Mud Dragons! - PAW 2005 - Wk 12

Proof that long Maine winters are stimulating to over active imaginations!...
It is officially MUD TIME in Maine. You can tell because the dragons come out and keep you company while you are driving....

A Western Dragon on my driver's side window...


An Eastern Dragon on my passenger's side window...


(Both Dragons were captured with the Canon SD300. The weren't in any way manipulated in PS.CS other than to crop them down for web use.)

Our House at Sunset

(SD300 on tripod. Auto ISO. Manual exposure. -2/3 EXP. Auto WB.)

Our house looking homelike, cozy and warm at sunset. This was mostly a test of the noise that I'd get from the new camera in low light long exposure shot. This was probably a full second exposure at 100 ISO. I'm very happy with the low noise and the colour of the shot.

March Turkeys - 2005 PAW - Wk 11

(Canon SD300. Manual mode. -2/3 exp. DOF added in PS.CS)

I have picked up an Canon SD300 point and shoot camera that I can keep with me at all times. I pretty much have carried a camera everywhere that I go since I became a photographer nearly 20 years ago now. One of the very first things that I learned in Photography School in 1985 is that if you don't have a camera with you when you see that once in a lifetime shot, then you absolutely have no chance of getting the shot. The SD300 is even better to carry everywhere than the Canon G2 that I used to have as a digital P&S. It is less than half the size of my PDA and still has a better 4MP sensor than the G2 had. It has virtually no direct control of aperture or shutter speeds, but with creative use of the several options that it does offer (a number of slow synch flash modes, and +/- EXP settings in Manual, several WB options etc...) and with PhotoShop I can control the image enough for my liking. I do wish that I could also shoot RAW with it for even more post processing control, but the Large SuperFine JPEGs seem to offer up enough information that they can be processed to my workflow without loosing too much detail.

Of course, this is not a camera that I'd shoot a wedding with, but when I've found myself tired lately of even carrying my small (but heavy) Leica M4P. If we go out to eat, my camera is always on the table in the way and with the cost of all of my cameras it makes me nervous to leave them in the car at all. I probably should see a therapist about this, but the thought of leaving the house without a camera bothers me. I almost always see something that I kick myself for later when I don't take a camera with me.

So anyhow, I have a tiny camera with me now everywhere I go that is pretty much capable of not getting in my way when I want to make a picture of something.

These are a few of the many many turkeys that are to be found now all around our 'neighborhood' now. When I was a kid growing up here in Maine, I never actually saw a wild turkey even though I've lived in or newar the woods all my life here in Maine. Ever. It wasn't until about 6 years ago or so that their population really has made a come back. They are not the brightest of beings on the planet, but they are often fun to watch.

Green Milk - 2005 PAW - Week 10

(Nikon D2H, old Vivitar Series 1 35-85/2.8. ISO 400. 1/180 @ 2.8)

On the morning of March 17th every year well before we awake at our house, the Sidhe turn our milk green. They do this to remind us that while a Christian Bishop named Patrick may have led the people of Ireland away from a rich heritage of Pagan Gaeldom, (as the Christian Abbot of Iona Columba later did in Scotland) we the decendants of the converted Celts are again safe and free to revisit that long forgotten heritage.

We don't drink ourselves into a stupor in order to 'celebrate' that Patrick began an overwhelming theocratic assimilation of yet another indiginous people who were one with the Land. Instead, we celebrate as a family the fact that some small vestiges and the spirit of those old Celtic Pagan traditions are being rediscovered, and much of what is left of it can be applied to a full spiritual life in the 21st Century. Through this application we hope that we are honouring our anscestors (Pagan and Christian) and that their spirits may live on forever in the generations of new Celts to come.

"If we are without knowledge of our past, then we are without knowledge of ourselves." - Annon Celtic proverb.

Big Snows, Little Grrrls

(Leica M4P, CV 35/2.5, Portra800)

Another photo of the grrrls mugging for camera time. Note the 8 foot snowbank still in the driveway in mid March. It simply can't snow any more this year, I no longer have any place to shovel it to!

Postal - 2005 PAW - Week 9

(Leica M4P. Voigtlander 35/2.5 Skopar. Portra 800. 1/500 @ f16.)

Buying 2 or 3 mailboxes a year to replace those taken out by the snowplow is a simple fact of life in rural Maine.

The pot holes and frost heaves came a bit early this year, but soon we'll be complainging about the black flies and the mud!

Complete!

The New Site is COMPLETE!
(and there was much rejoicing.)

I'm thinking of using this as my new logo as well.
Anyone have any comments/feedback?
PAW will return shortly and all caught up. I've actually got a roll of film that I'm having developed!

The Web Bard

Alas, I have fallen behind in my PAW responsibilities. I shot my first wedding of the 2005 season last Saturday and have been working on processing all of those images, but mostly, I blame my good friend Kevin in the photo above. (Actually taken a couple of months ago.)

See, Kevin is a professional webspinner and he has completely made over my business site this last week and of course, I've been all consumed with dumping more and more work on him by saying "what if we tried this" or "what about that style" and "do you thik this would work" You know...in general, just making a pain of myself. To his credit he didn't kick my ass and he cheerfully set about the task of providing my business the first professional website it has ever had.

Check out the site for yourself and you will see what a fantastic job he has done. ESPECIALLY compared to the OLD site that I had patched togther over the last 7 years mostly with Notepad and 'borrowed' HTML.

The very time consuming to build new photo gallery layouts should be up by this weekend...In the mean time, I've made a mess of the whole thing by being impatient and putting the site live using the old gallery format. As soon as Kevin gets his own personal site up, I will be very happy to recommend him as a top notch webdesign guy.

Ancient Still Life

(Nikon D70, Nikkor 180/2.8, 1/125 @2.8, vingetted in ACR)

I hadn't used my 180/2.8 lens for a while so I took it out for some exercise this afternoon getting ready for my first wedding of the season this weekend.

Here is a photo of Yang Shao period (~4000 BCE) clay jar which I purchased from my good friend and dealer of antiquities William Bradford of Imperium Arts in Southern Maine. Lest you think I'm spending thousands of dollars on priceless artifacts that I should be spending on camera equipment, I should tell you that William's artifacts are very affordable. We aren't talking about sacred burial objects, here. My jar was the equivalent of TupperWare in Western China in 4000BCE. William's ancient items are often mundane everyday use items that are discovered in digs a lot but have no scientific value to the archaeologists who uncover them. After they are catalogued, they are sold in order to fund further projects. This makes them very affordable to the average person who would like to own a bit of history. My vase for instance cost me less than $150 US even though it is about 6000 years old and it is still in perfectly usable condition today!

I'm an enthusiastic and unrepentant student of history. Being able to own a vase that was hand crafted before humans had any form of written language, without paying a kingly sum, was very cool to me.

Storm - PAW 2005 - Wk 8

(Nikon D70, 18-70 kit lens)

Yet another DownEaster storm on the first day of March, dumping yet another foot of snow on us. 19 days until Ostara! (Not that the coming of spring will stop the snow in Maine.)

Regardless, it is warm in my office and this is the view that I enjoy from my window while I'm working.

Fisheye View of the Front Yard

(Nikon D70, 10.5/2.8 fisheye lens)

Tracey's and my shadow, the grrrls, the snowy front yard, our house, the garage and carriage shed all in a fisheye view on a bright sunny day.

The garage and carriage shed shown here are two of the oldest structures still standing in the town of Denmark. The Federal style house that they used to be attached was destroyed in a bad chimney fire a decade ago. It had been the oldest house in the town. We plan on shoring up these two structures this summer as budget and time permit.