This welcoming field of daffodils, a community project sponsored by the Essex Foundation, can be found at the bottom of Exit 3 (northbound) on Route 9.
{ 0 comments }
From the category archives:
April
Last year the marsh behind our neighbor’s house was overflowing with great egrets, most of them juveniles. They stayed for a couple of weeks in early April, probably decimated the fish and and amphibian population in the place, and then were gone.
This year, just a few showed up, and I only photographed a couple of times: this adult, who proved a patient model, and later, a juvenile who would not even stick around for a single shot.
Their majestic beauty and placid manner belie skillful and ruthless abilities as predators; this one caught and swallowed a fish just one minute earlier.
{ 0 comments }
A group of wild turkeys forage on cow manure recently spread over the field (those brown lines in the foreground), probably for the undigested corn from the cattle’s feed.
There’s a whole science to minimizing the cost of feeding cows, including harvesting the corn when kernels are at their peak maturity, decreasing the particle size of the corn kernels when ground, or using a bacterial inoculant in the silage to maximize fermentation (from an article here, thanks Google). My guess is that the small farmers in the area don’t really concern themselves much with those economics, probably for the same reasons we put up bird feeders in our back yard.
There’s a nice article here on the conservation effort over the past century that brought the turkey population in the US back from thirty thousand to seven million.
{ 0 comments }
I was struck with the flaxen hues of many of the mown fields throughout southern VT last week, a color no doubt enhanced by the light rain that was falling throughout most of our trip. “Looks cold and bleak..”, says a friend from GA, where they are currently reveling in camelias and azaleas. If I was looking at this scene in November, with four or five months of winter to come, I might have agreed. But now, here in April, this scene is positively summer-ish, a prelude of the warmth to come.
{ 2 comments }
Three views of a truck – perhaps a hundred yards out in a field – on a overcast day: the first is at 850mm with a Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary, the second is at 232mm with a Canon 70-200mm, and the third is at 64mm with a Canon 17-55mm. My Canon camera has a crop factor of 1.6, thus the longer actual reach. Each exposure was with Aperture Priority and automatic focus, and processed lightly in Lightroom, using only the Portrait mode.
At this point, I prefer the closeup. It has the simplest composition, the most color, and the mystery and intimacy of a portrait.
{ 0 comments }
Nothing ambiguous about this work; the spirit and attitude in the piece is, uh, easily discerned. And I didn’t even show the NSFW element. And the workmanship! Kudos!
{ 0 comments }
Speaking of “a lifetime together”, this remarkable larger-than-life metal sculpture can be found on the Westminster West Road in Putney, next to High Meadows Farm. It was created by a neighbor who lives completely off the grid; Howard, the co-owner of High Meadows, says you’d want this man by your side if it ever came down to “survival”.
{ 0 comments }
The great egrets are mostly gone from the marsh out back now, but for a few stragglers that visit now and again. They first showed up around April 2, and most stayed for a couple of weeks. Their numbers peaked at twenty-one on April 7th (about two-thirds juveniles), all in about a quarter of an acre. Our neighbors Johnny and Annie, who have been here eleven years, had never seen a whole colony visiting.
Here’s one shot of a juvenile with the rented lens I used (Canon 100-400mm and 1.4 Extender); it was perched on top of a telephone pole some twenty yards out.
{ 2 comments }