Wind Turbines

We drove home from Rochester today, and the weather was beautiful, and traffic was light.  It was a nice ride home, with blue sky and sunshine.  On the way up to Rochester I spotted several giant wind turbines on the ridges as we approached Binghamton.  On the way home I looked more closely and had my camera ready for a couple of quick snaps.  These things are huge!  I did a search on the "internets" when I got home.  These turbines are located in Windsor, NY which is about 15 miles East Southeast of Binghamton.  I did find a couple of news stories that talked about a total of 34 wind turbines located in Windsor and Sanford, NY when the project is done.  They mention that some of the turbines will 600 feet tall!  Wow!  They looked huge but it was so hard to guess how high because they were so far away.

Here is a slightly closer view.  Their blades were "feathered" which means the edge of each blade was facing into the wind, so the blades would not rotate if the wind were blowing.  Not sure why that was.

 

Easter Sunday

This is Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Webster, NY, where we went to Easter Sunday Mass today.  I was stunned when we got out of the car and I saw this beautiful church in the early morning light. I can't remember right off hand, the last time I saw an entirely brick church.  Or perhaps I have, but the bricks were darker and weathered more.  These bricks are a very bright orange, which looks beautiful against a bright blue sky. There is a plaque on the front of the church that says 1901 but I was unable to find out any other information on their website or on the web, other than that date.

The interior of the church is beautiful as well, as you can see from this photograph.

This is one of the many beautiful stained glass windows in the church.

At lunch time Vince, Jo Anne, and Kathy and I went to dinner at a restaurant downtown where we met Chris and Becky for an Easter Brunch.  It was good to see them both - we last saw them at a Thanksgiving dinner two years ago.  Here Kathy is showing them photographs on her phone of Vivian. that Amy has sent.  It was a lovely way to spend Easter Day.

 

Cattails

"Typha is a genus of about 30 species of monocotyledonous flowering plants in the family Typhaceae. These plants have a variety of common names, in American English as reed, cattail, or punks." (Thank you Wikipedia!). They largely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, where they are found in a variety of wetland habitats.  Don't you love coming here and learning more about the world?   :-). Vince and Jo Anne's new home backs up against a small wetland, not 30 feet from their back door.  We have been watching all kinds of birds and ducks and geese every day, which is so much fun.  I wandered down to the edge of the wetland and used my 200mm lens to look at some of the plants and birds closely and these cattails in various stages of dissolution caught my eye.  It is so much fun to see what happens to the brown cigar shaped parts of the plant after going through winter.  I have posted an extra large image so please click on it to see more detail.

 

George Eastman's Home

I went to George Eastman House, as I have called it, since going there for the first time in 1960, as a freshman at RIT.  The name has changed to better reflect what it is these days and it is now the Eastman Museum, just to set the record straight.  I go there to see the photographic exhibits on display as well as seeing some of the cameras they have on display as well, some types of which I have owned in my career.  But for some reason yesterday, I decided to walk around the house itself where the photographs used to be on display.  They have since built an entire new museum and research center behind, and connected, to the house that George Eastman lived in.  I was taken to stop in each of the rooms I visited, and tried to imagine what it was like when George Eastman lived there.  It was a very relaxing time for me and I enjoyed carefully observing the furniture and paintings in each of the rooms.  This is the amazing conservatory where George Eastman had breakfast every morning while an organist played music for him on one of the two pipe organs built into the house!

This is a view of the "oculus," an eye-shaped window in the ceiling of the third floor of the home.  Don't you just love the elegant curved railings everywhere?

Here is his desk in the living room of the home.  Fresh flowers from the large gardens on the property at the time, were  throughout the home.

When George was growing up, his father's health started deteriorating, the family gave up the farm they were running and moved to Rochester.  His father died of a brain disorder. To survive and afford George's schooling, his mother took in boarders.  As Eastman began to have success with his photography business, he vowed to repay his mother for the hardships she had endured in raising him.  She came to live with him in his home where George took great care of her.  This is her closet, just outside her bedroom where she lived until she died.

This is the magnificent garden as seen from his mother's bedroom window.  It has just been completely restored after a project lasting a few years.  I can't wait to see this when it is in bloom. 

And this is the coolest thing.  It is a "camera obscura" and it is a small, completely darkened room with a lens in the blocked off window which, as you get used to the dark, projects a view of the scene outside the window, upside down, because that's what lenses do.  You have to sit on a bench inside and let your eyes grow accustomed to the dark, and then you begin to see the scene outside..  These are only a few random photographs from visiting the house - there are so many more, but I hope this piques your interest, should you have a chance to visit Rochester, NY one day.

 

 

And What's to Become of This Home...

We were headed north on the way to Vince and JoAnne's when this house flashed by on our left.  I couldn't help notice all the boarded up windows and doors on this house.  Naturally, I am always looking for old and abandoned things to photograph along my way.  I didn't stop in my first passing, but today I went to the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, and saw this as I passed by this morning, and vowed to stop and photograph it on the way home.  Which I have done.  What is interesting about this house is that it appears to have a brand new metal roof on it, which means it won't rot and collapse after 30 or 40 years as the Ovid farmhouse did.  There is a lot of agricultural land around this area, and a lot of it has already been developed with large housing and condominium projects.  So perhaps this land is destined to suffer the same development.  I will keep you posted, but it may take a while to see what happens here. This house is in a spectacular setting, by the way, it stands alone on the top of a rise and so is silhouetted against the sky in both directions.

 

The Red Barn

Vince and Jo Anne moved to Webster a few years ago, and so I am slowly learning the new neighborhood.  I was on the way to Wegman's to bet some salad fixings to go with dinner tonight when I drove by this barn.  I have driven by it before but never really noticed it.  But I did today.  So I stopped to photograph it.  I always look a building, or any subject, actually, a number of different ways before photographing and I usually shoot it from different points of view.  This is one of the last photographs I did and it is different for me, because I put the tree right in the middle of the front of the barn!  Normally you want distractions away from the subject.  But my heart tells me this is the most interesting view, because it is unexpected.

Here is one of the other, more traditional views, and I thought it would be interesting to see one of the other ways I photographed this red barn.  It's nice because you can see the whole barn and all the windows and there is a white fence in the photograph for added interest.  But I like the first shot with the tree best.  Everyone is allowed to tell me which one they like best, however.

 

The Farmhouse Fading, Now and Then

We are now in Rochester, and on the way up today I had to stop and photograph my favorite farmhouse.  It has been over a year since we have been up here and I was not even sure what I would find.  The last time I came by, the entire roof had collapsed and it was looking pretty sad. I wondered if it was even still standing.  I was shocked at how dramatically different it looked this time, and then I realized that someone had stripped the clapboards off the front of the house!

This is a view through a window of the inside of part of the house and of course you can see the sky from within the rooms now.

I really love this photograph, of the tilted door and screen door.  Not sure why, but it is subtle.  I photographed this the last time, but it was illuminated by the harsh light of the direct sun.  This is more beautiful because of the soft light.  Apparently there was a side porch, in the foreground, but it has collapsed as well.  I would love to be able to see what this house looked like when it was newer and still occupied.

Here is a view I have photographed many times in the past.  Someone even cut down one of the trees in front, and I wonder why they did that.

And to put things in perspective, here is a similar photograph of the farmhouse in 2009, 14 years ago.  It was the oldest photograph I have on this computer, but there may be older photographs in the desktop computer at home.