Recently, my wife and I spent a day (sans children) hiking on Isle Au Haut, a 10 km ferry ride from Stonington, ME. Isle Au Haut has about 45 year-round residents, and much of the island is part of Acadia National Park. Due to it’s remoteness, it’s the least visited part of Acadia (actually, I don’t have any data on that, but I’d bet you a nickel it’s true). There are only two rangers on the island and part of their job (aside from being incredibly friendly and knowledgeable) is to make sure everyone that entered the park in the morning leaves at the end of the day on the last ferry.

This will be the first of several posts on the trip, and I’ll include a photo or two with each post.

Today’s photos, the ferns (A) and the beach rocks (B), are taken at Duck Harbor (southwestern part of the island), and Squeaker Cove, respectively.

Duck harbor was where I first noticed that Isle Au Haut has some of the largest uninterupted fields (except for large boulders and occasional trees) that I have ever seen. These fields are so densely packed with ferns (I believe in this case, hay-scented ferns) that they seem to have crowded out many other species of plants. The visual effect is amazing, and the soft overcast light made photographing the fields quite pleasingly simple.

After a short hike up and over Duck Harbor Mountain, we arrived at Squeaker Cove. Beautiful smooth granite stones line the beach, which inevitably prompts people to create little cairn scultpures, many of which you can see here.

Incidently, when we arrived at the next beach at Deep Cove, which is populated by similarly smooth granite stones, my wife stepped in such a way that two of the polished stones slid against each other and produced a noise we both spontaneously described as a squeak, hence our theory that this is behind the naming of Squeaker Cove.

I have no idea if this theory has any truth to it, but it’s a good sounding theory. So there.

I hope you enjoy the images. More about hiking on the island in the next post.

A few other photos from a recent trip to Flagstaff Lake Hut.

My family (last weekend) stayed for several nights at Maine Huts & Trails’ Flagstaff Lake Hut which is on the northeastern shores of Flagstaff Lake. To the south lie the Bigelow Mountains (whose peaks the Appalachian Trial passes over). It’s a beautiful location where the nightime sounds are consist of owls and plaintive loons, and some of the darkest night skies I’ve seen.

The actual story behing the creation of Flagstaff Lake still leaves a bad taste in many people’s minds—read more at this link.
Despite the history, the hut is situated in a beautiful spot and landscape photography opportunities abound. Our first night there, a short walk down a peninusla, and we were treated to a peaceful sunet with some dramatic light.

I could see, as the sun lowered in the sky, that it was soon going to be behind the clouds and anticipated the rays of light, and deliberately underexposed this image slightly to help preserve highlight detail.

But how should I frame the scene? Conventional wisdom is to not center your subject in the frame (and for some people not to take a photograph of a sunset!); so if you say that the sun & the dark central clouds are the subject, I’ve clearly violated this rule. In many cases, this rule is a good one to follow, since a central subject placement can me very static (i.e. boring). So, is there another framing of this scene that would be better?

Perhaps, but my eye sees this image as well balanced with the heavy blacks at the bottom third of the image and the sky occupying the rest. Furthermore, the dark edges of the clouds form a “v” shaped (or a nearly oblique line rising from left to right). I find the shapes of the mountains make my eye wander naturally from bottom right to bottom left and then up toward the sun and clouds. The sharp contrasts lead my eye around the image naturally, and in a way that seems pleasing to me.

I like this image, and I think the framing works well. I think this image is a good example of when it’s a good idea to ignore the “rule” of avoiding central subject placement.

Technical details:  this image was 1/640 sec at f/8.0 70-200mm f/2.8L at 70 mm, ISO 100 -1/3 EV, processed in Adobe Lightroom 3  and converted to B&W using SilverEfex Pro.

Garry Winogrand is famous for saying that pictures DO NOT tell stories, but I wonder what his thinking was behind that stance. Look at this image—isn’t there a story here? We of course don’t know exactly what the story is unless we met the current or former owner and asked them, but in true “Sherlockian” (is that a word?) fashion, we can make some pretty good guesses from what we see here. I see a house in serious disrepair (not seen in this image is the fact that the foreground floor is totally rotted out), but also with modern insulation indicating that someone was thinking of doing some work on the house, and also modern cleaning products as if someone was set to clean the house. The fact that this room is not really functional, means that there’s probably other sections of the house that are in better condition—maybe those are the rooms the cleaning products were meant for. Perhaps this room was used as storage? What to make of all the keys on the wall? Somone went to the trouble of bracing the door too, which tells me they cared to get into this room relatively often. So I see a house that has likely been lived in recently, and that someone set out to repair, but for some reason has not done so. Why?

The photo brings up more questions than it answers, but there clearly is a story here, and my desire to understand the story behind abandoned houses like this is what makes these rural stuctures so intriguing to me.

This picture was about 1 second, handheld at f/11, made possible because the lens shade on my 50 mm f/1.4 lens allowed me to brace it up to the window which served to steady the camera and remove unwanted reflections on a bright sunny day.

I’m busy delving into the newly released Lightroom 3, organizing my library and doing some much needed keywording. In the course of doing so, I came across this photograph taken last fall at the Upper Falls, Cathance River, ME Thought it would make a nice blog post.

I must say that I am completely delighted at the image quality improvements in Lightroom 3. The new Lens Corrections are fantastic and I now have no reason to maintain my license for DxO Optics Pro, which is a time and money savings.

Only 1800 images left to sort through! My mid year resolution is to finish this task and never to fall behind on keywording and organizing again.

2010 Mid Atlantic Planetarium Society, Portland, ME

Recently, I had to photograph the Mid Atlantic Planetarium Society meeting in Portland, ME. This relatively simple shoot turned into a very stressful project due to two factors.

First, (I’m not supposed to admit this sort of thing, right?) I totally forgot about the shoot until I received a friendly reminder via phone (thanks Jerry!) about an hour before the shoot—you can probably imagine the extreme embarassment and quick mixed-with-panic thinking that ensued.

So, down to my basement office, grab camera bag (always ready to go), light stand bag (ready to go with two shoot through umbrellas, and stands), tripod, and one other bag. I get in the car, and I’m thinking fast and furiously. Then, as I drive down to Portland, I go over a lighting plan; shoot down on the group, from a chair or a ladder, and use two speedlights to cross light the group. Simple.

Now the second stressful event.

I arrive at the conference, notice that there is a balcony from which I can shoot (no ladder needed, yeah), set up my light stands, and attach my radio triggers (Chinese Cactus V2s triggers). Test the triggering. NOTHING.
Okay, panic setting in. I just used these triggers and they were working fine. Battery problem? Ha, I always carry spares. Load up the new batteries…still nothing. Panic level increasing. Group portraits are stressful just like weddings—there are no retakes. Now I have to abandon my original plan. No radio triggers, what to do? The conference room is pretty dark and I don’t want to have to push my ISO up to 3200 if I can avoid it. Fortunately, I carry a 10 m off camera shoe cord, so I managed to light the entire group with a single 580EX II flash on a shoot through umbrella.

Amazingly, I think there is only one person mid-blink in this photo, and he’s wearing glasses, so the reflections mask the blink. A successful group photo.

So, my take on the Cactus V2s triggers. Don’t use them unless you buy a few extras to have on hand. When I arrived home, I sat down to see what the issue was, and was able to make only one receiver fire. The second seems dead for no apparent reason. Maybe I’ll have to finally invest in Pocket Wizards. Time to do some RF trigger research.

Oh, and make sure to add ALL my shoots to my iCalendar.

A cold and windy walk at Popham Beach at low tide lead to what looked like an old pier piling washed up on the beach. Canon G10, handheld.

On a Thanksgiving Day family hike in Brooksville I came upon this bend in the trail and realized while photographing that even at 24mm, I am not not going to get a sharp focus across the image (at least not without a tilt shift lens), so I set up my tripod and cable release and made two exposures; one with focus in the foreground, and the other with focus farther back in the frame.

Once home, I opened the two raw images using PhotoAcute and combined them using the focus stacking feature. This is the first time I’ve used this feature, and it worked remarkably well.