Tag: Connecticut

Categories
Landscape

Saturday May 8, 2010

WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Well I’m going to have to apologize for this one.  I’ve said that I never shoot sunsets.  The problem with them is that they happen every day.  It’s hard to find an unusual angle or an edgy point of view.  What am I going to add to the lore of sunsets?

A few years ago an artist friend painted a trompe-l’œil sky on the ceiling of our living room in Connecticut.  We asked for a Tiepolo sky.  Instead he painted an El Greco – a gray, brooding sky – because that’s what the sky looks like in Connecticut.  Well the May 8 sunset was pretty much a Tiepolo sky – the light was sensational.  Shot with a Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens, four exposures stitched together and cropped to a 2×3 aspect ratio.  I desaturated the blues in Photoshop – they were over the top.  I’ve pasted a copy of Tiepolo’s Allegory of the Planets and Continents for comparison.

Tiepolo sunset
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Allegory of the Planets and Continents
Categories
Landscape

Sunday May 2, 2010

WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Early morning. This was taken by mounting my Nikon D700 on an Astro-Physics 5 inch refracting telescope, providing an effective focal length of 780mm and an aperture of f6.

Connecticut Spring
Categories
-Woody's Picks Landscape Religion

Monday April 19, 2010

HARWINTON, CONNECTICUT – I drove to Harwinton today to visit the Connecticut DEP office there, to pick up a boat license.  Like most other Litchfield County towns Hawinton has a Congregational Church on a small green – the congregation dates to 1738.  The 1935 “Connecticut Guide” says this about Hawrinton

In Harwinton Village, the Congregational Church was built in 1806. The design is simple but pleasing, with the heavily molded cornice of pediment and roof. The 3 front doorways have rounded fanlights and pedimented hoods. Above the central doorway is a Palladian window, repeated in the tower. On the north of the Church is the stone Memorial Chapel, beautiful but incongruous, given by Collis P. Huntington, the financier of the Southern Pacific R. R., in memory of his mother. Huntington was born in the town in1821, and worked on a farm here until the age of 14, when he went to New York to seek his fortune.

Harwinton Connecticut
Categories
Garden Landscape Out my window

Sunday April 18, 2010

WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Another gray, rainy day.  But at the end of the day something amazing happened.  Just as the sun set it briefly broke through the clouds.  It was as if the landscape had been bathed in a red spotlight – one of those “It’s remarkable to be alive” moments.

Sunset after the rain
Categories
Garden Landscape

Sunday April 11, 2010

WARREN CONNECTICUT – So now it’s really spring.  Not much going on here from a photographic standpoint.  Flowering trees seem to rob my work of its vitality.  I’ve rented a Nikon and a few lenses as an experiment.  I don’t care for the “jittery” quality of the out of focus portions of the image.

Spring
Categories
-Woody's Picks Landscape Religion Small town

Saturday April 10, 2010

CORNWALL BRIDGE, CONNECTICUT – St. Bridget Church. A Catholic church. Late 19th Century gothic revival, The is very little information online, except that this congregation recently celebrated its 125th anniversary.  I took this because of the unusual point of view – the image is taken from a highway bridge that runs above the church.  The view is generally obscured by trees except for one spot where this shot is possible.  Because of the limited choice in angles there was no way to eliminate the utility wires.  May reaction at the time was “The wires are there.  We’ll just make them part of the image.”  I’m afraid that without a pole or some other indication that they are intentional, they look like a mistake.

St. Bridget Church, Cornwall Bridge Connecticut
Categories
Religion Small town

Sunday April 4, 2010 (Easter)

SHARON, CONNECTICUT – Back to shooting Litchfield County Churches on Easter Sunday.  This is Christ Episcopal Church in Sharon.  According to the Church’s history “In April, 1755, the town of Sharon granted the members of the Church of England permission to erect their first church. The congregation rapidly increased and outgrew their church by 1764 when a new “really neat and beautiful” church was built.  During the Revolutionary War, the building was desecrated when it was used for military purposes, turned into barracks, and then converted into a stable. In subsequent years, it fell into extreme disrepair and was finally torn down. . . . Circumstances shifted for the Parish in 1809 when the town’s Episcopalians officially organized as a parish and formally established themselves as part of the Protestant Episcopal Church on May 27th. With a clergy and vestry of their own, the members began construction on the existing brick building that was consecrated on November 24, 1819.”

Congregational churches built in he 1820s were most often federal style.  See my blog entries for November 21, 22 and 29, 2009.   The gothic revival came later to the Congregational churches.  Interestingly the Episcopalians built gothic revival structures from the late 1700s onward.  See my entries for January 2 and February 14, 2010.

Christ Episcopal Church Sharon CT
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