing collection of art - a testament to centuries of human creation. Countless expressions of joy, pain, love, freedom, strife, war, and religion reside here. Some of the best creations, of generations long gone, live and breathe in this museum. The weather was beautiful. We were very fortunate. Springtime in Paris. Highly recommended.
Nikkon D800 Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 32mm f/8 ISO 100 5 image HDR
As a relatively new photographer ,I don’t have a ton of work from the past, so now and then I don’t have anything fresh to post. So here’s an image I shot last year in September,for which many people have expressed their adoration. I was up early searching for a sunrise picture. Everywhere I drove, I came away empty handed. The scene was either too cloudy, or too congested, or too blah, or too, well, not inspiring. This church was one of the places I had paused in front of earlier but nothing stood out, nothing caught my eye. When I returned, with my new vantage point, I could place the Sun behind the church and see its rays play in the morning mist. The clouds that had earlier obscured the dawn, broke into soft patterns across the sky, transforming the solid blue into gradients of azure. Then (purely by accident of course) the hot air balloon drifted into frame. Click!
Nikon D800 Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38mm f/10 ISO 100 7 image HDR
