Red, white and blue
This year I was fortunate enough to spend 4th of July weekend with a very good friend of mine on Cape Cod. The weather was absolutely fantastic and we sat on the beach, enjoyed a nice bottle of wine and watched a seemingly endless display of fireworks along the coastline. Here is my attempt at capturing some red, white and blue.
A few steps
My friend Sabrina recently asked me to write a guest post on her blog. The reason was to share a few small success stories, to motivate other aspiring photographers to keep following their dream.
Photography is a life-long journey. The way you see things and photograph them evolves constantly. It teaches you to see the world around you in new eyes. You find beauty in unexpected places. An exciting and addicting experience. I am looking forward to continuing on this journey and what discoveries and opportunities it will provide for me.
If you would like to see what small successes and surprises it had in store for me so far this year, you can check out my post on Sabrina’s blog. Each journey consists of a lot of steps and these were only a few of mine along the way.
And then there were four
As I had posted a while back (you can find the posts here and here) I have been watching two osprey nests in the area. First the bad news: one of the nest was abandoned. I don’t know why, the same thing happened last year. They worked on the nest, mated, they stayed for a while and then for some reason they left.
Today I checked on the second nest and was very happy to see that their family has grown. They seem to have two healthy chicks and I arrived just at feeding time. I enjoyed watching them and am looking forward to observing them over the next few weeks as the chicks mature.
Bass Harbor Light House
When I visited Acadia National Park a year ago I naturally had to stop by one of the most iconic locations there – the Bass Harbor light house. There was only one problem: The ocean was completely calm, not a cloud in the sky, in other words, it was rather boring.
When I returned this year, the scenario was quite different. It was a gloomy day and the surf was pounding the rocky shore below the light house. Great light house weather. I managed to get a few nice shots just before a thunderstorm started.
Acadia coastline in the fog
A year ago I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a workshop with Art Wolfe in the Acadia National Park in Maine. Now, newly inspired from a recent one-day seminar with Art, I headed back to Acadia for a weekend trip of hiking and photography with my mother, who was visiting from Germany.
We arrived in the afternoon in a mix of rain and fog. I headed straight for the coastline, hoping to get a nice shot of the rocky shoreline in this weather. I was hoping for a long exposure of the waves coming in over the rocks. Below you can see the result of a 30 second exposure of the shore.
By the way – should an Art Wolfe seminar be in a city near you, I highly recommend to attend. Get ready to be inspired!
A trip to 1627
Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA offers the unique opportunity to take a trip back to 1627. It is the re-creation of a small farming town built by english colonists. The people working here have taken on the names and viewpoints of actual people that lived here during this time. Any question you ask them will be answered as if you are actually in 1627, which can be confusing in the beginning. If you arrive first thing in the morning on a weekday (and not in the middle of tourist season) you might be lucky enough to see the entire village without any tourists for a brief time and you will feel transported back in time.
The art of dressage
This weekend I had the great opportunity to audit the NEDA symposium with Bettina Drummond, a highly respected classical dressage trainer, educated by Nuno Oliveira (one of the great Portuguese masters) and the French school at Saumur. For her, dressage is clearly an artistic endevour, a way to let the horse express itself.
Nobody would ever doubt that ballet is an artform, but the opinions seem to differ when it comes to dressage. The dressage one sees in competition arenas a lot of times is more sport than art. But then there are also plenty of riders (myself included) that train dressage not for competition, but for pure enjoyment, trying to achieve maximum harmony with our dance partner – the horse. The road to create a work of art in dressage is long and steep. Your partner is a horse. You have to learn to communicate with each other by means of feel and touch. You might find out after a few years that your horse does not have the mental or physical capability to become the dancer you would like him to be and you either have to learn to stay within those limits or start from scratch. And then there are a lot of unforeseen variables – after all, you are dealing with a living being. After years of daily work you might achieve your goal, a living work of art, when your horse performs with such ease and through such subtle communication that it can hardly be detected by the observer. It requires ultimate dedication. My own work of art is still in the rough draft stage, shall we say, but I am working at it daily. Dressage teaches humility and patience. You learn to be happy with tiny successes.
It was an inspiration to observe a true equestrian artist at work this weekend.
Reflection
Things are finally drying up around here after the heavy flooding. There are still some local remnants, one of which provided a nice picture opportunity the other morning. I drive past this farm a lot, and when the pasture in front of it flooded I realized that there might be a beautiful reflection in store for me. It did require some patience – it was either windy or rainy – but the other morning it finally came together. Beautiful morning light, no wind and a nice reflection of the barn and fence line in the still lightly flooded pasture.
Home renovation – osprey style
The ospreys have been busy rebuilding their nest. Here are a few pictures from yesterday.
Delivering building supplies.
Some rearrangements
The happy couple.
They are back!
Last year I spent endless hours observing an osprey nest nearby. I had hoped to follow them through the season, from nesting to raising their young. I managed to get some nice pictures of nest building, mating, daily activities, but then one day they disappeared without ever having hatched any offspring. I then moved on to a different nest, where I actually was able to get a few picture of their single offspring, but it was just the picture of a head poking out of the nest. I had hoped to catch the first flight, but missed it. Well, they are back. Both nests are occupied, so I will give it another try. Now, if my Canon extender would have fit on my Sigma 120-400 I would have been really happy, but sadly this is not the case. I might just need to invest in the Sigma extender.
Here are a few pictures I took today. I will keep posting on this blog as things progress, so stay tuned.
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