A Scene in the Garden

We were finished visiting the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park and we took our time to sit on benches and look out over the Hudson river.  We had a very relaxing afternoon which was nice.  Then I happened to see a map I had picked up at the visitor center and I noticed that there was a large garden at the southern end of the property.  It was far enough away and with all the trees you wouldn't know it was there.  So we walked over to it and were amazed.  This was the first thing I saw and it stopped me in my tracks.  Pretty amazing, right?  Then we wandered around for another 45 minutes looking at all the brick architecture there.  This may just be the best photograph I have taken all year.

 

Inside the Mansion

I hope these interior photographs of a few of the rooms don't get tedious to look at and read about.  So I will be brief.  This is one of the guest rooms in the mansion, for weekend guests visiting the Vanderbilts for horseback riding, golf, tennis, swimming and formal dinners and dancing.

A marble bust in a niche on the stairway leading to the second floor.

This is Mrs. Louise Vanderbilt's bedroom, and I think that the park ranger said it was based on Marie Antoinette's bedroom?  Why a bedroom needs a heavy wooden wall around the bed is beyond me.  Maybe to keep her husband out?

OK, so here's where I reveal my ignorance.  I cannot imagine why someone would choose these two marble statues for under the mantlepiece of the fireplace in the first floor entrance room.  I would love to know what they signify, though.  They are, to me, bizarre.

What a magnificent tapestry!  This is just stunning.  I do not know what it represents, but it is just beautiful.  And the artistry on the wooden chest, if that's what it is, is just astounding.  Once again, no clue on my part who made these, or the date, sorry to say.  Touring the mansion and seeing these rooms and architectural details and artwork was a wonderful and enlightening experience.

 

Frederick Vanderbilt's Mansion

Frederick Vanderbilt and his wife bought a two story mansion on this spot, with the intention of adding a third story.  In the survey of the mansion they found that the foundation was not in good shape and that the vertical beams were not capable of supporting a whole new third story floor.  So they decided to demolish the mansion on the spot and build a whole new one. 

So this is wild...  They quickly had a small mansion built within a hundred yards of so of where the new mansion would be.  It was all hands on deck and from start to finish the small mansion took, I think the ranger said, something like 67 days.  So they had a place to live while the new mansion was going to be built.  Amazing what you can do with a lot of money.

I have seen and photographed a number of mansions in my day, and I didn't find this building all that attractive.  But what do I know about architecture?  McKim, Mead & White designed this neoclassical building with Beaux-Arts ornamentation and incorporated all the latest innovations: electricity, central heating and indoor plumbing!  It was built between 1896 - 1899.

These are columns on the south end of the building.

And this view is of the north end of the mansion, looking south.  In another post I will show you some of the interior rooms which we saw on the tour.

 

A Ghost Room

The day after we visited the Culinary Institute of America, we drove further north to the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site and spent most of the day there touring, first, the mansion and then the grounds and gardens.  It is a mansion overlooking the Hudson River, built during the "Gilded Age" by Frederick Vanderbilt, one of the grandsons of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt who rose from poverty to become a shipping and railroad tycoon.  What is wonderful about this mansion is that when Frederick died, he willed the mansion to a niece who tried to sell it but found no buyers.  At the suggestion of her neighbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested that she donate the house and all its furnishings to the National Park Service!  So this is an astounding place to visit because it has all the original furnishings.  The mansion is virtually unchanged from the time the Vanderbilts lived there!  The Vanderbilts only used this mansion for the spring and fall seasons.  What we see here is an example of how the furniture was protected when they were absent - these are custom made covers for every piece of furniture in the mansion!  I loved the spooky feeling, seeing the furniture draped in white.  I shot this in color but it is a better photograph seen in black and white.

 

A Pilgrimage

One of the reasons we chose the mid-Hudson river area to visit was that Kathy wanted to make a pilgrimage to the final resting place of a famous French Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  Kathy has been in an online Zoom group for nearly a year now, run by a Priest in Boston, Mass, which she found out about from her cousin Sharon.  They have been talking about some of the writings of de Chardin for a while now.  The interesting thing is that his resting place is on the grounds of the CIA!  That’s because the current campus of CIA was once a Jesuit novitiate, which means that priests were trained there before their ordination.

So we were told to go to campus security and get the key to the locked cemetery.  It is an absolutely beautiful cemetery surrounded by trees and all the gravestones of the priests are exactly alike which was striking.  It was very quiet and peaceful.We wondered how we would find the one gravestone we wanted.  It was easy, however because the stones were arranged chronologically.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French Jesuit theologian and scientist renowned for his pioneering field work in paleontology. His visionary writings on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory aroused the suspicions of the Vatican and he was forbidden to publish on religious matters during his lifetime. After his death, the publication of his many books marked him as one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of this century - a mystic whose holistic vision speaks with growing relevance to contemporary spirituality.

Finding his grave was easier than we thought, because there is a tiny garden in front of his gravestone.  Something added to by different visitors, I am guessing.  She spent some quiet time there while I photographed this beautiful setting.  Our visit turned out to be memorable because of the quiet and beauty of the place.

The CIA

I promised yesterday to explain to you why it was OK for us to have our anniversary dinner in a diner last night.  THIS dessert is the reason!  At the last minute, we were able to get a reservation for lunch at the Bocuse Restaurant, which felt like winning the lottery!  This French restaurant re-imagines the execution of classic French cuisine.  This is only my dessert, but the green salad with a citrus dressing was out of this world, and the vegetables and sauce that came with my pork chop were just astounding!  What a thrill to have such amazing food!  It was an astounding dining experience.  I just photographed this one dish, and I didn't take any photographs of the restaurant itself.  But here is a photograph of the beautiful student dining room at the Culinary Institute of America. 

The school was founded in 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut as a vocational institute for returning veterans of World War II.  With a growing student body, the school purchased a former Jesuit novitiate  in Hyde Park in 1970, and that is still its central campus.  There are about 3,000 students here, give or take, and about 1,000 new freshmen each year!

This is the main building with a fountain in front.  It is a beautiful campus and so nice seeing all the students who have just come back from summer vacation.  But the best part, really of our whole experience is talking to each of our servers, and asking where they are from - this is really an international school - and it is so heartwarming to hear the stories of these young students and what they hope to accomplish in their time here and after graduation.  Those conversations were the best part of our day.

 

Our Anniversary Dinner!

It is September 13th, our anniversary!  We decided to celebrate by driving up the Hudson river to Hyde Park for the weekend.  So for our anniversary dinner we decided to eat at the Gateway Diner, across the river on Route 9 in Highland, NY.  Wait, you think that we should eat in a fancy restaurant for such an important celebration?  Well, there is more to the story, which I will tell you about tomorrow.  When we arrived at the restaurant it was late in the day, and  the light was perfect for a nice photograph.  It is a beautiful classic diner both inside and out!  After dinner when we came out of the diner it was dark out, but the diner looked even more spectacular, so it was time for another photograph!  It is hard to pick a favorite.

Moonset over the Harbor

I was coming home from my astronomy meeting and when I was10 miles from home I could see the first quarter moon low in the sky.  I thought that if I was lucky, I would get to the harbor before the moon set.  It was close, and I didn't drive any faster than normal and I managed to get this photograph about 5 minutes before the moon started to go below the trees.  It's nice that there is a reflection of the moon on the water to add interest to the photograph

 

ISS Pass

Someone in the astronomy club mentioned that there was going to be an "ISS Pass" at 8:01 tonight.  I said I would start our meeting late so people could step outside to view this.  "ISS" is the International Space Station.  The report said it would appear in the southwest, and move to the southeast.  So my first photograph showed the streak coming out from behind a tree, the next, just a streak in the sky, and this image shows it disappearing behind a tree.  The great thing is that a light in the parking lot illuminated the tree, thus giving me a great foreground object.  My exposure lasted for 30 seconds, with my camera on a tripod.  Just think, that streak was a giant machine carrying a number of astronauts around and around the earth.  It was so bright because it was reflecting the light of the sun.  It looked like a brilliant star, and it slowly moved from right to left and was visible for a period of about 3 minutes.  What a beautiful sight!

 

Bye, Bye, Floppy Drives

I am in a cleaning up and throwing out mode these days.  These are floppy disks I threw in the trash. This is nuts, but I have saved up until now, believe it or not, all these Windows 95 installer floppy disks!  Why?  I have no idea.  I just forgot that I still had them.  Windows 95 came out in August 1995, so I have saved them for 29 years.  You know "just in case..."

 

A Beautiful Insect, A Terrifying Insect!

This is a dead Spotted Lanternfly on the driveway.  I had just stepped on it to kill it, which is what the stories in the newspaper say we should all do.  "If you see these insects, it is important to kill them, to prevent their spread."  “Spotted Lanternfly: The Next Worst Thing” is what it says on the Cornell Cooprative Extension Service Website.  And then it says "If left unchecked, the Spotted Lanternfly can potentially wreak havoc on the New York’s grape, orchard and logging industries.  It causes harm by sucking sap from plant stems and leaves. This can reduce photosynthesis, weaken the plant and eventually contribute to the plant’s death.  So these insects are a terrifying threat to a number of important agricultural industries!  So, no, I don't feel badly for stepping on this beautiful insect.

 

A Warm Loaf of Bread in the Morning!

What is better than this, I ask you, a warm loaf of bread right out of the oven, just before breakfast!  I have not been eating bread lately, trying to avoid carbs to get my weight down and my cholesterol down as well.  But Kathy just felt the need for baking some bread, so instead of Quaker Oats for breakfast, I had warm buttered bread with my coffee this morning!  What a treat!

 

I THOUGHT There Was a Picture...

I was buying my usual apples at the grocery store.  I really love Honeycrisp, because they are always crispy, even when it is not apple season.  Anyhow I usually examine each apple quickly to see if there are any brown spots.  When I picked this one up, I was taken with the pattern of green splotches and thin green kind of spidery lines on this side of the apple.  I thought it would make an interesting photograph, but when I started working with the apple on some seamless background paper, and viewing it in the camera with my closeup lens, I was disappointed that the patterns were actually not very interesting.  Oh well...  Maybe I will have something better for you tomorrow.

 

Two Boats, Three Masts

I saw this scene from quite a long way away.  It looked at first glance like a single yacht with three masts, but then I realized it was two separate boats.  So in order to do this photograph, I had to drive back up the street and grab my 200-600mm Sony zoom lens.  With that lens on my camera I could really reach out and get a much closer view of the boats and masts.  I am going to go out on a limb and say the larger yacht is Ketch rigged.  I am not sure if the jib and staysail changes that designation at all.  Primo will check in and let us all know the correct term!  Always nice to have an expert in the audience!

 

The Magic of Digital Cameras!

We had an observing session at this week's meeting and I decided to try and take some photographs in the dark!  This post is not about the photograph itself,  but rather about how I was able to make the photograph in the first place.  I have a 50mm f/1.4 lens.  f/1.4 refers to the aperture of the lens - the maximum opening that lets the light through.  Most lenses these days for digital cameras are f/4 or so.  So the f/stops between F/4 and F/1.4 go like this:  1.4, 2.0, 2.8. 4.0.  So that means my 1.4 aperture lens lets in EIGHT times more light, which is a help because standing there with my camera, it was difficult to see Mark at his telescope because it was pretty dark!  The other thing was the "film speed."  When I was working, my films had a "film speed" of 400.  For dim light situations, there was a film that was 1600.  In my SONY a7 camera, I just kept dialing up the numbers until I got to - get this, 12,800!  That is an astounding number.  Unimaginable, in fact, but that's the magic of modern digital sensors!  So I was in the dark, and the camera choose a shutter speed of 1/8th of a second.  And that is how I got this "impossible" photograph, through the magic of modern camera technology.

 

The Fishermen Return Home

FINALLY a real photograph!  Well at least I turned around!  I was driving through Cold Spring Harbor and saw the color of the sky reflected in the waters of the harbor.  I also saw some boats silhouetted against the light as I drove past.  So I did turn around!  When I found this spot for my composition I liked the moored fishing boat on the left, and then suddenly I saw three men standing on the dock in the right center of the image.  They I realized they were fishermen unloading their boat.  When I saw the "V" shaped wake to the left of another boat coming in to dock and THEN another boat and wake to the right, I started shooting more quidkly.  So I stood and watched and clicked the shutter even after this photograph, because you never know what might happen next, but this photograph was the "keeper!"  I did post a larger than normal image so if you click on it, you can see a much larger version!

 

M57, The Ring Nebula

This is a pretty astounding astronomical object, called The Ring Nebula.  It was discovered by Charles Messier in a relatively small aperture telescope back in January of 1779.  The Ring Nebula is a "planetary nebula" in the constellation of Lyra.  Such a nebula is formed when a star, during the last stages of its evolution before becoming a white dwarf, expels a vast luminous envelope of ionized gas into the surrounding interstellar space.  In a telescope with an 8" or 10" mirror, it appears similar to this, but with no color at all.  Our eyes are not sensitive to color in dim light.  I have been struggling to learn how to use a special astronomical camera to photograph things like this, and I have been having trouble calibrating an "go-to" computerized telescope mount for a year or so now.  Well, tonight I had success!  I found the problem, and I got this magnificent photograph of something the human eye cannot see in color, AND I did it from my light-polluted side yard in Sea Cliff.  Quite a night!

I decided after successfully getting the Ring Nebula photograph, that I would show you the telescope and mount that I am working with to get this photograph.  This is not a trivial thing, setting up this heavy mount and telescope.  There are thirty pounds of counterweights on the left hand side of the mount opposite the telescope, in this photo.  It takes a while to see this all up, so it was really something when it finally all came together tonight!  You can click on both these photographs to see them in more detail.

 

Rose of Sharon

We had a really heavy rainstorm yesterday and I noticed that these blossoms from the Rose of Sharon tree had fallen into the street on the other side. In the middle of the driving rain I was looking for a photograph from the comfort of my porch, when I saw the brilliant pink color, and decided that would would work for the subject of my picture.  I did take a photograph then, but through the rain, everything was faded, and so I did this picture after the rain stopped.

 

A Curvy Cornfield

Truth be told here, I photographed these young cornstalks back in June.  I was driving on a small road I use to take the back way to get to a Home Depot when I saw these rows of corn, and they are probably no higher than perhaps 18"  Now they have grown to full size, been harvested, and then cut down!  I knew I had these photographs around but never got to editing them.  Duh!  Because the plants were so small, I could see the rows of corn for a long distance and it was the gentle curves in the rows that I enjoyed photographing.  I used a 400mm lens which is a pretty long telephoto lens, and that compresses what we are seeing.