MaineSight

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.

As I was walking my dog on this cold February day in Maine, I came across this icy stream. Unfortunately, I brought a monopod instead of a tripod, and was forced to do my best without a true stable platform. I attatched the monopod to my Canon G10 and braced the horizontally oriented camera/monopod against myself while taking this photo (1/4 sec, f/4, ISO 80). Not bad for 1/4 second. But what I’m not showing are the 35 pictures that didn’t make the cut. There’s one distracting element in this picture that bugs me; do you see it?

I took a short sunset paddle tonight in Frenchman Bay. I’ve never photographed while paddling, but I decided to try to get over my inhibition about mixing salt water with photography. I’m still nervous while attempting to photograph while paddling—even though it was calm when I went out. I’m constantly paranoid I am going to drop the camera or capsize as compose a photo.

Here are a few photos from a day trip to Little Cranberry Island, Maine. On the south shore of the island, there is an amazing 2 km long beach littered with small smoothed stones polished from many tidal cycles.

At low tide, there are hundreds of these starfish on the barnacle encrusted rocks in Hancock, Maine. I’ve read (in a book by Thorton W. Burgess) that a single arm of a starfish can re-grow an entire new starfish. How does that happen? Wouldn’t that mean that the starfish’s arm has to first grow a new stomach so that it can gather food for what must be a pretty seriously energy intensive re-building process?

I’m a little delinquent on updates, even though I’ve been shooting almost every day for the last few weeks. This photo is from inside Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine. Since I didn’t have much time (the “three F’s” again!), I handheld this at ISO 1600. I could spend hours back here with a tripod making photos someday…

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.

This picture was taken this morning at Popham Beach, Maine — one of the few sandy beaches in Maine. This picture was NOT photoshop-ed. Just a simple levels adjustment.

Taking my dog for a walk, I came across these cedar posts in my neighbor’s field. I liked the patterns of the posts in the snow and the shadow detail around each post in the image below. Another 30-40 cm of snow on the way tonight…

In January, I started working my way through Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the right side of the brain. Aside from helping me pay even closer attention to what I see, it’s turned out to be deeply satisfying to finally be able to draw a reasonable facsimile of a face-such as this attempt to copy a sketch Henri Fuseli (1741-1825) made of himself: