Wednesday December 24, 2014

WARREN and BANTAM CONNECTICUT – Christmas Eve. The process that I’ve adopted for this project presents a real challenge around holidays. In the course of my one picture every day project I generally shoot the equivalent of a roll of film a day. So over a 365 day year I end up with 10,000 to 11,000 images. I post about a week after each shot, which gives me a chance to edit with a bit of detachment. But as a result of the delay these posts are never breaking news. For typical landscapes, cityscapes and people this isn’t a problem, but it is with holidays. Here I am on New Years Eve (when I’m writing this) posting Christmas Eve. The solution is simply to avoid holiday themes on holidays, which makes me look Scrooge-line, which I’m not.

Anyway here are some non-Holiday images taken with my Leica M Monochrom and an 18mm Super-Elmar lens.

Day 1,896 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.

On this day five years ago (day 70): Monarchs. This is rare color for me these days. It was taken near Tualpujahua Mexico. Here we witnessed a remarkable phenomenon: there is huge annual migration of Monarch butterflies from Canada and the Northeastern United States to this mountainous region of Mexico, about a three hour drive from Mexico City.  The Monarchs arrive in early November, which coincides with the Day of the Dead – the pre-Spanish people resident in the area believed that Monarchs were the souls of their ancestors.  They cluster in very high density (estimated at about 20 million butterflies per hectare) at very high altitude.  It’s possible to visit them by driving deeply into the the mountains and riding a horse for about a half hour from a nomadic base camp.  It’s possible to walk, but not advised because the elevation is very high, 11,200 feet (3,400 meters) and the half day one is there is too short a time to become acclimatized to the altitude.   The Monarchs cluster quietly on every surface until the temperature goes above 50 degrees F at which point they take to the air in breathtaking density,  The Monarchs we see in Connecticut take part in this migration.