Saw this wonderful old house in Babylon Village, New York today. How great would it be to fix this up into a studio?
Tag: photography
So on a recent trip to Vermont I actually found a way to entertain myself at a local antique shop. Usually, when I’m dragged to these types of shops, I wander around, staring at the ceiling, hoping my wife or family doesn’t take too long. I just don’t have the antique bug. I take nothing away from people who love antiquing, but it bores the hell out of me.
So at this recent visit I started checking out the various plastic dolls and statuettes, specifically their faces. And the more I did that the more they started to seem almost alive, with sad, happy, lost, and even demented expressions.
I decided to take as many photos of these faces as I could. I must have looked strange to the store’s staff, me some weirdo taking photos of little dolls and wooden statues, not buying anything, just snapping away.
The set came out great. And the more I look at them the more human they seem.
You tell me.
Enjoy the photos. I think I’ll take more of these.
So here it is, my first batch of taken with my new Nikon D5000 DSLR digital camera. I’m still learning how to use it, specifically how to tweak ISO, shutter speed and aperture to make photos better. It’s still over my head, but luckily I’ve been visiting Digital Photography School for tips, a great website for novice photographers such as myself.
For this first group I decide to take more photographs of the snowy winter scenery on my property. I experimented with landscapes from afar in addition to a few up-close macro shots. of the snow-laden branches and shrived red berries hanging on the vines.
There’s a very clean feeling I get from the photos this camera takes, they’re not as grainy as the ones from my point-and-shoot Canon. But as for a deeper analysis, I need to learn more before I can make one.
In the meantime, enjoy these photos. There are some great ones of the small barn on my property.
Truth be told, most of my nature photos I take on my property, which is fairly large by Long Island standards and features a great assortment of trees, vines, bushes and flowers. But I also leave the reservation.
This batch comes around the same time as my last group of fall photos, but were taken at one of the salt marshes on the Long Island sounds.
They feature thin, wiry vines, some with almost delicious looking blue berries (though I gather I’d get pretty damn sick eating them).
Then there’s the water, which seems to looks cold in the barren fall.
But the algae that lines the ricks on the shore, it’s a green as it is in spring, which makes me wonder what changes aquatic plant life goes through during seasonal shifts.
Enjoy the photos.
It’s a tossup for the most depressing end of a season between late late fall and late winter.
While winter tends to linger, and slushy, gray snow, cold wind and barren trees can get a bit maddening by the end of February. But the end of fall, when all of the wild colors fade to subtle brown, when the dead leaves crack and curl in their piles, and the empty trees creak in the chilling winds, well, it’s a real bummer.
These are the last photos I took of the season, just a few days before a fierce blizzard blew in with winter.
It’s all sticks, save for a few red berries. There are even a few photos of my barn, which seems to frown in the cold.
Enjoy the photos.
This next batch of photos comes from late fall, but not the end of fall. As you’ll see in later photos, this period of the season still had plenty of color left in it.
The middle of fall was marked with bright yellows and plenty of greens, from still healthy lawns, stubborn-to-change leaves and knotty vines. But, closer to the end of the season the greens disappeared, replaced by yellows and reds, while the old yellows turned brown.
At the same time, the leaves on the ground, which once looked waxy and pliable, had browned and shriveled and dried.
So, enjoy the photos. My next batch will come from the very end of the season, when most of the colors were gone.
Now that winter is here, having dumped more than two feet of snow on Long Island this weekend, it’s time for my usual scramble to get my photos from the previous season online. You’ll see handful of posts coming in the next few days.
The first batch is a small one, featuring a few of the now bare, thorny vines on my property. They’re from either small rose bushes or the thick and abundant vines that create one of my favorite property features, the rose tree.
Of course, these thorns, like sharks teeth, look ominous, especially in the fall when the flowers and the leaves are dead and they haunt in the open.
I’ve taken a fair amount of these in the arms or the legs when I ride past them on the lawn mower, you’d think I’d learn to give them a wide berth. I guess the roses make me forget, and I don’t have to mow in the winter or the fall, when they’re gone.
Enjoy the photos.
While I have held back on the photo posts recently, trying to get more writing done than photo taking, I have plenty of photos I’ve taken this fall that I’d love to share.
So here’s the first batch, taken right when the leaves started to fall off of the trees. These are a lot of the same tress and bushes I photographed in the summer, like the hosta, which has lost its flowers and turned yellow, and the hydrangeas that have left behind brown, dried shells of flowers.
Of course, it’s the up close colors and patterns of the leaves that inspire me the most.
Enjoy the photos. And, as always, you’re welcome to download any of them you would like. I’m not good enough a photographer to be stingy with my pics.
