WARREN CONNECTICUT – I love it when in mostly cloudy weather clear patches illuminate bits of the Connecticut countryside. Here’s an example. It lasted for a few seconds. I was lucky to capture it with my Leica and a 90mm Elmarit lens. One of my best landscapes of the year.
Baby Cloud
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Boxing Day. Curiously I shot the same subject one year ago. This time I selected a different angle and camera, my Alpa Max with a short-mount 120 mm Schneider lens and a tilt adapter. Tilting is a view camera feature that is available for longer Alpa lenses. It permits tilting the lens and thus the focus plane, to either extend or shorten apparent depth of field. Here I have used it to keep the top of the sundial and the wall and the trees in the background in focus. It can be a tedious iterative process to get focus right with this technique; there are rules of thumb that help; there’s also an iPhone app that gives you a very good starting point. What I don’t like about this image is a mental mistake on my part: cutting off the bottom of the sundial.
Sundial
WASHINGTON CONNECTICUT – I went out with my Alpa Max today to add to my collection of Litchfield County churches. In reviewing my progress to day I realized that I hadn’t yet taken a full frontal image of the iconic Washington Congregational Church with high res medium format gear. I wasn’t satisfied with the image that I captured so I’m not showing it today – I’ll have to go back to try again – but I caught this as a set up the tripod and did a test image to assure that all was in order.
Washington Congregational Church
TORRINGTON CONNECTICUT – This afternoon I drove to this former mill town on the Naugatuck River to photograph churches. The light was right to collect two of the large Catholic Churches in town, St. Peter Church and St. Francis Assisi Church. The light was wrong for the Central Congregational Church – I’ll be back tomorrow morning for it. The large Episcopal Church, Trinity Church, is very tight to a narrow street and accordingly very hard to photograph. Anyway here are St. Peter and St. Francis Assisi, taken with my Alpa Max and an 80 meg Phase One back. These subjects require full use of the camera’s rise and shift features. The St. Francis Assis (the second image) is two frames stitched.
St. Peter Church TorringtonSt. Francis Assisi Torrington
NEW PRESTON and WAREN CONNECTICUT – So here’s another one of the buildings in New Preston Connecticut, shot with my Alpa Max, a 47mm Schneider Digitar lens and a Phase One IQ 180 back. I caught our friend Dorothee Grisebach and Maria with my Leica after we packed the car up to come back to New York.
New PrestonDorothee and Maria
WARREN CONNECTICUT – So if the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, what’s the day after Thanksgiving? Purging Day? Leftovers Day? Cold Turkey Day. Try to Get Some Exercise Day? Get the Hell Out of the Kitchen Day? We’ll have to work on this.
My disposition has dramatically improved, foto-wise. I got out in good morning light with a tripod, my Alpa Max and the usual suspects in terms of lenses, filters and so on.
