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Late in the Season

Washington DC, 27 February 2026   It's still Winter, so I'm still posting Winter photos! This one is from a couple of weeks back, taken with my phone as I was navigating the sidewalks of Gloucester after one of our several snow storms.

I'm in Washington hoping to complete the sale of our wonderful liveaboard motor yacht, the Mad Hatteras, and have been running around the last couple of days purging non-toxic anti-freeze from the plumbing of various sorts, and starting up the main engines, which, blessed be the ancient Detroit Diesels, started fairly quickly after ten weeks of layup, and settled down to run smoothly, if a little smokely. But Detroits are a little smokey, especially after a long period of inactivity. Whaddya expect from a 2 stroke diesel engine designed in 1937? The generator won't start, which will probably require some combination of a mechanic and negotiation. All in all, I'm hopeful, for a good survey (this is like a house inspection), a good sea trial (like a test drive) and reasonable negotiations. Wish me luck...

Illuminating Window

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 22 February 2026   This window is the source of the patterns of illumination and shadow I posted last week. I took the picture with my phone a couple of days ago.

I am pretty constantly working on new images, but at least in this season I'm not planning or pursuing them. One reason so many of them are phone images. The best camera being the one that's with you, eh? But, in this case the big Canon cameras were in their bag hanging from a hook on the back of the coat closet door not ten feet from where I captured this image. But the phone was in my pocket... And, best not to wait, the light can change so fast.

Door Illumination

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 13 February 2026   A new interior still life from our house in Gloucester, taken earlier this week. I feel so lucky to be living in this little museum of light, shadow, and detail! The pattern is the sunlight shining through the lacy curtain of the window opposite.

A straight photo, not infrared, but a color image, post processed, then rendered to black and white and post processed some more. I'm learning as I go along. This time around I learned to use the color tempurature slider to give a warm feel to a photo that was rather blue in cast. Doesn't show in the B&W version, of course!

I would love to study photographic post processing formally, either in a live class (online classes haven't worked well for me) with a good teacher, or on an apprenticeship with a really good technician, say, my printer in Hong Kong, Danny Chau or the redoubtable Leah Gordon, organizer of the Ghetto Biennale, a wonderful photographer whose day job is (or at least has been) prepping photos for publication in printed materials. I learned so much from Danny when I lived in Hong Kong and could ask him questions when I brought him files for printing and later picked up the final products, and even later, comparing the files I sent with the images he processed from them. I've written about this before. Leah helped me enormously with a difficult image when I circled back to Haiti for the 5th Ghetto Biennale in 2017, opening the door for me for a certain kind of photographic enhancement. Sadly, those opportunities, either for classes, or learning at the feet or a real master, are rare. So, progress is slow, but I push where I can and there is progress!

DC Stick Season

In Transit, 6 February 2026   So, if snow is everywhere in one's life, and not just everywhere, but covering up everything else, I guess one is going take a lot of pictures of snow and build up a Winter portfolio. So, here we are, complete with an example from the most recent Wednesday. Interestingly, it's a strong echo of a photo I took in northern Vermont a couple of years ago. But, comparing them, it's better. More light, giving a crisper, more immediate feel. Dare I believe I'm getting to be a better photographer even at this late stage? Even if I wasn't working conciously to improve with this kind of image? It would be sweet! I took this natural color photo with my phone. That's what I had with me as I was running around town. No post processing, straight from the machine...

I've been down in Washington DC, taking care of the boat, pickled for Winter, and taking care of a bit of other business and being deliciously social with my peeps at the Capital Yacht Club. The boat seems fine, but of course the full test will be in the spring and the recommissioning of systems.

Weed and Granite

In Transit, 30 January 2026   A block of granite, discarded in the water on the inside of the Dog Bar breakwater across the mouth of Gloucester's harbor. The waving weeds are floating around the unmoving local stone. A straight infrared photo, taken a couple of months ago in early days of full Winter in 2025.

Heading South today to spend a week in the Nation's Capital. Check in on the boat, do an upgrade as recommeded by last year's survey, and, possibly, do some photo business. Not, unfortunately, going far enough South to get warm...

Glasses

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 23 January 2026   I think the dead of Winter is a good time to be doing still life photographs indoors! This is another found image from the sunlit artificial stone top of our kitchen island. Glasses really are photogenic. In the twenties Edward Steichen used photos of glasses as the basis for silk fabric design (as well as selling many prints of the original photo) and there are many, many other examples since then. I've taken and posted one or two myself...

We are well into the season, with snow, solidly sub-freezing temperatures, with serious amounts of both in the forecast. It does change the practice of the art, and definitely changes the way one lives. We're in a two hundred and thirty year old house, and while it was thoroughly insulated at one point there are limits to how far one can go with that without major reconstruction, and we're very dependant on the modern oil fired furnace in the cellar pumping a lot of heat into the house to keep us cozy. Not a problem, just an observation.

I've seven major projects going, including current photography, which takes precedence. Among other things I have a suitcase and a box full of own family photos, a shelf of negatives and proofs from my happy 1980s, and three boxes of terribly disorganized film from the Oughts, when my photography really began picking up in my Third Wave. I could lock myself away for six months and be fully occupied... But the other six projects pull on me as well. I'm resigned to being busy, but I will get to the old images!

Goose Cove Resevoir in Winter

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 16 January 2026   Another big local infrared panorama (though only a single row and nine souce images). This is part of Cape Ann's water supply, nestled into the semi-wild public area in the middle of the island known as Dogtown Commons. The little artificial lake wasn't completely frozen over, but had a sheet of ice at this end, and the recent snowfall had stuck.

I feel like we're right in the depths of Winter. A cold front blew past last night, bringing crystalline blue skies, but also temperatures well below freezing. We are almost a month beyond the Winter Solstice, but we are also a couple of months short of warmer weather. Photographically, I tend to prefer the other seasons, especially for the infrared work since now there is so much less greenery to be etherally white. But in this photo there are plenty of evergreen trees to give the effect. With or without I'm looking for images in the season I'm given and currently inhabit.

Littoral Marsh, Annisquam River

Gloucester, MA, 9 January 2026   A photo taken of local scenery in October. This is one of the wetlands around the Annisquam, a slow moving, tidal waterway that was a river but is now open to the ocean at both ends, and which divides the island of Cape Ann from the mainland of Massachusetts.

It's infrared, of course, and a large fifteen frame stitched panorama. This one went together pretty quickly and easily, with a bit of work needed to get it to stitch seamlessly at the false horizon that is the opposite riverbank, and a bit more to clean up distractions at the edges so that the eye gets pulled into the middle of the photo and the world of this image.

Frozen Sea Foam

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2 January 2026    Happy New Year! The night before last — 31 December — I reset the copyright year on my cameras. That is part of the metadata of the photographs, which also includes my name and a mess of time and technical data. And, yesterday I edited the copyright date on the index page of this web site and on the canned text for posts on this blog page. I'm feeling really clever, since last year it was well into February before I noticed I hadn't updated any of those things. Easy enough to fix the dates on these pages, but I left the copyright years on the individual photos taken during those two months because it was just too much trouble to edit them, one by one over hundreds of files. Trying to do it right this year!

The photo dates from just about a week ago from a walk on Good Harbor Beach. It was very cold! The white lumps really are frozen sea foam. A straight infrared photograph.

Winter Sky, Brooklyn

Swanzey, New Hampshire, 26 December 2025   It's Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, and a recognized holiday in much of the Commonwealth. We're past the Solstice, and the days are getting longer, by a minute or so per day, but we're still very much in the depths of Winter.

I took this Winter photo just ten days ago, from a roof in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, that is to say between the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. You can see the buildings of lower Manhattan in the background on the right side of the photo. It was quite cold, and there was two to three inches of snow underfoot. Julee and I were visiting a friend who lives in the building, and she took us up at my request but she and Julee quickly left me to my own devices since we were all in our shirt sleeves... This is a ten frame infrared panorama.

O Brooklyn Tree

In Transit, 19 December 2025   Christmas next week, a day before my next post, and this year I have a legitimately Christmas-y photo to post. Julee and I went to New York for the Man Ray exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (which was very good and very interesting, but not the kind of special that the Julia Margaret Cameron show I reported on in my 5 September blog post was) and I gathered up a lot of photos along the way of this visit to New York City. I may post one or more of those in the weeks to come.

This is a detail of beloved quasi-Aunt Linda's giant Christmas Tree, a straight infrared photo. I don't often do infrared indoors under artificial light, but this week brought me some successes in that line.

Good Harbor Beach, Low Tide in Winter

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 12 December 2025   Oh! It was so cold! It was beautiful, blue, and I took a couple of visitors to Good Harbor Beach last Monday. The tempurature was well below freezing and there was a wicked wind blowing off the Atlantic. It was so cold! But, I took a bunch of photos I'm happy with, including this one, before one of my friends and I took refuge in the car, with the motor running, heat on, and heated seats turned up to high, while the other, tougher, more insane perhaps, or both, walked the length of the beach and back.

Technically, it's infrared, and a two frame vertical panorama, for wideness and composition. I like that it's nearly square, invoking the feel of my mother's Rolleiflex, or the Hassleblad I never owned.

Inhabited Illumination

Washington DC, 5 December 2025   It's been a long time since I've shared a photo of a person. This person gave me explicit permission!

Julee put decorative window film up on various windows of the house in Gloucester for privacy. Small lots in Glosta, and we live very close to our neighbors. Being decorative, it's very prismatic, and, depending on the time of year and the time of day, the sun coming through the windows throws these wonderful splashes of light. It was in no way intentional, but I do, of course, take photographic advantage of the situation!

This Winter came on much colder and faster than I expected, so I'm down in Washington this week - rather than the middle of December - winterizing the boat. We no longer live on it, so we're not here, keeping it all warm and toasty for ourselves and all warm and toasty for the engines and all the various different kinds of plumbing. So, I'm filling all that with special marine anti-freeze to eliminate the chance of trouble between now and the end of March.

Capitola Flea Market

Swanzey, New Hampshire, 28 November 2025   An image from a sunny Sunday long ago. I was 28, living in Santa Cruz, California, and obsessed with photography, carrying a photojournalist's Canon F-1 loaded with iconic Kodak Tri-X film with me everywhere. This photo came from a trip to the enourmous flea market held every Sunday in the Capitola Drive-In movie theater. (You could see the screen from Highway 1 as you went by in the evening, but of course if you wanted sound you had to pay for admission.)

I think it's pretty obvious that this picture and the one I posted last week were made by the same artist, in spite of the four decades and a technical revolution separating them. Playing with reflections (you can see the clouds in the mirrored tray under the stemmed glasses) is something I seem to have come to early.

Getting a post up this week was hard. Last Friday, after my post, I was trying to send some audio to an external system, a process that should not have been either difficult or dangerous, and I blew up my computer. It didn't actually explode, but it was pretty dramatic. So now I own a brick, and am improvising on my phone and an older Macbook Pro that I can't use to repliclate my old environment as it's a generation or two earlier than my non-working working computer. So, I'm shopping the used market, and hope for a substantial recovery for next week. Scanned a contempory 8X10 proof print at my in-laws' house for the image.

Light and Water

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 21 November 2025   A little something from our home, from earlier in the month. A very straight color photo verging on abstraction, perhaps channeling such photographers as Susan Derges or Josef Sudek. This is a found image. I will admit to moving the glass a little bit and moving an object out of the background, though not in this particular image.

When I took this photo on the second, it was warm... Winter is coming! I have to change photographer gears as well as dressing warm.

Washington Square Summer

Washinton DC, 14 November 2025   Now that it's getting cold, a little reminder of the end of Summer not so long ago. The venue is Washington Square Park, the iconic center of Greenwich Village in Manhattan at the foot of Fifth Avenue. This is the beginning of September, when I was in New York for the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit. Of course I'll always do a little tourism when I can! But more than pure tourism this was a bit of a Sentimental Journey, as I've been there before, starting in 1981 when I was doing the Epic Road Trip right after college and drove to New York from California and back in a 1959 VW camper van, crashing for a couple of weeks in the Bronx and another couple of weeks in NYU faculty housing on Bleeker Street, only a couple of blocks from the location of this photo.

This is a straight photo, aside from being infrared. It could be many city parks in North America, of course, but I do think it captures a bit of that warm urban weekend vibe.

Boudhanath Repairs, Midway

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 8 November 2025   Another found photograph from my wanderings through exotic places. I had completely forgotten this wonderful sunny afternoon in Boudha at the center of Tibetan life in Kathamandu. A little less then ten years ago! I had not previously processed this batch of pictures, but did this week. I've posted big pictures of this wonderful stupa before, color panoramas from the time the spire was being prepped for demolition and rebuilding and three years later when repairs were complete.


Boudhanath Scaffolding   Here's a view, from the same session, of the other side of the stupa's dome, showing the temporary structure that made it possible to remove the materials making up the earthquake-damaged spire, and to haul up the materials needed to build the replacement. The spire is in itself a very large building! It's very easy to feel intense nostolgia for Boudha. We went there often when we lived in Kathmandu, and really enjoyed it. Fortunately, it's a sweet nostalgia, made of good memories and no regrets.

Both of these picures are infrared photos, and the top one is a stitched panorama assembled from seven invidual images. It's interesting to me to see some evolution over the three years of similar inages. I got better at pullng in the context of the scene, including elements at the edges that made for a more complete cityscape. Always learning, hopefully!

Graphic Waterplants

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 30 October 2025   A very graphic piece, a discovery from a very frustrating day nine years ago in Bangkok. I took it at the Jim Thompson House a quixotic and amazing little museum of Southeast Asian art built of a cluster of traditional Thai mahongany houses. These plants are growing in one of scores of very large standing pots scattered around the compound. It's a straight infrared photo, with just a little tweaking in post processing. I like the stark white pattern of the water plants.

And the frustration? Some of those pots filled with water had koi in them. Koi are photogenic! As are the reflections in and transparency of water! I spent a certain amount of time taking pictures, lining up the edges of the pots, the delightful reflections of the trees in the compound, and the placid fish themselves as they swam around in the water. I have hoped over the years that I could make something of them, but they're very dubious images, with exposure and contrast problems, and, dreadfully, focus issues. The fish are really indistinct. What was going on? I think I must have been trying to focus on the fish, which was problematic, as the fish would have been fairly fuzzy anyway, and the camera probably had some confusion, what with the surface of the water and the reflections. Not sharp, and I don't think there's any way for me to pull them together. This picture is sharp. And last week's picture is super-sharp.

I'll survive, 'cuz I'm a gallery-style art photographer. If I'd been a travel photographer with an assignment to photograph the koi in the Jim Thompson House and I'd brought home photos of that quality my editor would have been withering and would have never given me with another assignment. I don't feel that kind of pressure, but I do feel some real regret and sorrow that I missed the picture, especially since it was sunny day in an exotic location I may never revisit. I don't know when (or if) I'm likely to go back to Bangkok, so that picture is lost. Fortunately there are other waters, other reflections, other fish, and other pictures.

Tidal Channel

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 24 October 2025   And yet a third image from the 10th, earlier this month.

This one is infrared, and a three image stitch.

Halibut Point Sailboat

Washington DC, 17 October 2025   Another photo from the great day just over two weeks ago. This shot is from Halibut Point at the top of the island of Cape Ann, looking across Ipswich Bay towards the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. The sailboat is a bit cute, but it does pull the picture together.

Annisquam River Tidal Wetland

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 10 October 2025   A week ago yesterday was A Very Good Day, photographically! In the morning I had a great session here, at side of the Annisquam River, and in the afternoon another great session at Halibut Point, in Rockport at the north end of Cape Ann. This was the first photo that morning, and I could have stopped there and been happy with my results for the day! But there is more, and I'm in the middle of processing that day's work... This is a straight photo with the infrared camera.

This location is bringing up some interesting technical questions. I've long known that there are moments when there are infrared splashes of light that we can't see, but which show up in the infrared photo if one is lucky enough to be pointing the camera the right way at the right moment. I've now experienced this three times, the most recently yesterday. On the other side, this morning I was at this spot with a rising tide, and shooting beds of semi-submerged littoral weeds. I could see into the water, and was counting on that for the images, but the water was inky and opaque in the photos. That's not always been my experience... So, how does infrared interact with water, really? Something to look into...

Still Life

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 3 October 2025   A little portrait of a flower, captured at the beginning of August in Brattleboro, Vermont. A target of opportunity on the edge of a parking lot. This still life really is alive, in explicit comparison to my "Nature Morte" post of 19 July. It's a simple photograph, taken with my big Canon R5 color camera. Putting the focus on the blossom and not on the plant was very deliberate.

My connection with photography has been very episodic of late. The current world, and my current world are hugely distracting! But, from time to time the holy fire still strikes. I had a very good day yesterday with the infrared camera and have a lot of compelling images from a morning session and an afternoon session to work with. I should have something to post by next week. So much is needed for moments like that, good weather above all, a clear mind (or at least some ability to compartmentalize!), and, of course, the faith needed to grab the little camera bag with the two big big cameras as I go out the door, along with the ability to slow down and work at visualizing and capturing the images in front of me.

Outer Harbor Excursion

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 26 September 2025   A week ago we had a little family celebration, and took a public schooner cruise on the Thomas E. Lannon at sunset. What a beautiful afternoon and evening! I took a lot of photos, both color, and (as here) infrared. This boat was headed towards the Outer Harbor mouth as the Lannon was headed back in towards the Inner Harbor.

Schooner cruises are a thing here in Gloucester. I know of at least three wooden schooners of varying states of bigness that regularly do cruises for hire or for the public. Of course! Gloucester is the home of the American schooner based cod fishery as memorialized in Kipling's Captains Courageous, Mark Kurlansky's The Last Fish Tale and Cod, as well as Keith McLaren's classic A Race for Real Sailors, which documents the Canadian/American grudge regattas that are the tradition which underpin Gloucester's annual fall Schooner Fest, the subject of my blog post at the beginning of September 2019, a surpising number of years ago...

Ironwork

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 19 September 2025   An infrared photo of a fence and not-terribly-well-tended yard in Washington, captured last week as I was walking back to the boat from the Library of Congress. I was doing a little research into an old corner of my photographic life that is also an increasingly obscure corner of American publishing history. I'll need to go back, and with any luck will post on it in a month or two.

Juxtaposition

Washington DC, 10 September 2025   A very accidental still life on our dining room table in Gloucester, the Nevari brass urli bowl from Nepal that featured in another still life in my 19 July blog post, set off by Haitian metalwork gecko made from a discarded steel oil drum. Both amazing traditions of art.

A straight infrared photo. The bowl lives on the dining room table, sometimes with flowers floating in it, sometimes empty as here. The gecko moves around the room, as real geckos do. I didn't arrange the table, just composed and captured the image.

May Prinsep by Julia Margaret Cameron (Image from the Web)

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 September 2025   Three stars! After a family event here in Gloucester I hitched a ride with my sister-in-law to Brooklyn and stayed a couple of nights there with my beloved quasi-Aunt Linda. Last Tuesday I took the subway into Manhattan to the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue to catch the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit before it closed next week. Here's the generally understood definition of Michelin's restaurant rating system: "3 STARS – “Exceptional, worth a special journey”*

Very definitely in this case! (Wheh! Given that I had, actually, made a special journey for it.) As you can see from the Wikipedia article linked to her name above she was a pioneer in the art of photography, working in the wet plate phase in the mid-19th Century, which is to say that she had to make her light sensitive emulsion and coat it onto a plate of glass in a blacked out darkroom and take the photo and develop it all while the emulsion was still wet. The resulting negatives were then contact printed on albumin paper, an early printing out process that yielded wonderful soft greys, but didn't naturally have the crisp contrasty punch we later came to expect from chemical black and white photography.

The pictures were all original made-by-Cameron-herself prints. They’re great because she had an amazing eye, a way with light, and with her models and sitters.** But, also very interesting because she knew everybody in 1860s and '70s England, not just the big names of the moment, but the up and coming. She did a portrait of Virginia Woolf’s mother, for example. She had a tendency towards high church and Victorian classicism, but unlike other allegorical photographers of the time she doesn’t spread it too thick, and even with the costuming you wouldn’t really know except for the metadata of the titles. And, of course, many of her pictures are straight portraits.

A bit I hadn’t known before was that these were popular artworks in the time, and she made some decent money selling prints and books. That's the reason, of course, that there are enough survivors to fill a large museum gallery with originals. As always with these special shows, where I'm both feeling and studying, I went through the whole show slowly and in sequence, and then found a place to sit and think, and then went back for a second long look at my favorites. This show took me so many directions. Into the photos themselves, of course, and the wonderful work of the photographer and models, especially seeing the original prints and the delicacy of many of them in their midtones, and the old master use of light throughout. Then out into the artistic community that Cameron inhabited and documented. What amazing people! I just learned that Virginia Woolf, herself a proximate heir of that group, and a colateral descendant of Cameron, wrote a whimsical take on Cameron's home based salon, the play Freshwater, the name of the Cameron's house on the Isle of Wight. I need to read that. Second hand copy on order!


P.S. Copy received! It's a fun read. The reason I'd never heard of it before is that it wasn't a commercial play. Not for the West End, but a house play, a one time event for Woolf, her family, and her friends. Much done in the day, going all the way back to Jane Austen and beyond. This play was performed on 18 January 1935 to about eighty invited guests at the London studio of Woolf's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. It's a gently mocking retelling of the salon of the Camerons, including such luminaries as Tennyson and the actress Ellen Terry as well as other known, but not as well known celebrities of the time. It would have been family history for many of the audience, and I expect even if it wasn't, those Bloomsbury types would all have read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians as well as knowing the characters as part of the London culture they inherited. The copy I got was illustrated by Edward Gorey, a perfect choice.


* (Michelin itself is less poetic)...

** She made a fine portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was visiting Alfred Tennyson, a neighbor of Cameron's. Tennyson dropped him off, saying "I have brought you a great man, who will let you immortalize him... I will leave you now. Longfellow, you will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you."

Sandy Bay Sunset

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 29 August 2025   So, as promised last week, here's the view. It was a pretty amazing sunset, as seen from Bearskin Neck in Rockport, Massachusetts! This version is an infrared panorama assembled from six individual photos, so it shows a big part of the sky and the entirety of Sandy Bay, except for the little bit around the corner to the left.

Bearskin Neck Sunset

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 22 August 2025   The patrons of The Hideaway, a little bar with barfood in Rockport not so far from here on the north side of the island of Cape Ann, watching the sunset. The Hideaway is on Bearskin Neck, with the harbor behind, and a view of Sandy Bay in front of these evening drinkers. The sunset they're watching is quite spectacular, and I'll likely run the photo of that next week.

I don't often get a chance at good people photos. I don't do much portrait work, nor event photography (and I'm not very good at either one) and street photography, as practiced by in the '60s by Vivian Maier and Gary Winogrand, is rather fraught today. Now, more than ever, people don't like randos taking photos of them! I didn't ask these people but they're all facing away me and not showing any recognizable faces... Faces aren't the point of this photo, and I like it on it's own merits.

Shot in infrared, straight from the camera, no post processing except for desaturation.

Essex Wetland

In Transit, 15 August 2025   A very wide, seven frame, infrared panorama of the wetland besides the Essex River and the town of Essex near our home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Essex is an iconic place, but I do have to admit that there are photogenic wetlands all over the north end of the North Shore of Massachusetts.

Taken only about three weeks ago, which seems like a long time...

I did, as hoped, recover quickly from Covid, and have packed up the boat and have shown it to the first potential buyer. Who, sadly, doesn't have the cash on hand right at the moment. It will be advertised, and probably listed with a broker, soon. All the stuff is in storage nearby awaiting the next trip when we'll rent a truck and schlep it all up to the house. At the moment I'm on the bus somewhere between Washington DC and Boston, heading home.

Outer Harbor Littoral Zone

Washington DC, 8 August 2025   A view of Gloucester's Outer Harbor, taken from the seawall, not so very far from the photo I posted a couple of weeks ago. Of course, once I'd nailed the location down it's no surprise that I'd documented versions of this view before. This is a something I took a couple of months ago, but hadn't processed or assembled before. It's an infrared panorama stitched from four frames.

Got suddenly slowed down! A lot... I'm down in Washington to finish packing up and cleaning up the boat for sale, and I got a bad cold. And then tested. After all these years of the pandemic I finally caught Covid. Or, rather, it seems to have caught me. I'm sick in bed, quarantining on the boat. I'm VAX'd, so somewhat protected from servere illness, and on Paxlovid, which should help even more. But I am uncomfortable and likely to spend the next few days sleeping.

100 Main

West Swanzey, New Hampshire, 1 August 2025   A very straight infrared photo I took just the other day and assembled this afternoon. Once again stitched together for the lack of a wide angle lens in close quarters. It's Gloucester's Main Street, which is unconfusingly named Main Street..

It's been a busy couple of weeks... Last week Julee put on a 80th birthday party for her parents, 60 guests from all over the county. We're still recovering! And of course with everything going on in our lives and in the world my emotions and focus are all over the place.

Stage Fort (Park) across Gloucester Harbor, 2025

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 26 July 2025   It's the second time I've leaned hard on earlier art from the 19th and early 20th Centuries in this blog. You can find the first one here in my Blog Archive. (I was a little surprised to be reminded how long ago I posted that one, and by extension, how long I've been doing regular posts. Six and a half years now!) This photo follows on to the painting below by Fitz Henry Lane, one of the painter laureates of Gloucester, which also claims John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper, along with many other luminaries of the brush, pencil, and printing plate.

Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor by Fitz Henry Lane, 1862

There have been a few changes in the shape and usage of the land since Lane painted this scene in the second year of the American Civil war... That undeveloped beach is now a very urban center of Gloucester life. Stage Fort was harbor defense, mounting a half dozen canon in the day, but I can't imagine it as being a serious impediment - by itself - to any real maritime power of the 1860s. Now it gives the name to a very nice municipal park, scene of many a family barbecue, softball games, concerts, and reenactments. And, of course, this wild rocky beach with a wrecked seine boat on it (awaiting repair?) is now highly contained by municipal park and esplanade.

This is the second version of this post. It's not a usual thing for me to revisit a post except for simple corrections of spelling or grammer, but in this case my first version was really off, with pictures taken from the eastern end of Western Avenue. After spending some time with the photos and the painting it became obvious to me that part of the compositional disconnect was the fact that Lane had been at the western end of Western Avenue. I was out on a mission the afternoon after I posted the first time. On my way back I took the long way around, and paid the more proper location a visit. Silly me, I didn't have my big cameras with me, but I captured the moment with my phone and stitched the seven frames together afterwards in post-production. If you're interested in the original blog post it's here.

Nature Morte

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 19 July 2025   How interesting! Friday just completely slipped past me and this post is a day late... It was all set up photographically by Wednesday, although I hadn't yet written any text... Following on to my post from 20 June, it continues to be a wild ride. We've (mostly!) cleared our possessions off the boat, and we drove up to Gloucester on Monday with another full carload of stuff for our combining home lives. At the end of this month I'll double back, finish cleaning out and up the boat for sale, and bring a rented vanload of possessions back with me. Then, Washington will be a place we visit, rather than a place we live. Emotionally it's been hard (though again, we're in better shape than many) compounded by the fact that there's a lot of physical and administrative work that has to happen, some of it on a schedule. At times it's been difficult to focus on anything but the next step, and at times we've been a little addled about what the next step needs to be.

But the quest to create Great Art (my phrase is partly in jest, partly a very serious statement of ambition) never completely dies! I took the photo above the day after we got back here. We had been in a bit of a state leaving Gloucester, and didn't clean out this Newari urli flower bowl when we left. When we got back the flowers were decomposing and the chemistry of the water had changed enough to strip the brass plating off the bottom of the bowl. Anyone following me knows I've always had a hand in still life, and the French term for "still life" is "nature morte". There are some interesting linguistic resonances to both terms, but I think we can agree that this nature is, in fact, dead! Taken on the sidewalk in front of our house in the bright sunlight with my infrared camera.

X-Ray Vision

Washington DC, 11 July 2025   It did seem iconic when we saw it standing alone in the middle of a very large open space that had obviously been fairly recently cleared of buildings, leaving this one as the last survivor.

Pittsburgh, just about a month ago, when we were walking The Strip at the advice of our hosts. Half shadow of the old, half trendy up and coming neighborhood, half touristy as hell, this being where you buy the T shirt. Three halves, but maybe that's appropriate for Pittsburgh, the cultural focus of the region! Well worth the morning walk. My first take on it was that this was an Irish pub themed joint because of the prominent four leaf clover over the front door. I had nothing else to go on! Of course there had to be a story, but it wasn't until I'd processed this photo and looked up the property that I got a sense of it. You can also get a sense here and here, if you want to follow me down the rabbit hole! It seems that Lucky's is a revered and traditional gay bar and hot night spot, dating back to when such things were at least borderline clandestine. The linked articles have pictures from before, and it's quite odd seeing the giant cube of concrete right next door, a completely commercial cold storage monolith for food. It leads me to wonder whether the images of the ghost stairs on the side of Lucky's came from it or from an earlier neighbor. I've seen these sorts of ghost buildings imprinted on the standing sides of buildings all over the world.

Techincally, this is a straight color photo taken with my phone, with a bit of cropping and perspective control to make it more architectual, rendered to black and white, then exposure and contrast tweaked a little bit. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But it was really a pretty quick and straightforward post-process.

Saltbox Floor

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 4 July 2025   A lot going on these days... However, an interior still life taken a couple of days ago in our house here in Gloucester for you. The house is a particular rectangular style of federal house called a saltbox here in New England, hence the title.

Grain

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 27 June 2025   Another very graphic photo of a wall... I took this one with my phone at a wedding venue (during an actual wedding party of one of Julee's cousins) in New Hampshire last September. A wonderful event!

We're settling in to Gloucester. Interesting, since we've had a root here since 2009, and this is a very familiar, homey, place to us, but it does feel different, more solid, more rooted than before.

Abstracted Wall

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 20 June 2025   A shot of the shadows of the blinds on the wall of our AirBnB during our stay in Chicago for Julee's attendance at the CIES Conference in March. A thousand years ago... As anyone who looks through my oeuvre can see, I really love shadows and reflections. This one started out as a color photo, rendered to black and white before being processed for display.

It's been a wild ride the last five months. Julee work is in international education asssistance, traditionally funded by the U.S. Government. Partly because that was the right thing to do, and partly as a projection of America's soft power and world leadership. The new regime in Washington has shut all of that down in the most ragged and destructive way possible. There is some private money supporting projects in the field and we thought that Julee might survive the implosion as one of the last managers in her organization, but as of last week she's been giving her notice and severance package.

So... our life plans are wildly accelerated. We'd been planning on moving to Gloucester full time next year, but between the sharp drop in income and the enormous drop in prospects in Washington we're doing that now with the boat going up for sale and the anchor of our lives moving to our home here. It's tough and tight, and while we're not in the kind of horrifying financial or emotional bind that many of our compatriots in government service and project implementation are in, our circumstances have really changed and we're scrambling into the next phase of our lives. One reason I haven't been doing a lot of original photography in the last weeks...

Aerial, Washington Waterfront in Renewal

Washington DC, 14 June 2025   I seem to be doing a lot of work with vintage photographs. This is one I found on the top of a file cabinet in the Washington Marina when I was having a talk with their inflatable boat specialist in his office. A month or two ago, my yacht club's Vice Commodore asked me to put together a History Wall, a display of images documenting our history, on a newly cleared and repainted wall in our library. I'd already asked and gotten permission - in a general way - to borrow and copy the picture, so I went and took possession, and hung it as part of the display that went up before the Club's 2025 Flag Raising ceremony.


Scanning the Waterfront   

Last weekend I scanned the photo. BFD, right? But, it was different than the ordinary scan. First, it's 16X20 inches… Second, it’s a unique, irreplaceable, black and white print that is at least 50 years old, framed in crafts-aisle material, held together with staples. Getting it out without damage was problematic. And, I found when I did get it out it was printed on single-weight (that is, thin) photo paper, troublesome because old photo print emulsions tend to be a bit brittle. And then there’s the matter of scanning. I know of no scanner big enough to scan 16X20… And I couldn’t afford one even if it existed. So, I had to scan it in segments and stitch the parts together with panorama software in post production. (Doesn’t that roll off the tongue!) And, while I would have wanted to use the higher end Epson dedicated scanner I have in Glosta, it’s in Glosta. I had to use the all-in-one Canon printer/scanner I have here on the boat, taking off the hinged pressure plate so I could lay the photo across the glass, (carefully!) subsituting a large hardcover cookbook for the plate. And, for the first time, setting up the high end VueScan stand-alone scanning software to work with this scanner, necessary for 16 bit data depth and for exposure control for the best scan. I was not able to find native Canon software that allowed either of those things. And, of course, I scanned at the highest reasonable resolution, so the grain of the original shows before the photo pixelates. All a bit much, in a way, but this is a project I get to do once before giving the original back to the owner.

And, it all worked!

The final product is a huge file, almost too big to fit on a DVD, and very nearly so big that that it chokes my FrankenMac. But, again, one go at this, and now I have something I can print very large should I want that, and something I can give to the archives of the Club. This version is much reduced for posting! The picture was taken around 1970, when much of SouthWest Washington had been razed for Urban Renewal, but not yet renewed. The 1926 clubhouse is the last building standing on the Waterfront to the right side of the photo, but it didn’t last much beyond the taking of this picture. And, of course, this Waterfront has been redeveloped a second time since then. The Washington Marina's building is the square one just to the left of the (then!) brand new highway bridge, and it’s the only building in the zone from before Word War II that has survived.

So, success, and the picture’s back together. I washed the glass, and bought a professional framer's point gun to reassemble it into its frame, so it's better than before. The Club is getting a new big print of the image, and when that's arrived and in its frame I'll return the original, with thanks, to the Washington Marina.

Spring at the Wharf

Washington DC, 6 June 2025   A photo from a little less than a couple of months ago, a cityscape taken of our neighborhood from the 14th Street Bridge down the Washington Waterfront towards our boat, Fishmarket in the foreground. I've shot from here before, but it was such a beautiful day...

The photo is a three frame infrared panorama. Interestingly it came out to almost exactly 2:3 aspect ratio of the traditional full frame, carried over from 35mm film. Identical to that of the 1984 photo in last week's photo.

There has been a lot going on in my life and I haven't been very photographic. I've just come off of a couple of weeks on the jury of a criminal court case in the District of Columbia. I'm satisfied with the outcome and believe our verdict to be fair, but found it very difficult, since I gave that as much as I could, knowing the stakes involved and the impact on the lives of my fellow citizens. It's over now, and I'll be reclaiming my time and emotional energy.

Refugees, Korem Camp, Ethiopia by Sebastião Salgado (Image from the Web)

Washington DC, 30 May 2025   Sebastião Salgado, one of the very greats of photography, died a week ago on 23 May. He was 81, but nonetheless a great loss. I first became aware of his work in the middle 1980s when I saw his photos of the giant Serra Pelada open pit dug-entirely-with-human-labor gold mine, followed by his work on migrations. He was working in the same vernacular I was, 35mm Tri-X film, though he was using a Leica camera vs. my Canon. I saw an exhibit of his original prints in Paris in 2001 and it was stunning, though they printed the images very large, right at, or maybe very slightly beyond, the limit of those small negatives to present at their best. I bought his book Genesis shortly following publication in 2013 after I'd seen some of the images reprinted in magazines. What amazing work! Very dark, moody, and evocative landscapes, and very, very, sharp. Something to aim for! He seems to have been a bit cagey about technique, but, as far as I've been able to glean, he was shooting a combination of medium format film and high end digital in his last decades. Julee and I saw his exhibit Amazônia at the Steam Factory (Fabbrica del Vapore) in Milan in October 2023. Maybe the best photo exhibit I've ever seen. Fabulous pictures, of course, and still enlarged to the limit of the original (though in this case just inside that limit) but this time the prints were typically two by three meters in size and bigger. Impeccably and imersively presented in a large very dark hall with crisp bright lighting on the photos themselves. Time does not dim the memory!

I've chosen this particular photo to represent him because I feel it presents two of the many amazing facets of his work, in the foreground his compassionate and penetrating portrayal of people in hardship, and in the background his feeling for and ability to capture big landscape.

Lilies, Urban Wetland

Washington DC, 23 May 2025   I didn't think I'd be returning to the Emerald Forest or the Emerald Wetland (the little bit of odd urban wild land near the house in downtown Goucester), but a corner of it has been cleared recently, giving new and renewed views into the wetland at the eastern end. This photo is a two frame infrared panorama, shot from the alley behind Gloucester's full service carwash.

Glosta Tree, Governor's Hill

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 16 May 2025   A favorite local tree in a charming little park not far from home, on one of Julee's and my standard walks to Stacey Boulevard along the Outer Harbor. This place is also called Lookout Park, but the trees have grown up and the city and harbor are only to be glimpsed through the gaps in the foliage. This picture, an infrared composite, was taken from the border of the park looking in.

Swamp Waterway

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 9 May 2025   Another one of the photos from the swamp tour a bit over a month ago. This one is a three frame infrared panorama of the waterway the tourboat we were on was following.

Not the best day for infrared photography, as it was very cloudy. IR does best when there is lots of sunlight. One needs a lot of contrast... So, while I captured about 250 frames, very few of the images are making the cut.

Swamp Ripple

Washington DC, 2 May 2025   One of the more pensive shots from Julee's and my swamp tourism in Louisiana just about a month ago.

Infrared, minimal adjustments...

Interview

Washington DC, 26 April 2025   Another wonderful photo retrieved from and for the archive. The only thing I know for sure about this picture is that the man taking notes is Irving Loewenthal. He was older when I knew him, but otherwise unchanged. He and his wife Mildred Loewenthal, who wrote professionally under her maiden name of Mildred Norton, were friends of my parents from the late '30s until the ends of their lives. I called them my quasi-godparents because they were childless and made my sister and I their heirs, which is why I was going through a box of their family photos a couple of weeks back. Everything except the fact of Irving is analysis and interpretation based on the image. There is no context from the photographic print itself. Image on one side, blank on the other!


42nd Street Movie Poster

As it happens I have a fairly deep take on both the artistic and technical history of American photography. This image has the look of large (well, in the day it was medium) format sheet film, and it's a flash photo, with the flash mounted above and to the left side of the camera, given the direction of the shadows. It is almost certainly a 4X5 Graflex Speed Graphic with a Kalart flash using #25 flashbulbs, the size of a lemon. Equipment that 95% of American journalistic photographers of the day were using. You've seen that setup in many, many, vintage and period movies! Given that Irving is taking notes, I would assume he was working on an article and that a photographer was sent along with him.

So, interviewing a chorus girl, with the stage mother supervising. Why do I say that? Well... If it was just the woman in the black two piece outfit (not quite a bikini, but close) bending over the journalist and his notes, this would be an even odder photo than it is. But, the women in the background wearing the same outfit say 'chorus line' to me. The backs of the flats, painted scenery, first said 'Broadway', but I'm thinking now that it's a sound stage in Hollywood.

By the sheerest coincidence, a few days before I ran across this photo I was reading a very good piece in New York Magazine by Frank Rich called How Broadway Became Broadway . Rich talks about his introduction to Broadway as a young person, but also in great detail of the history of Broadway and our perception of it. Quite reasonably he talks about the root of many of our beloved clichés and tropes as being the 1933 film 42nd Street. I looked it up, and there are the black two piece outfits, right on the vintage movie poster! Hm! Was Irving interviewing on the set in 1932? It's certainly possible. However, last week I streamed the movie, and not a black two piece in sight. So, where did they come from, and how did they get from there to the poster? Was a dance number shot, and cut from the final? Or rehearsed and never shot? Or was this a different project entirely? I’ve done a little digging but have no leads.

And what about the stage mother? Why would I so identify the older woman behind the dancer? Well…. I’m one of those people who likes to go to the originals whenever possible, and the original for the 1933 movie 42nd Street is the 1930 novel 42nd Street, by Bradford Ropes which is a really fun read. He had been a chorus boy, so he certainly knew the milieu. And he was gay, and a big chunk of the plot was driven by a gay relationship, too much for even a pre-code Hollywood movie. Especially a relationship that just is, rather than being a morality tale. But another big chunk of the plot is driven by the dreadful stage mother of one of the dancers. I was halfway through the book when I saw this photo, so it was pretty easy to say “Aha! A real stage mother!” The two woman share details of their appearance and the older one seems reasonably older enough to be the mother. She doesn’t seem dreadful at all. I would call her expression benign interest and concern. All stage mothers should be thus!

By The Way, I find Irving’s outfit just as interesting as the dancer’s. How wonderful that a journalist could get away with wearing such fanciful clothing!

The Diplomat

Washington DC, 18 April 2025   Found photo of me in my dinner jacket with my lover at the Marine Ball, The Very First Marine Ball in Hanoi Ever, in 1998. I was the first U.S. consular officer assigned to Ho Chi Minh City, and she was one of the section heads at the new Embassy in Hanoi. A fabulous event. A bit on the discovery below, but I don't really have a provenance. I don't remember the moment, or who took this photo, and whether I'd handed them my wonderful Olympus Stylus pocket camera (in which case I will eventually run across the negative) or whether one of our friends shot it with their own camera and shared. In any case I have a excellent big print (color film processing and printing was very good in Vietnam!) that scanned well. The monocle is real, and I still wear it.

I just spent something over a week in my late sister's house with the family photographs in Phoenix. A horribly disorganized haystack! But, as you can see, there were some real finds, both interesting family album stuff and some very good photographs. Some both! I suspect I'll be posting a number of old photos by other people in the coming weeks. The process brought up a lot of emotional stuff, and will likely continue to do so as I do the second and third run through the first cull. I think it's time to read Lucretius and become philosophical.

Moonrise, Sunnyslope

Phoenix, 11 April 2025   Around the corner and a few hundred feet from the door to my nephew's house here. I came to visit with him and his family and take some more steps in managing the closure of my sister's estate. For the first few days I was here I was going through a century of family photos. Every decade had it's bad and random photographers... And, of course, even the good photographers had bad days. I think we'll end up with a fifth, or less, maybe much less, of the pictures.

I wasn't feeling it for the photography this trip. Until Tuesday, when I turned on to the street near my nephew's house, and, with the sun strong in the west, I felt it. I took a number of frames for composite panoramic photos, and this one -- which is straight, aside from being infrared. For a photo like this I felt confident processing on my old Macbook (see last week!) one eye on the image in Photoshop, one eye on the histogram.

Untitled

New Orleans, 4 April 2025   A shot of the wetlands beside Lake Pontchartrain, not so far from the land routes north from New Orleans. I will admit to pure tourism, but, in spite of that and the dark sky and spotty sunlight I brought home 250 exposures. After all, when is this Northeast Corridor boy going to be back? In spite of less-than-ideal light I think I've got some good pictures from the outing a couple of days ago. I'm not going to process them any further, or even name this one until I get home and have a chance to look at them on the big graphics arts monitor. The delicate separation of tones needed - particularly in the darker areas - just isn't going to show on the twisted nematic screen of the ancient FrankenMacbook. So, more to come!

Marshall Field's Atrium

Chicago, 27 March 2025   On the road, a complex, four headed trip including Julee's professional conference here in Chicago. We did a couple of days of tourism together after the conference closed, but before that I did tourism on my own while Julee worked. One morning I walked the Chicago Pedway, an underground network of passageways that makes it possible to get around downtown without dealing with the worst of Chicago winter. I found myself in the basement of Macy's, took the elevator to the top of the store and then took pictures on the way down. It's a Macy's now but it started life as the flagship for Marshall Field's department stores in 1906, when local department stores, each based in their own city, dominated retail and were very big business in spite of being local. The scale of this building is evidence of how big. The successor Macy's store doesn't come close to fillng the space.

The photo is a vertical panorama, consisting of five frames captured with my cell phone. It went together surprisingly easily!

Great Falls

Washington DC, 21 March 2025   A sunny end-of-winter day on the Potomac. Not quite a couple of weeks ago, but the weather had a very different flavor. It wasn't warm, and it doesn't look warm in the photo. This is the absolute head of navigation for the river, though the functional head of navigation is a few miles downstream in Georgetown, now a neighborhood within the District of Columbia, but a small city before there was a Washington DC (or a United States) that made it's living on transhipment.

This is big infrared panorama, assembled from twelve individual frames. I took a lot of pictures that day. Much processing still to do. Perhaps even on this photo. The clouds could be brighter, though I note that clouds are very often much greyer than we see them if we really stop and look.

Post Ultimate Winter Day

Washington DC, 16 March 2025   A very recognizable Washington landmark, of course, captured in infrared five days ago. The photo has a small history, hence the title. I first took this photo in color with my cell phone on a very cold winter day a couple of weeks ago. Like this one, a mosaic of photos to be assembled into a panoramic view to cover for the fact I don't typically carry a camera bag full of many lenses. But, I hadn't quite gone wide enough, and those images didn't assemble into the image I wanted. So I had to go back, and I had to wait for a truly clear sky. There were high clouds on the 10th, so no go. I was nervous, as it was obvious the weather was changing, and that the 10th really was the last cold winter day. I had to hope that the next day would be totally clear (which it was) and that the trees wouldn't have started to visibly bud out (which they hadn't) ruining the stark winter look of the scene. Captured in both infrared and color. It was quite warm that day, so I declared it the first day after (Post Ultimate) winter.

Last week I posted a couple of days early, as I was gearing up to migrate this website to a new domain server company, and this week I'm a couple of days late as I was still in the process of the migration on Friday. Not easy stuff for a self taught webmaster taking care of a single website! What drove the change of services was the fact that the email addresses associated with this site were failing much of the time, and the technical support I was getting in trying to clean that up was really poor. When I was looking at a second round of fixes, I threw up my hands (or at least sardonically raised my eyebrow) and started looking for a service that was reputed for excellent customer service. I think I may have found it. So far the support has been quick and very good.

There's still cleanup. Not all of the images are displaying, and I'll likely to have to add those files back in one by one. The internal links are glitchy. And, as I check links I've found one or two external links that are broken, probably not for technical reasons, but because the target organizations are no more... This is why the web master checks! Once I'm sure the email is up and reliable I'll need to revamp some parts of the site, along with revamping my business plan and approach. I'll almost certainly be building out with Substack. More as it rolls out!

Spiky Alien Plant and Social Circle

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 March 2025   Perhaps my last portrait of this beloved plant, my sixth posted in this space. After two rounds of consultation and healing with the Garden Committee at our boat club, Julee and I had to admit that life on a boat floating in fresh water was perhaps a little damp for a plant evolved in the arid semi-desert of Eastern South Africa. So, the poor thing was given up for adoption, and, after some further healing, lives as the centerpiece of this plant display in the middle of the meetings table in our boat Club's Library. I truly don't know if this plant is happier living in a group home, but it thrives, and I like to think that's meaningful.

I'd been wanting to take this picture for a while, and plotting a setup involving a black tablecloth and carrying the little planter outside. But last week's picture showed an easier way. Wait for the sunlight, and carry the planter into my Club's Captains Room and put it on the black table top. Straight infrared photo, like all my posted portraits of Spiky Alien Plant.

(For logistical reasons I'm putting up this Friday blog post a couple of days early.)

Brueghel's Revenge

Washington DC, 28 February 2025   It's about as traditional a 17th Century still life as you can get, isn't it? Captured the day before yesterday in the Captains Room of my boat club here on the Washington Waterfront. Given the all white flowers I assume that a member brought them back from a wedding. I don't know that I would ever have intentionally set up a still life like this, but I'm always happy to accept the gift of an image presented to me as I move through the world. So, an arrangement of flowers on a black table, illuminated by the bright sunshine streaming through the window. The Jan Brueghels, Elder and Younger, were Dutch masters who were fabulous at everything in Baroque painting, including wonderful still lifes of flowers.

A color photo, just as it came out of the camera, although slightly cropped to center the subject. Interestingly, I took this first with my phone, and then thought that it was worth the best effort I could make and went to the boat and got my big cameras and took it again, in color, and infrared. Hm... This is the kind of situation where equipment does matter. The detail, crispness, and clarity of the image from the 40 megapixel Canon R5 really does leave the phone image far behind. (It's not just that there are more pixels, it's that they're (no joke!) bigger, better, pixels...) The best camera is the one that's with you, but if the superior camera is close at hand one might as well go and get it!

Waterfront Sunset

Washington DC, 21 February 2025   I do seem to have a knack for living in pretty places. Hong Kong and Kathmandu are kinda obvious, but, even now when I'm unceremoniously retired and (with a bit of fuss) repatriated, things are still rather good looking and photogenic, both here and in Gloucester. I took this shot up the Waterfront from our boat and the Club last month during an earlier cold snap. You can see a couple of ducks walking around on the top of the water in the middle. The statue of the Maine lobsterman is to the left, and the back of the Fish Market to the right. Technically it's a three frame panorama, stitched up out of frames captured with my cell phone.

Used and Unusual in Winter

Washington DC, 14 February 2025   Happy Valentines Day!

A shot of my favorite bookstore, in Gloucester, taken from the second floor across the street where I was visiting with my favorite dental hygenist and dentist. Infrared, of course, and wide angle thanks to my habit of stitching up individual photos to mimic the use of a wider angle lens. One of the bookstore owners told me he'd thought about a picture from the second floor across the street, but hadn't disturbed the sanctity of the dental practice with his camera. And, also, that he liked the fact that the colors of the signs of the other stores washed out in infrared, underlining the name of his storefront! The photo section is in the very front, to the left as one looks in or walks in the door. It is a place of terrible temptation for me...

Domestic Drama

In Transit, 7 February 2025   So it's a photo of my kitchen window... No side eye, please! Target of opportunity this past Monday.

It's infrared, which makes the sky even more dramatic. An interesting side effect of that is the pitcher to the left. To the eye (and in a standard color photo) it's a deep, nearly opaque, purple. But to infrared it's completely clear.

Breaking Up

Washington DC, 31 January 2025   The light on the frozen Potomac and the patterns of the thin ice as the river was unfreezing looked interesting so I grabbed my small camera bag and went for a walk, capturing this single frame infrared image from the northern side of of the 14th Street Bridge looking towards Memorial Bridge, with Arlington Cemetery the Hidden City of Rosslyn in the background.

Glosta Prismatics 1

Washington DC, 24 January 2025   An indoor still life from our house in Gloucester. The houses there are close together, so we have privacy film on a couple of our windows, and the kind of privacy film we like throws these rainbows into the house in the mornings and afternoons. They're photogenic, so I may well be processing more of these pictures and posting them, thus the "1".

Tourism

Washington DC, 13 January 2025   Though to be fair, this young person is probably not a tourist, and may have been to the Eiffel Tower enough times to be legitimately blasé. Maybe her family brought visitors, and insisted she come along. As often, I don't know the full story! Or any of the specific story. So the picture is a starting point, like so many pictures in human history...

Taken from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, which has two levels, with my Canon R5, the kind of equipment one needs if one is going to be shooting handheld in the darkness of night, even in the City of Light. It's a three frame vertical panorama. I locked the focus on the landing below so that the view of Paris would stitch without problems. (For all that, this was a hard panorama to stitch.) And, of course, you want Paris to be obvious, but the interest is on the landing and the person, so that needs to be sharp.

Post Haussmann

Washington DC, 10 January 2025   Another shot from that wonderfull walk through North East Paris, documented over the last couple of months starting from 22 November. I'm still processing photos from that grouping.

Baron Haussmann, of course, is the creator of our image of Paris. But even his Wikipedia article says "His vision of the city defines modern central Paris." (Italics mine!) This neighborhood is far from central, being a stroll from the Porte des Lilas, named for what was a real gate in the Paris city wall that actually helped hold off the German Army for a while during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, just after Haussmann had been driven from his office as the Prefect of the Seine. It was likely farmland then. In the mid 20th Century it was the setting for dark movies of romantic seediness. Now, it seems to me a quite liveable middle class neighborhood, very Paris, even if the dominant architecture is 20th Century rather than 19th Century. It's not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway or Gene Kelly, but I could live there very happily! This is one of the parts of Paris that is hilly, and in those parts, these urban bridges are common. They lend an interesting topological aspect to the geography of the place, since givens, like being able to walk around the block, no longer apply.

On the technical side, this is a three frame infrared panorama. I had to lighten the dark shadows when I was processing the raw files, as the dark shadows were even darker than I liked.

Vishwanath at Night

Washington DC, 3 January 2025   Taken just before we left our life in Kathmandu six years ago. It would be fun to say this was our neighborhood temple, but that's not true, or at least it would be a great exageration. The temple closest to our apartment was the much more modest (but also wonderful) Walkhu Ganesh temple, just up the alley/goli and a left turn from the front door to our little apartment building. This is the Vishwanath, the big temple for Shiva in Patan Durbar Square, about two blocks from our place, a large feature in the ceremonial center of Lalitpur. It was beyond amazing to be living right in the middle of a special place like that.

The temple had just undergone repairs and renovation after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake and was lit up for the first time. Whenever I'm photographing a single created object (even a big one like this) I mentally give credit the the creator or creators of the subject thing. Here, at a minimum, to the architect and the lighting designer!

This is a night shot, with the camera (my Canon R, since converted for infrared) on a tripod for steadiness. It's a three frame stitched panorama, as often with me, simply to avoid carrying and changing lenses. In spite of the component photos being captured so long ago it was only last week that I assembled this picture. I have a companion oblique photo that I'm also very pleased with. A single frame shot that didn't require stitching. That was the photo on my business card for a while.

Upstream From the Ile

In Transit, 27 December 2024   'Tis the Season to be in transit, of course. On the way back to the home in Washington today.

I took the photo in Paris last month, on the other sunny day, the one I didn't expect and that caught me be surprise when I was out without my big cameras. Hey the best camera is the one that's with you, right? And of course, cell phone cameras are in fact pretty damn good, as you can see. This is a horizontal panorama stitched up from five frames taken with my phone. The upstream side of the Ile de la Cité dead ahead on the left side, the Seine in the foreground, of course, with the Ile St. Louis to the right. We flew out a few days before the interior of Notre Dame was reopened after the fire. A quasi-cousin, a deep Francophile, just posted a photo of herself on pilgrimage in front of the cathedral.

This is a photo of opportunity, very much my modus operandi. If the phone camera wasn't good I'd have to carry a pocket camera all the time, which I did before cell phones got smart and acquired cameras. But, sometimes I do go hunting for the picture, like the recent day on the Jersey side of the Hudson, where I had a strong idea of what I was after, or the recent day in Paris on the Canal St. Martin, where I didn't have a strong idea of what I was after, but was definitely on a photo mission.

So, perhaps one of my goals (avoiding the word "resolution") for the coming year will be to do more intentional photography. Along with bringing some order to my back catalogue, and even to my current catalogue. Okay, I've think I've just given myself 730 days of work for the next year, and days when I don't do much of anything else, certainly very little of my signature move of staring into space and day dreaming. But life isn't open ended, so I will have to give it what I can...

Happy New Year!

The Emerald Forest at Christmas

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 20 December 2024   Something a bit more seasonal and current, especially as Christmas will be past by the time I post next week. The patch of wild land (the subject of many of my photos over the last four years) a couple of blocks from our house in Gloucester is, of course, bare, leafless, and open in this depth of Winter, but there are a trio of tiny pine trees growing up in the middle, and one of my neighbors decorated this one for the holiday.

So Happy Holidays! My next post will be after Christmas...

Witnesses at the Bassin de la Villette

Washington DC, 13 December 2024   From the NE Paris walk last month. It's the southern end of the Bassin, just north of the first locks on the Canal St. Martin. I don't know their story. Perhaps one of them was showing the other their beloved Bassin de la Villette? All speculation of course!

This a straight single frame infrared photo. Unilike a lot of others in this series I didn't build up a larger image by stitching together multiple shots in post-production.

Under Development

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 6 December 2024   A third photo from the wonderful walk through northeast Paris on the 20th of last month. Not an old or fashionable neighborhood, and showing a mix of more modern Parisian architectual styles along with the hilly aspect of the city as one gets away from the river. This neighborhood was so unfashionable in the early part of the last century that the great chanteuse Edith Piaf was born into a broken family on the steps of an apartment house, more or less in the street, near here. I did make a pilgrimage to that spot at the bottom of Rue Belleville this trip.

In Gloucester this week, as we're getting a solar panel rig installed as preparation for the Zombie Accapolypse. (Only half a joke...) Today the carpenters are making loud noises and shaking the house from a corner of the cellar where they're building an enclosure for the big lithium-ion batteries. While they're working, I'm going through pages of old negatives from the '80s, and transferring ones from deteriorated negative pages to fresh pages. Fussy and boring work, but the archive requires it! I have about forty pages still to go...

Every now and then I take a glance at the negatives themselves, and find that there's a lot of comunality with the work I'm doing today. I do hope that on the whole I've improved over the last fifty years but find I'm okay with being more or less the same person I was when young. And, as I've said before, I'm still very proud of some of the images I created in my twenties.

Upper Rue Belleville

West Swanzey, New Hampshire, 29 November 2024    Another shot from the sunny day in Paris on Wednesday last week. This is a three frame infrared panorama taken in the Northeast quadrant of the city, between the Part des Lilas, where I exited the metro and started walking, and the Basin de la Villette, where I turned left to follow the water and took the photo I posted last week.

For many artists, certainly for me, travel means so much. It's not as simple as going to fabulous places, though there's nothing wrong with that, except that everyone else on the planet is going to them and they're getting a little crowded. Paris is actually better than many spots. Florence last year was packed, packed, with tourists. There are a lot of obvious tourists in Paris as well, but it's also a big city full of French people running their country, creating French media and culture, and generally living their lives. One of the things that was delightful about the visit was seeing all the kids and families running around. But, to circle back, the need is for someplace different and fresh. Paris is definitely different...

Bridge and Lock, Canal Saint Martin

Paris, 22 November 2024   Our second week in Paris. A dear childhood friend of Julee's has an apartment in the southwest corner of the city, and since she works and lives in another European city she was so very kind as to offer us the use of it. It's in a very comfy, but totally unknown, neighborhood, and it's been a wonderful visit. I pushed for this extended stay, because, looking at the photos of Brassai and Robert Doisenau, and the wonderful book Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clébert, illustrated with photos by Patrice Molinard, I realized there was a lot of Paris I knew nothing about, in spite of having lived in the city as a child. My Dad worked at UNESCO, headquartered here, and the Paris of his dreams was centered on the Latin Quarter and the northwest to southeast diagonal, which includes much of touristic Paris. There's enough interest there to occupy years of exploration. But, there is more to Paris, and I wanted to get a taste of it. So, we're staying in the southwest, and I'm spending time during the day in the northeast.

I knew that there is a big boat basin, the Basin de l'Arsenal between the Bastille Opera and the Seine, and was vaguely aware that it had to be connected, at least historically, with the French canal system upstream, otherwise why would it have existed in the first place? It turns there is to this day a nearly five kilometer working canal running through the northeast quadrant of Paris, the Canal Saint-Martin. Two days ago, the only sunny day of our visit, I walked the length of the above ground part (a fair length of it runs through tunnel, as the real estate got too valuable to leave uncovered!) with my cameras. This is the lock and pedestrian bridge at Quai Valmy and Rue des Récollets. Yesterday I went back and took a boat tour along the length of the canal and got to experience the locks in action. What a blast!

Staight infrared photograph...

Hotel Olaffson Lobby

Paris, 15 November 2024   Something reminded me the other day of a photo I took in Haiti many years ago. A collegue had at the time extragavantly praised it as "good enough for the National Geographic". Heady words! Hm... So I went and looked at it again, and I'm sorry to say I don't think it's good, at least not that good. Sigh! But I thought of other pictures I'd taken during that time, and I feel this one has held up. I took it one random evening from in front of the stage, looking through the lobby to the front doors.

The Hotel Olaffson was a real landmark, a turn of the 20th Century gingerbread house, large enough to be converted into a small hotel, and later a serious (small) music venue that was destination for visitors and locals alike. It was the original for the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's classic novel The Comedians and a large character in Herbert Gold's classic memoir of Haiti, The Best Nightmare on Earth. Also, for some time, my neighborhood bar...

Homage to Andreas Feininger

In Transit, 8 November 2024   From my trip to New Jersey three weeks ago. This is the kind of shot that drew me to the location. It's inspired by Andreas Feininger, a Life Magazine staffer when the magazine was in its heyday in the mid 20th Century. He was a wonderful photographer who went for the technical, supported by his training as a cabinet maker in the Bauhaus School in Weimar Germany. If he needed an unusual configuation in his equipment he simply built it, in those days of big wooden cameras. He was influential, both for his work and for the fact that he wrote popular and successful books on technique and aesthetics for the students of the art at all levels. I grew up with them because my mother, a wonderful photographer and teacher of the art herself, had them and they were in the house when I was first serious about photography in my early teens. Feininger was a great documenter of cityscape, and Dover Publications, a purveyer of inexpensive paperback books brought out his New York in the Forties a cheap but well produced paperback, in 1978, and it sold quite well. Dover very quickly followed up with Berenice Abbot's New York in the Thirties and Feininger's Chicago 1941

Empire State Building by Andreas Feininger   Here is one of the originals, scraped off the web, so I don't have a title or year for it. Feininger shot on 4X5 inch black and white sheet film in a custom made camera. I shot in infrared in a modified full frame (24X36mm, that is, approximately one inch by an inch and a third) camera, so much smaller. My photo is cropped down from that, so smaller still. There has been a little progress in the technology of photography in the last eighty years... My location is close to his, but not exactly the same spot. And, a lot has grown up since then, both trees and buildings! I'm happy with the day's work, but I may go back to this neighborhood and see if I can build on it.

Lothlórien in St. Marys

Washington DC, 1 November 2024   From our summer visit to Canada. I held it back because I sent a print in the way of a thank you to our hosts in St. Marys, Ontario, and I wanted them to see it before I posted. It was the husband who said "Hard to imagine we live here, it looks like Lóthlorien", giving the photo its name.

It is a different way of seeing the world. I do think the the word "seeing" is the right word, even if I have to use the modified camera as an intermediary. The term "elfeyes" just came to me. It's a little cute, but I think I'll keep it for future use.

Midtown from Hoboken

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 24 October 2024   A Big Picture from a Grand Adventure! Not The Big Picture, of course, but big enough... For a long time, perhaps three or four years, I'd been wanting to do some extreme telephoto work looking towards Manhattan from behind the Jersey Palisades, the rocky ridge that runs along the west bank of the Hudson. There are a lot of problems here. First, it's a neighborhood I didn't know, so scouting locations would be hard. Second, it's far from any base of mine so logistics is hard. Third, this kind of photography is completely weather dependent, which is really hard for a location far from home. Earlier this year Julee and I reconnected with a Foreign Service friend when she came to visit in Washington. My ears pricked up when I realized she had a home in Hawthorne, NJ, nearby, and she had the kindness to accept my request to stay with her when the photography appeared to be possible. So, since then, I've been looking at my calendar, keeping an eye on the weather, and waiting for the moment it would come together. That moment was the last part of last week. All set up, and I drove the four and a half hours from Washington to Northern New Jersey on Friday, spent the afternoon and all day Saturday driving around and searching for good vantage points and photographing. A really good, productive, energizing couple of days!


Untitled, by My Friend

And the Grand Adventure? My friend came with me on Saturday, and she'd been pressing me to try a location in Hoboken. I wasn't that enthusiastic, as I'd been fixated on the behind-the-Palisades vision, but we went. Good, but obstructed, views of Manhattan from the ground level. We ended up next to a tall building with an annex that looked like it might have an accessible terrace above the tree line. The building is a quasi-public space, but we weren't allowed to access the stairs that seemed to lead directly to the area that interested me, but were firmly directed to the elevators back in the tall part of the building. Once in the elevator, we looked at the button for the 18th (top) floor meeting rooms and pressed it instead of 4... We were stymied for a bit, since the meeting rooms with the views were locked, but there was a stairwell next to the elevator that went up as well as down. No placarding that forbade access... No signage at all, actually... My friend was very dubious, but I led the way into the dark, dirty, industrial, space through three flights of locked doors, all mysterious except for the room marked "Elevator Machinery". And, at the top, an open door to the roof. Also very functional in an industrial way, with power cables, bracing cables, all sorts of antennae, and glorious views, as you can see from this week's photo. My friend suggested that security would come for us, a reasonable thought since there were cameras in the stairwell, so I worked quickly at first so I'd have the pictures on my memory cards before we were thrown out. But security never came...

I'm really pleased with the work. My photo is a three frame infrared panorama of Manhattan right across the river from where we were skulking. I also took 180° panoramas up and down the river, and covered everything in color as well as infrared. I'll be working with these images, and others I took on the trip, for some time. Very big thanks to my friend who took me there, and then stayed with me as I pushed the boundaries!

Old Anchorage, Washington Channel

In Transit, 18 October 2024   Perhaps the very first infrared photo I made, certainly the first that was at all successful. A bit over twelve years ago! I'd sent my first generation Canon 5D to Lifepixel in Washington State for conversion to infrared and it was mailed back to me at the Capital Yacht Club while I was in Washington DC as part of my R&R from Hong Kong. It took me a year for the coin to drop on how to set the camera up for best results, but I did still get some decent images during that year, including this one. I reprocessed this photo from the RAW file a couple of days ago and was surprised and how little tweaking it needed or could take. I desaturated it and upped the contrast a little bit.

A friend had their boat moored opposite the then location of the Club in what was then the designated anchorage field for the Channel, and I took this photo of a visiting double cabin yacht trawler, also anchored out, from the deck of their boat. Today the designated anchoring field is down the Channel on the other side of the Police Pier (pictured in my post from 4 October) and now this area has a line of mooring balls for smaller boats that one has to rent. A good thing! It was a difficult place to anchor, very constricted, and fairly deep, a bad combination. And, of course, there is a lot more traffic through the Channel now, including the big steel river ferries and we need to keep the moored boats to the side.

Understory, Keene, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 11 October 2024   The third photo I've posted of the wonderful stolen, or at least snatched, 45 minutes I spent in the patch of woods near the home of my in-laws on the 15th of last month. I'm very happy with the way this one turned out.

It continues to be odd spending my mornings trying on some serious writing. A lot of my energy is going in to that, and I'm a bit concerned about splitting my time and energy between two creative endeavors that are so different, and each so involving. There is a man named Ctein who has achieved success as a science fiction writer and as photographer and as a top photographic printer. So it's possible... I will have to really work at parsing out myself.

The Washington Channel at Ft. McNair

Washington DC, 4 October 2024   A photo of opportunity from last week. I was walking home past the wall of Fort McNair and stopped at the Titinic Memorial and captured this photo with my phone. It's a nine frame double row stitched panorama.

Oh my, what a busy week. Not enough of that busyness (Is that really a different spelling and word than "business"?) had to do with photography. I have been writing up a storm, which is great, and a different kind of creative, but it will be a while, and much editing before any of that is ready for prime time. Regardless, onward!

Forest Floor, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 29 September 2024   Another image from the late afternoon session where I took the image I posted last week.

No comment on again being late with my Friday post...

Transcedent Forest, New Hampshire

Washington DC, 21 September 2024   A day late, on this week's Blog Post. Not a dollar short (I mean c'mon, I haven't come close to figuring out how to monetize this activity!) but it is Saturday already, and I do try to post reliably on Friday. Apologies to my legion of fans... The past week got rather busy, and it won't be over until tomorrow afternoon, as I'm having friends over Sunday during the day.

I took the photo on the last day we were in New Hampshire for a cousin's wedding last weekend. I suppose that counts as travel for photography, but it was close call, as the weekend was packed with, well, a destination wedding (not to the Bahamas, thank you Amber and Ryan!) and much family getting together. I snuck away for a couple of hours as things were winding down, late in the day Sunday, but early enough that the sunlight was still getting through to the understory of the forest.

Prospect Street Cemetery, Gloucester

Washington DC, 13 September 2024   Much smaller scale, perhaps, but another older color panorama, in this case a color portrait of one of the many small cemeteries in Gloucester, three frames captured with my phone when I was on an afternoon walk almost exactly three years ago. I've posted photos of this cemetery before, but in infrared.

It's been a quiet time photographically. Not that I'm not taking pictures, but flame of artistic holy fire isn't burning as brightly as I could wish. It's been an odd season altogether, with both very local, and very big and national, politics taking up a lot of the space in my brain.

And... I haven't been travelling in the last little bit, so my ability to do something fresh is a bit limited. I'm primarily a 'scape (landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes) photographer these days, with a solid side gig in intimate landscapes and still life, so not travelling, even locally, limits my ability to be original. But, when I scroll down my blog and blog archive I do feel good about my work over the recent months and years. I have a really good base to continue to build on! It will come, it will come...

Pacific Sunset, Montara

Washington DC, 6 September 2024   O!MG... Friday snuck up on me this week. This morning I was blissfully unaware that it was a blog day, and when I started engaging this afternoon I thought I would have to scramble for a photo. But, when I opened ACDSee (which is my beloved photo filing system), this photo was there. I've no idea how that happened, but I'll take serendipity when it's offered. It's a very traditional photographic landscape of a sunset, of course, but not a bad effort of it's type. It's a three frame stitched panorama, taken from California Highway 1 (the fabled Pacific Coast Highway) between Santa Cruz and San Francisco last December.

I find it interesting that it's now uncommon to take a picture like this without contrails in it. When I was a child in the early days of the jet age seeing a contrail was rare and noteworthy.

Gothic Manufactory

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 30 August 2024   Second Glosta Gothic image in a row. But Gothic Darkness has it's place... This is an infrared photo of a Gloucester landmark, the factory that made copper based paint for boat and ship bottoms on the north side of the entrance to the Inner Harbor. The copper paint was a very effective deterent to underwater marine growth. But, the product has not just fallen out of favor but is now actually illegal because, in this case, very effective = extremely toxic. Such is life... You can read more about the building and the history on Gail Welter's web site, My photo was taken from a schooner entering the harbor last week.

House and Sky

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 23 August 2024   A bit dramatic, isn't it? I promise The Adams Family doesn't live across the street from us here in Gloucester. Nor Stephen King, although I note that he's recently moved out of his spooky mansion in Bangor, Maine, custom built for him in the '70s - complete with the right vibe for a horror writer, including secret passages.

Lighting makes such a difference! It's really just a handsome big victorian, occupied by good neighbors, a very normal house though a bit grand. But, shot in infrared against a dramatic sunset sky it does loom, doesn't it? We used to use a deep red filter with black and white film to darken the sky and emphasize clouds (as in Adam's classic Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico ), and, of course, infrared is red-filter-on-steroids.

Lake George

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 16 August 2024   Julee and I broke up the long drive from southwestern Ontario with an overnight stop in Lake George Village in upstate New York. A bit of a photographer's and art lover's pilgramage, as it was where Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe spent their summers in the 1920s and '30s. Stieglitz' family had a property there and were serious summer people. It's still got a wonderful inland resort/beach town vibe.

I took the photo from the bow of one of the old excursion ships that ply the lake. It's an eight frame infrared panorama. Beautiful day!

Grand Trunk Bridge

St. Marys, Ontario, Canada, 9 August 2024   A local landmark, the pedestrian bridge that carries the Grand Trunk Trail over the Upper Thames River. Straight infrared photo, slightly straightened out in Photoshop.

Julee and I are far off my beaten track in Western Ontario, on a mini class reunion of four of the boys I went through most of secondary school in Mexico City with in the early '70s. These are the people for whom I was exuming the bad beginner's photos last week. They were well received, even with their uneven (and mostly terrible) quality...

It's been a great week with my peeps! And I had a little time and sunlight for my photography.

Weeds and Ripples

Gloucester, 2 August 2024   More of the littoral (and literal!) grasses along the Annisquam, with the ripples of the incoming tide moving through them. A good day photographically!

I've just had a sobering experience... I was going through some of the pictures I took as a young teenager. O!MG. What a terrible photographer I was! I don't think all of my work from that epoque was that bad (and there is a vanishingly small number of photographers whose contact sheets or folders contain more hits than flops, even at the highest levels, even when exposing film was an expensive act done carefully) but the stuff I was looking at was really embarrassing, both artistically and technically. Oy! But it won't go away because it's a unique record of my dear friends of the time, so I'll have to come to terms with it, and not be too discouraged. I've always been clear that I'm allowed to take family and souvenir postcard shots, after all! But, Oy! I do believe I got better, and relatively quickly, as there's work from my early twenties I'm still really proud of. Even in my sixties I've not dispaired of working hard at my art and continuing to improve.

Rockport Harbor Littoral Zone

Washington DC, 26 July 2024   The littoral zone is that place between high tide and low tide, the part of the seashore that is sometimes above the water and sometimes below it, containing plants and creatures that are uniquely adapted that bi-polar existance. I've been shooting the grasses along the Annisquam, once a tidal, marshy, river, and now a tidal marshy, channel, open to the sea at both ends due to the digging out of the Blynman Canal, which has a patchy history of near four hundred years of on again-off again use since it was first dug out in 1643. This shot is on the other end of the island of Cape Ann in Rockport Harbor. All built out of granite, since Rockport was aptly named, being where the products of nearby quarries were loaded for shipment by sea. The place must have had a much more working class vibe than it does now... Finns immigranted to work the quarries, and left their mark. One of their descendants did a lovely job of paving our driveway a couple of years ago, though not with native granite. Too expensive! So, as you can see, even the detritis of Rockport Harbor is big chunks of granite. The bright green is the mossy weeds that grow on the parts of the rocks that go underwater twice a day with the tides.

By the way, the writer Andrea Barrett wrote a kick ass short story called the The Littoral Zone. Highly recommended! It's in her collection Ship Fever and Other Stories. Sadly out of print, but definitely available at, say, Powell's City of Books in Portland.

Salt Marsh Weeds

Fryeburg, Maine, 19 July 2024   I'm on a quick trip up to Maine to visit with an old friend who I met in college forty five years ago or so. Forty five years... What an odd thought! But, not at all odd that we're still in touch, and still have an most intense connection.

The Gloucester Marina, close to our home there, is built in a bend of the Annisquam River over one of the salt marshes that line the river. There's a long walkway over the shallow part out to the less shallow part where the boats live. The marsh on either side is mostly covered by water during high tide, mostly in the air when the water runs out. These is the realm of these amphibious grasses, and they're wonderfully photogenic. One just has to wait for good light and the right tide. In the last weeks I've taken a lot of infrared photos from the walkway. This one is a two frame stitched panorama to get all of the pointed feature of the grass in.

The Illegalist Cover

Gloucester Massachusetts, 12 July 2024   I've been published! Last Winter I was in Gloucester's wonderful and iconic purveyer of used books, Dogtown Books, talking to one of the owners, Lucas Cotterman. He mentioned that he and his partner, Caroline Harvey, were putting together an issue of a Gloucester-oriented arts and literature magazine.

Hey, I've got photos of Gloucester...

And of course I offered them up. Lucas and Caroline picked the lead photo from the Amazing Day gallery on my website, and it's now the lead artwork in this wonderful first issue of The Illegalist. What a delightful thing, even if the printer/editor did mis-spell my name in two different ways on the contributors page... Aside from that it's good work from cover to cover. Proud to be included! If you're interested in a copy I'd encourage you to make the trip to Main Street here in Gloucester and buy one over the counter. (A visit to Dogtown Books is worthwhile in any case.) Or, buy it online through The Illegalist website. Link there, and to the bookstore in the text above.

And there's a launch party! The reception/soirée will be held at The Manship Artists Residency here on Cape Ann on Saturday 27 July at 6:30. Come! I'll be there, along with many of the other coolest people in the neighborhood. And you could buy a copy of the magazine...

2024 July 4th Glosta Parade

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 5 July 2024   "Glosta", as we pronounce, and, often, write, "Gloucester", is, interestingly, a July 4th Eve kinda place. Everyone was barbecuing in large groups in their yards the afternoon of the 3rd, and the big parade (very long, very local, very idiosyncratic) was that evening, and we all lined up for it over its serpentive route. Julee and I took chairs and drinks to Washington Street, which is very much done all along the way. This is an infrared photo of the lead element of the parade, the combined fire departments of Gloucester and Rockport (which shares the island of Cape Ann with Gloucester). Following the fire departments, a long, motley, and enthusiatic medley of marching bands, local civic organizations, clubs, school sports teams, potliticians running for office, and a small holdover group of Horribles in weird costumes. (This is officially The Fishtown Horribles Parade.) The mayor was tucked in there somewhere! Small fireworks all around that night in the neighborhood, and big fireworks over the harbor last night. Julee told me that Glosta would be dead the next day, and it was very quiet, though more businesses than I expected were open.

Found Art

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 28 June 2024   So, when we got to the house here, I walked around and got a couple of good photos of picturesque windows. I've since installed the the final venetian blinds to replace this sheet, and others in this room which we'd hung in the immdiate aftermath of the renovation...

Straight color photo with the big Canon R5.

I've been taking artsy photos of windows since my twenties. Not going to stop now!

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