MaineSight

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 late, wet, February snow transformed the landscape into a monochrome wonderland. Photographed, processed, and posted from my iPhone 3Gs.

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.

Tamaracks, Durham, Maine. Processed with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.

This was taken on a wonderful overcast day in Brooksville, Maine on some land recently donated to the Blue Hill Heritage Trust.

Unfortunately, I mistakingly left my tripod at home, and this image was handheld  ISO 800 for 1/30 second at f/10.

Are the daisies out early this year in Maine? In any case, they are all over in the fields now, and I spent a good 45 minutes looking through the viewfinder till this composition struck me as pleasing.

A few weeks ago, I visited the two Maine Huts that the August MaineSight workshop will be located at. I had the good fortune to meet John and Cindy Orcutt, who were caretaking at the Flagstaff Lake Hut. John is an Architect (and excellent Photographer!) and Cindy is a Landscape Architect, and together, they designed the Flagstaff lake hut and its grounds. John gave me a personal tour of the good photographic spots in and around Flagstaff Lake. John and Cindy also told be about a funny but true aphorism they called the “three f’s of Photography”.

These are the three things (that begin with the letter ‘f’) that get in the way of outdoor photographers: Food, Family, and Friends. As nature photographers, we want to be outside when there is the best light—sunrise and sunset—and this is usually around the time we want to eat some food: breakfast and dinner. Getting up early, means that if your family is along, taking care of kids also interferes—or at least means that your spouse has to be willing to take over that role. And friends, well, they want to stay up and visit with us, and you’ve got to go to sleep early to get up before sunrise.

Fortunately, sunrise is pretty darn early in Maine at this time of the year, and breakfast doesn’t really interfere. Here’s a photograph I snuck at 6 am this past weekend when my family was up  visiting family and friends in Blue Hill, Maine:

I’m always struck by the wonderous green when trees first leaf-out in the spring, but this picture also carries a feeling of deep or original intimacy as the three leaves gently rest against each other as they all grow together from the same branch.

The first crocus of spring! It’s been a long winter and it’s nice to feel like the warmer weather is really on the way. It’s truly amazing that a little bulb can produce such a beautiful flower—and for that matter—that the universe exists at all. Reminds me of a quotation by Abraham J. Heschel:

“Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy”.