Nightscape With Trees

Last Sunday I posted a photograph of a tiny bus stop shelter after going for my walk late in the day.  Well I kept on walking as it got darker and did a bunch of interesting photographs.  It was almost completely dark by the time I got back to Laurel Avenue.  As I walked up the street I saw this tree partially illuminated by the streetlight, and the shadow of the tree on the street.  And the exposure even captured the last of the light in the sky.

 

Why We Fly

We did a cross country trip today, and when you live on an island, the only place to go is across Long Island Sound and up to Connecticut.  Unless you want to fly through New York City, which we didn't!  So we took off from Brookhaven airport, climbed to 6,500 feet to cross the sound and then went to Danbury Municipal airport in Connecticut.  There were a few clouds in the distance over the sound which I thought made a nice photograph.

But then as we neared the Connecticut shore the clouds thickened and we flew over them as we headed north.  There was a band of these clouds along the shore and it was beautiful to fly over them.  We had no worried because we could see beyond them and it was clear north of us.  How magnificent to be up flying around clouds.  Just magical.  Be sure and click on each of the cloud photos to see more detail!

And here are two intrepid airmen - the instructor and the student.  You might wonder why I am not smiling.  It's funny when I saw this photograph, because usually I am smiling.  But I was holding my Canon digital camera with my left hand and snapping photographs, while flying the plane with my right hand.  And I am serious because I am trying to compose the photograph properly!  Trust me, I was having fun!

 

Upstate Skies

The thing that I love about being upstate is that in so many areas you can see forever because the land is farmland and it is flat in so many cases.  And when you can see a horizon like this, it means you can see clouds all the way down to the horizon, not just when they are overhead.  I love the open feeling that seeing this gives me.  It is beautiful country up here. If you click on the photograph and look at where the sky meets the land, you will see a sliver of Seneca Lake.

 

Fading Colors Of Fall

Whenever I go to what I call "Eastman House" (It is actually called the George Eastman Museum") I start looking for photographs the second I get out of my car.  And I am always carrying my camera, and I am never disappointed.  This granite wall is at the end of the West Garden.  Built in 1917, the West Garden was designed by architect Claude Bragdon, who modeled it after an English walled garden designed by Sir Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll at Hestercombe House in Somerset, England.  On the opposite side of this wall is an roofed area with three arched entrances, and then a magnificent garden between this structure and the main house.  I love the faded colors of the leaves and vines here, which are emphasized by the neutral gray color of the granite.

So this is exciting!  I was bugged because I was incapable of describing the other side of the granite wall.  So on a hunch, I googled "Eastman Garden" and found this photograph that I did of the West Garden from the mansion.  Now you can see what I was trying to describe.  I am sure the arched structure has a name but I'll be darned if I have ever heard of what it is called.  Anyhow, now you know what it looks like!

 

Bus Stop

I went for my three mile walk late this afternoon.  Down by Scudder's Pond I saw this little bus stop shelter.  It is for the North Shore Country Club and has always been there, and I have seen it, but it only jumped out at me today because it was seen surrounded by wonderful fall color!  How pretty this was! And there is something old fashioned about this simple structure, and nice because it is not made of plastic and metal like most bus shelters.  And it looks freshly painted as well.

 

Tappan Zee Bridge, and Moon

This is the new Tappan Zee Bridge, which I have photographed before.  And I photographed it today as we crossed it again on the way home.  DO NOT FREAK OUT!  Kathy was driving, which was really great and I could photograph the whole time we were crossing the bridge.  "From the day it opened in December 1955, the Tappan Zee Bridge powered significant economic currents on both sides of the river. Its impact was most dramatic in Rockland County, which evolved rapidly from a predominantly rural and agricultural area to a diverse and bustling suburb."  I never knew that!  It was a clear day driving home and the sun was near the horizon as we crossed the bridge, and it illuminated the bridge with this golden light. And look at that, I got the moon in the photograph as well!

 

Finally, the Wetland at Sunset

The condo that Vince and Jo Anne live in backs right up against a wetland with trees.  It has to be the best location in the whole complex to be able to see this.  I did a New York State birding program here in two days, having seen Wood duck her for the first time in my life. So I have taken a number of photographs like this view in the four years they have lived here.  But none of the photographs were goo enough.  But today, sitting in their sun room, looking out at this scene, I finally photographed a moment that I felt good about.  The sun room is such a lovely place to have a cup of tea late in the day and watch the sun go down in the woods.  We leave here tomorrow, and I can't wait to come back here and watch sunsets in the comfort of this warm, sunny room.

 

High Flight

I have a two mile walk that I do when up here staying with Vince and Jo Anne.  So I was out yesterday and it was later in the day with blue sky and cirrus clouds.  I had seen several contrails and photographed some.  Contrails are "condensation trails" that are the exhaust from the turbine engines on aircraft.  In the cold air at 36,000 feet, the moisture in the exhaust freezes and makes these long, thin clouds.  So I loved this shot with the man made contrail and cirrus clouds.  So I have this very cool app on my iPhone and you click on it to open it.  It uses the GPS in the phone to see where I am and centers me on the screen and then it shows all the aircraft in the sky near me!  So I looked this one up.  It is Delta 2479 from Boston to Chicago!  I mean how cool is that!  When I am home and out riding my bike, there are all these aircraft inbound to JFK.  I check some of them out, and always get kind of a far away feeling when I see a flight arriving from, for instance Paris, France or London.  It is fun to know where aircraft are coming from and going to.

 

Portraits of a Doe

I don't remember being this close to a deer, maybe ever.  I have seen them briefly by the side of the road when driving by, but never had the chance to study them for such a long time.  I was inside the clubhouse with large glass windows and one of the members said that there was a Doe outside!  I am guessing it was maybe 20 to 25 feet away and I only had a 24-70mm lens on the camera.  But I took the photos anyway, through the glass window even though the image was not very big.  I was able to crop into the image to get these larger images of the Doe.  What a magnificent animal these White-tailed deer are!  Just beautiful!

I had no idea that they would like to eat the grass!  They were really wary, keeping an eye on me and so I moved very slowly even though I was inside the building and even a slight movement would get them to stop and look at me very carefully.

They looked at me like this! 

And this is a beautiful view.  How rarely do we become face to face with nature, other than perhaps birds.  This was such a nice moment to have time to study them closely.  There were two Does but I think all my photographs are all of just one of them, but I am not sure.

 

What's Missing Here?

Here is a place I have photographed before.  But something is missing.  Any idea what it is?

An entire house is missing!  I photographed this derelict home when we were last in Rochester, back in April of 2023.  What is not obvious is that behind this house is a large area of farmland that has been bulldozed flat, and there are now a series of streets that have been installed.  And now there are buildings that are under construction.  They are multi-story, so I am not sure if they are condominiums or some other kind of living structures.  This house is on about 90 acres, so that's a lot of homes!

 

The Camera Club

Since Vince and Jo Anne have moved to their new condominium, I have become friends with two of their neighbors, both photographers.  How cool is that!  As luck would have it, it turned out there was a meeting of the Arbor Creek Photo Group today, and I was here!  So Vince invited me to the meeting of all these photographers.  What a great time I had!

It is such a wonderful group of people, from all professions who are interested in photography and can share their joy of photography with each other.  Some have pretty advanced equipment and others are doing astounding images with their iPhones!  It doesn't matter what you shoot with, it is what you see, and people in this group are all learning from each other and photographing so many different subjects.

They each have at least one photograph on the gallery on the wall of the community room.  It was nice to see the sharing of information between members.  What was also impressive to me is how knowledgable they all are about the world we live in, and many who have traveled extensively.  Not only do they do photographs, but they have a depth of understanding about their subjects and about history.  This room is filled with really smart people, and they were welcoming to me as well.

There had been a photo assignment for members, and they showed examples of their work on the assignment during the meeting.  There was also a detailed demonstration of a couple of new techniques that come in the latest version of Photoshop, and how to use these to best effect with some of your images.  I had heard of one of these techniques, but had no idea about what it did and how it was used, and I was stunned to see it used in the hands of an expert!

And of course there were all kinds of individual discussions among members during the break.  The meeting went on for over two hours, and it seemed a much shorter time than that.  It was such a rich esperience.  This group makes me wish I could go to all of their meetings!  Hey, it's only an 8 hour drive to get here!

"There's a Cow on the Front Lawn!"

We were driving up Route 96 a few miles south of Geneva. We were driving by farms and small houses and suddenly Kathy said "There's a cow on the front lawn!"  I said "What" and she repeated it.  She said she had never seen a cow on the front lawn of a house.  She said I should go back and photograph it.  So I turned the car around and drove back, and sure enough, there was the cow.  Only thing, it wasn't quite a "lawn."  And the house was abandoned.  You can see that a giant tree limb has fallen on the rear of the house.  But I did think this was a good photograph for the blog.  We are upstate, having driven up today, and so you will be seeing photographs from up here for a while on the blog.

 

This is So Silly...

This is such a strange photograph!  It makes me laugh to look at it, and I am posting it because it is so bizarre!  BUT.  This photograph has a practical purpose, believe it or not.  I went to the ophthalmologist the other day to get my yearly examination and he found that my prescription needs to be changed slightly.  So I have decided to get glasses at one of the online companies.  I have previously bought a single prescription pair of glasses to use when having meetings on Zoom.  That was a worthwhile purchase and I saved a bunch of money.  So I have decided to get new bifocals and a new frames as well.  I think I am saving something like $200 in the process.  So I have the prescription from the doctor, but the ordering process requires knowing your interpupillary distance.  I called the doctor back and the receptionist said I had to get that done at an optometrist.   OR, I though, I can do it myself!  So I had Kathy take a close up of my face, holding a metric scale just under my eyes.  Then I opened the photograph in Photoshop, and enlarged it to full screen and saw what the distance between my pupils was.  So you see there was a real reason to do this.  But it still looks strange!  It makes me laugh at myself.

 

Today I Got a Haircut

So today I got a haircut.  What does that have to do with this photograph?  My appointment was not until 5:00 PM.  So I parked my car in the parking lot behind the hairdresser and walked down the driveway.  When I looked up, I saw a crescent moon behind some thin clouds. Fortunately where was an interesting tree, with no leaves on it.  So I grabbed my toy camera from its case on my belt and started shooting.  As I zoomed the lens to a wide angle view, I saw the there windows in the bottom left and that made the photograph more interesting, so I included them.

 

Grasses in Fall

I turned the next to last corner to get to Laurel Avenue and saw this scene, and given that this was after 3 PM the light was perfect for illuminating these grasses. And the bonus is that in the background are two trees showing fall colors.  I am thrilled to find this photograph today, so close to home.  As you know, I have been really looking for fall color and even though this is not a blaze of color, it has a wonderful sense of fall.

 

Here's Lookin' at You

I thought this was the cutest thing!  It is a regular potted plant - I have no idea WHAT plant, by the way - but then in front of it is a steel rod painted black, which you can see if you look carefully.  And at the end of the rod are a pair of eyes!  How cool is that!  What's funny is that this plant and the house in conversation with the sun are within two hundred feet of each other, on the steep hill.  So I had to stop twice on that hill!  That, to me, is dedication to my craft!  Anything I can do to make you smile!

 

A Conversation With The Sun

On my bike route which is ten miles long, there is a very short street that gains about two hundred feet in altitude in a very short distance!  It feels like I am climbing in the the Tour de France at Alpe d'Huez, which has an 8% grade!  If I stop on this steep road to take a photograph, which I did twice today, I cannot continue with my climb.  I need to start up by going downhill first for a short distance, to clip into my pedals, and then I turn and start back up hill.  But it was worth it to stop and photograph, as you can see from this photograph.  I think this is one of the earliest homes in this area, based on the small clerestory windows just under the roof line.  It is a beautiful house in perfect condition and I admire it each time I grind my way up the hill that it is on.  But what stopped me today was the way the sunlight, at a low angle, illuminated the house.  The words that instantly came to mind were that the house was having a conversation with the sun.  I can't explain it more than that.

 

My Quest for Fall Color

In my quest looking for Fall color, I photographed two different things today so I wouldn't leave all of you without your yearly fill of Fall color on my blog.  This photograph is not the traditional image that you would think of, but it really grabbed my attention.  These "Elephant ears" are growing in a small triangular brick garden that I built for Kathy in the rear of the back yard years ago.  When I saw these subtle, but beautiful colors today, I thought it was such an interesting subject so I spent some time with these plants.  This photograph is my favorite.  

 

Fall Color, Sort Of

Fall color was strange this year.  This was the first tree I saw in color, a few weeks ago as I was driving to the recycling center.  I think I needed to see this tree a week earlier so that there were more leaves on it.  But at the same time, all the other trees on the street were still green.  It seemed that way as I drove around Long Island.  Small spots of color, but never everything all at once, which would make for a nice photograph.  Maybe in places on Long Island that I never saw.  Wish I had a better Fall color photo for you this year!

 

Nightscape, Glen Head

When I get off the train on the way back from the city, I have to walk a couple blocks to the parking lot where my car is parked.  There is something about photographs of landscapes at night interests me.  But I rarely go out looking for them.  But on this night, I was taken by the water tower  and how it hovered over all the buildings.  So I did several photographs of scenes with the water tower in them.  This last one, from the parking lot is my favorite.  Something different.

 

Geese & Things

This photograph was taken through a window from one of the galleries at the Nassau County Museum of Art on a recent visit.  Maybe it proves the point that I am never NOT looking for a photograph!  We were at the museum to see an exhibit but whenever a gallery has a window, I always take a look out to see what is there.  In this case, the first thing I saw were all the geese walking across the lawn.  I liked that and began composing the picture around them.  The background was really interesting with some trees in fall color.  The gray circle is a sculpture in the pond.  And I waited as the people walking were in good spots, and last but not least, I tried cropping our the dark green hedges in the foreground, but the photograph was better leaving parts of them in to kind of contain the rest of the photograph.  Because of the dark hedges in the foreground and the darker shapes of the trees in the background, there is an interesting shape of the lighter green lawn.

 

Happy Birthday to Stan!

When I went into the city on Tuesday, one of the reasons was to celebrate Stan's birthday with our group of night sky photographers.  Stan's wife Ann, at the right in the photo suggested the party and we all signed up.  Wouldn't miss a party for Stan, ever!  Ann brought the party hats, which we all wore during our dinner.  Why did we do that?  Because we are party animals!   :-)

And here are all of us our usual group photograph, jammed into a short hallway that leads to the rest room!  It is so good to all be together again, see how happy we are?  Good friends, good food, and a wonderful gathering. 

 

Night Flight!

Now that daylight savings time has gone away, and the sun sets at its correct time, which means earlier, I got to do a flight at night.  Usually I fly on Wednesdays from 2PM to 4PM, but I didn't book early enough - usually 3 weeks ahead, so the only slot open was 4PM to 6PM.  So what was great was that sunset is 4:42PM.  The aircraft was late coming back from a previous flight so we didn't really take off until 4:40 or so when there was still light in the sky and a bit of a colorful sunset.  We did two takeoffs and landings and it was dark after that.  Then we flew from Brookhaven airport over to Islip MacArthur airport, so that I could refresh my radio work with air traffic control.  We did one touch and go at that much larger airport and then came back to the small airport to land.  When I saw this view out the window, I said to the instructor "Your airplane" and he takes over while I shoot.  He's used to that by now!  When I am done I say "My airplane" and then I am back in control of flying.  It was an absolutely magnificent night of flying. I probably haven't flown a small, single engine airplane at night in over 20 years.

This was the first photograph I took, which was the sunset.  I was concentrating on flying and hadn't set the camera correctly on the ground, so the photograph is blurry, but you can get some idea of how beautiful the sky was, before it got dark.  Scenes like this are a reminder to me of why I fly!

 

The Gorgeous Hickory Tree

                                       

What a joy this Hickory tree is!  Yesterday's photograph was taken maybe 3 or 4 days ago, but now every leaf on the tree has turned this beautiful color.  When the tree gets this color, Kathy and I find as we pass Amy's old room, we stop just to see the yellow leaves, because they are so beautiful.  So I started looking for another interesting photograph of the tree.  And I realized that seeing it through a window is not a bad photo.

But then, looking for another photograph, I opened the window completely and photographed the tree with nothing in the way.  I really love this photograph as well.  We had reasonable temperatures today, but I think that in the next day or two, the temps will be dropping and we won't see 50 degrees again for a while.

Something Beautiful in Fall

I am embarrassed by showing you the poor squirrel from yesterday, but it seemed an important photograph given the nature of the post. So here is something just beautiful.  Our magnificent hickory tree.  It still has some green in it because the fall color has been strange this year.  It seems to be happening in some spots and not in others.  There is suddenly a time each year in fall, when the tree changes to completely yellow leaves.  It is my sign that when I am painting the house, which requires that the temperature be above 50 degrees, that when the tree turns yellow, the temperatures will never be above 50 degrees again.  Just for fun, I have included the setting moon along with the beautiful tree.

 

The Squirrel Did It.

At 11 AM yesterday morning our power went out!  I heard a "BANG" just as the lights went out!  Hmmmmm... We waited an hour, because these things don't usually last that long.   So after an hour I went to the store to buy some things.  What was unfortunate was that Stan and Ann were coming for dinner, and Kathy was just starting to bake a pie for dessert.  So we were stuck.  On the way back from the store, I was looking up and down streets to see if I could see a repair truck.  I didn't see anything, until I turned up Laurel avenue and as I got close to our house, there was the repair truck!  So I walked up to where the lineman was preparing his tools and equipment before getting in the bucket.  I asked what caused the outage.  I thought maybe a transformer had exploded or something.  He walked over to some leaves by the side of the street, and moved some leaves out of the way with his foot;  "This squirrel caused it. He must have been walking around up on the transformer and unfortunately part of him was on one wire and part of him on the other, and he was a conduit for a very high voltage and he was electrocuted, and that blew the fuse."  He said that when the fuse blew, that was the bang I heard. He said he needed to replace the giant fuse, and then go to a substation to reset something else before we would have power.  What was really nice is that he was so friendly and answered all the questions I had and I really appreciated that.

Well this is the poor squirrel.   He was just trying to find something to eat, and going about his day.  But he stepped on the wrong thing, sad to say.  Sorry for the disturbing picture.

So here is the lineman at work in his bucket.  He is WAY up in the air.  He is wearing orange rubber insulating sleeves which is a safety device just in case he accidentally brushed up against a live wire!  The arm connected to the bucket is made of fiberglass, so it is insulated from the ground, another safety feature of his equipment.  Well after a while the truck went away, heading off to the substation, and about an hour after that the power came back on.  Boy, we really take the electric service for granted, don't we!  The good news is that Kathy got the pie baked in time and we had a lovely dinner together!

 

The Artist at Work

Stan and Ann came out from the city this afternoon so that we could visit the Nassau County Museum of Art, where there was an exhibit of Modigliani portraits, along with portrait examples from a number of other artists.  There was a woman artist at work in the first gallery, doing a portrait from memory, I believe.  As a fund raising project for the museum, you could commission her to do a portrait of you, and some of the money would go to the museum.  I was fascinated, watching the way she worked, in particular because she held the brush a long way from the metal ferrule that holds the bristles.  So I asked her a few questions as she painted, and realized that I wanted to do a quick portrait of her.  I asked if that was OK and she said it would be fine.  I was taken, first, that she was painting in an elegant black dress, instead of in an artist's smock.  The other thing was her wonderful profile, and the gentle curve of her arm.  So I did a few images and then started talking to her again.  Then I realized that I had kind of missed the point.  So I said I wanted to do just a few more, and this time I backed up. What is wonderful I thought was the contrast of how she was dressed, with her surroundings, particularly the white drop cloth on the floor.  So I am glad I didn't stop photographing her after this first image.  My favorite, when I was all done, is this vertical image which has so much more information about her surroundings.

 

Frost This Morning!

When I woke this morning I looked out at the side yard as I always do, and noticed what looked like small patches of frost on the lawn.  They looked like the photograph, below.  So I knew they would not last long at all, so I rushed through my shower and dressed quickly.  I put on a jacket and grabbed my camera, after changing the lens to a "macro" lens, used for close ups.  The photograph below is the first one I took, and I did a bunch, but it really didn't look that interesting.  And every time I do a close-up, I think of the words of my friend Dean Ketelsen, who recently passed away: "Not close enough, Ken!"  Dean was the absolute master of the close up, sometimes using a technique where you take a dozen photographs, one by one at different points of focus, and then he combined them so the subject was tack sharp from back to front.  So I haven't done that, but after doing the photograph, I moved in closer and closer to the blades of grass until I got THIS close.  I was stunned to see that I can see the tiny ice crystals clinging to each blade of grass!  What a surprise I could see that, and that I could photograph it as well!  How cool is this!

 

Three People Walking

I was on the way back from errands late this afternoon and as I drove by the harbor I saw the brilliant yellow light from the setting sun illuminating my favorite trees.  Because it was really clear this afternoon, the late afternoon light was not softened by haze.  So the sidelight on the trees was brilliant and that's the first thing that caught my attention.  So I pulled over, grabbed a camera and framed the picture.  Then I waited for some people to walk through.  When I saw three, I thought "perfect" and waited until the spacing was perfect. Click.

 

Almost Completely Gone

                             

I was in the city at the end of September and did these photographs of the old Pennsylvania Hotel at that time.  I hadn't gotten around to editing them until now.   Well, this historic hotel is just about completely gone now.  The only thing left above the street level are these black beams which once held up the facade of the hotel.  I'm sorry I never took a photograph of the hotel before it was shrouded in black fabric to protect people during the demolition.

I got these photographs by finding a crack between the gates that allowed trucks in to carry off the demolition material.  If I found a 3 inch gap, then the lens would fit in the space and I could take a photograph.  For the first photograph, they had one of those curved pipe exit gates like in the subway system and I put my arms and camera through the pipes and reached in as far as I could to eliminate any foreround.  For this shot I found a 3 inch gap to show the back of the beams in the top photo.

And this is the view of the street.  The only thing sticking up above street level, in addition to the black painted beams, is the protective scaffolding and walls that surrounded the hotel during demolition.  Funny how easy it is to forget what was once here, after such a short time.  So here are two photographs I think I have posted before, but which are great reminders of what once was.