David’s Blog
On Writing
I have several rules to writing. OK, there are not really rules. Let’s call them strong suggestions. None of these are original and I take no credit for any of them, but all have proved true over my 30 years of writing. The suggestions are not listed by importance - I put them on the page as they tumbled off my pointy, little head. Write however is...
Fog 2
Ok, I seem to be on a roll, a weather roll. Here are some of my favorite fog photos...I couldn't resist. I love to photograph in the fog because fog wipes out the background replacing any annoying or distracting elements with a magical soft white gauze. Photographing in fog is fabulous. And it's fun too! Here is a bit of how-to: put your camera on matrix...
A visitor in the night
I had a strange and wonderful visitor in the dark last night, a male luna moth. What a wondrous animal! It is about 4" long and 3" wide with a white body and tiny red legs. I know it is a male luna moth because like most moths, the antennae are broad and not skinny as would be a female's. Adult luna moths have no mouths so they don't eat and they only live...
Rain
So I started to think about other surprising weather conditions that I like for photography and I came up with my all time favorite...Rain! I then opened up Lightroom and typed in 'rain' in the search keywords field and lo and behold many of my all time favorite photos appeared! What is it about the rain that I find so attractive? First is the lack of...
Horse Barn Swallow
I had a little fun with a pair of barn swallows in the horse barn on the dairy farm where I help with chores. The pair was nesting 20' back from the big doors and as I watched them I saw that they frequently perched on the old horse tack stored in the beams of the roof. Grabbing my Nikon 80-400 and cranking up my Nikon D750 to ISO 3200 I framed up the a...
Fog and Forests!
Boy I love fog! As soon as the the clouds descend or the fog envelopes I head for the forest. The combination of fog and forest equals magical photography. The best part of fog in the forest is that the fog wipes out all the background so the forest becomes almost 1-dimensional and thus much easier to find compositions. Don't worry about the exposure. Take...
Crossroads Vermont!!
The Crossroads Vermont workshop is complete and what a great workshop it was!!! Any workshop is exactly as good as the people who come to learn and stretch and experience a new area and we were blessed to have a wonderful group of inquisitive and very talented photographers. Crossroads workshops are all about learning to take photos that will help the...
Salamanders the right way
So I went back up into the woods and tried again to get some nice pics of salamanders and efts. It has been so dry that it has been very hard to find the little squirmy devils. Needing moist skin, amphibians will go underground when things are dry on the forest floor leaving prying photographers little to photograph. But efts are tough little scoundrels so...
The Passage Bird
I was out in my wood shed stacking cords this morning when an unusual birdcall caught my ear and wouldn’t let go. It was loud and emphatic, I mean really emphatic, a mix of slower staccato notes followed crisply by a faster rough trill. Not very melodic but very noticeable if you are near. I was. My bird brain spit out the name- Tennessee warbler, a...
Salamanders
Yes, even the great ones fail and fail horribly. Case in point- I was out in my woods the other day trying to get some good pics of salamanders. Not an easy thing to do but if you are going to do it this is the time of year to try. In Spring, the woods are wet so salamanders are happy to walk about and are also easy to find under rotten logs. As the months...
Moments
I have been thinking lately about how ephemeral photography can be. Sometimes the opportunity to photgraph something is maddeningly brief and sometimes it can be joyously long. Peak fall color here in Vermont often lasts 4 to 5 days so anytime in that window and you are going to get great shots. Photographing spider webs in September in my meadows is a two...