Headlight

On Wednesday afternoon I slipped out a little early and headed to Scituate, MA. I had looked out the window and saw white puffy clouds filling the previously clear, blue sky. I figured that there might be a reasonably nice sunset to be had and since it was still warm I headed to the ocean. Even if there wasn't much going on photographically, how bad could it be to spend some of the afternoon beside an old New England lighthouse and watch the tide roll in?

Anyway, the weather cooperated aaaaaaaand it was nice to watch the tide. Here's a shot of the lighthouse



It turned out to be the right thing to do for an otherwise slow afternoon. Of course, I did have to endure the Boston (inapproptiately named) rush hour traffic on the way home. Oh well, a small price

Cheers!
Lizz

Day Trip to New Hampshire

Last Saturday my buddy Ralph, aka The Doctor, and I made a whirlwind trip to New Hampshire.

It began with a stop at the seashore for sunrise. Well, almost. You see, while we intended an alpine start to see if we could capture some nice images of sunrise at Odirone Point, NH, we were a bit late out the door. It was a case of the hurrier I go the behinder I get. Anyway, as I'm driving as fast as I feel comfortable I look out the side window to see flames forming in the sky. I mean absolutely gorgeous red sky and my heart began to sink because I knew that we were not going to make it. At least not how we intended.

We arrived at the water just as the sun poked over the horizon. The Doc snapped off a couple of shots, one of which was pretty nice. Fortunately the tide was out and the water calm, so I set up to take some images of the rocks with reflections. Here's the best of the lot:


After the light changed, (which was pretty darn fast!) we headed north for a hike up the Champney Falls Trail to Picher and Champney Falls. It was a bluebird day which is nice for hiking, but kinda bland for photography since there were no clouds. It was a delightful hike and there were some guys with topropes at the falls ice climbing. It was fun to watch and made me anxious to dust off my skills and get out there again. Hopefully next week!

Once we finished our walk, we headed to Rocky Gorge along the Kancamagus Highway. The Swift River was mostly frozen and there were some interesting ice sculptures along the shore and in the river itself. Here's one image that I converted to black and white.:


We spent a couple of hours there before heading off to the Moat Mountain Brewhouse for some sustenance before the shlep back home. All in all not a bad way to spend a winter Saturday.

Thanks for reading,
Lizz

2010 and Some New Ideas

I know I've said this before, but I really do want to try and make posts to this blog more frequent. It is really just laziness disguised as procrastination.

Anyway, I'm an idiot. Last weekend I made the choice to go somewhere different over the coming weekend. I wanted to go somewhere within New England and expand my photography subjects. The only problem? I left our place in the Berkshires and left my camera bag in the foyer. DOH!!!!

So, I was able to slip out to the house today and grab my gear including snowshoes, just in case the snow is deeper up north. On my way back to Boston on Rt 2 I crossed over the French King Bridge into Erving. Everyone scopes out the view north up the Connecticut River but I wanted to see what was south. I caught a glimpse of something gold and decided to check out the beautiful footbridge that crosses over the Millers River just before it empties into the Connecticut. I had a little time to set up and shoot a couple of images before the light went away. Here's my effort:


I hope you like it. Thanks for reading,
Lizz

Late Summer

New England can be a very weird place to live. We always seem to be gearing our activities towards the next season. One week ago we had our only blast of real summer: temperatures in the mid 80s with dewpoints in the mid 70s. In other words I worked up a solid sweat just blinking my eyes. What was I doing? Putting my firewood into the barn for the winter. It seemed quite ironic to me.

I had a chance to visit Colorado for 10 days in July. I also was able to visit Acadia National Park right after that. There are new images from both trips up on my website www.lizzbartlett.com

Today, after finishing some chores, Holly and I went up to MacLeod Pond in Catamount State Forest for some photography. the new road that the state built does not appear to have increased the negative impact many feared that it would. It is still as beautiful as ever. Here's one of the images from this afternoon.



I hope your weekend was as nice.
Thanks for reading!
Lizz

The Best $99 I Have Spent in a Long Time

I'm stubborn. I have been experimenting with HDR since I first bought my digital camera a year ago. The potential for the technique is huge and works really well in situations where a split ND filter would leave a line in the image or would have a dark top of a tree.

However, my results have been mixed. I've been using the Merge to HDR feature in Photoshop. Some of the merged images are pretty nice, but all too often the images appear gray and dingy no matter what I do for adjustments. Over the year I have read several reviews of Photomatix Pro but, (this is where the stubborn come sin) I have continued with Photoshop. So, I downloaded the free trial and ran some tests. After the first try I was sold. The best $99 I have spent in a long time.

Here are a couple comparisons:
Photoshop


Photomatix


Photoshop


Photomatix


I'm not sure if it's just that I wasn't skilled enough during the conversion from a 32 bit to 16 bit image, but the Photomatix adjustments are very intuitive and the results are , as you can see, pretty convincing.

I hope you liked the images and thanks for reading.
Lizz

Birds!

I have discovered another thing that I really like about shooting digital. The flexibility to change as the conditions change.

I recently took an evening wander out to the Great Meadow National Wildlife Refuge, one of my favorite places to go at the end of the day. I took the opportunity to try my hand at a little bird photography something I had not really tried before due to the limitations of my film choices. Velvia 50 is a really wonderful landscape film, but catching a Great Blue Heron in flight in fading light is probably not going to happen. By boosting the ISO to 800 and opening up to f8 I was able to freeze the bird in flight handholding my 70-300.

Great Blue Heron in flight:



As I wandered around I found a bird I had never seen before....a Moorhen. A man who had been walking along the levee told me where to look. He also told me that one of the birds was "rather chatty" and could be easily seen. Sure enough there was one of the Moorhens wading along the levee in the reeds. I watched and photographed for a good half an hour until the bird moved into a more secluded spot.

Moorhen in the reeds:



What are you looking at?



I also spotted another bird of interest, a mother Wood Duck with her brood paddling around in the shallows. The ducklings cavorted and played with each other while mom kept a wary eye on me. It was fun to watch her herd the young'uns around.

Mama Wood Duck:



Slowly the light faded and the birds began moving to their evening roosts. I reset my D300 to ISO 100 and set up to shoot sunset. The skies cooperated and streaks of magenta painted the clouds. Once the lights went out I headed home.

Sunset:



Thanks for reading!
Lizz

Published!

Well, the big news is that I had a photo published in the Appalachian Mountain Club's monthly magazine "AMC Outdoors". Last November I entered the AMC's annual photo contest. While I wasn't among the winners, the senior editor of the magazine liked my image of sunset taken at Popham Beach State Park in Phippsburg, ME. He liked it enough that he asked to run it in the June issue. Here's the image:


Thanks for reading!
Lizz