New England

• John W. Gardner.

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Here is one more from the Vermont Fall road trip. The highlight of the trip was a location known as smuggler’s notch, which is a pass close to the Canadian border that separates Mount Mansfield, the highest peak of the Green Mountains, from Spruce Peak and the Sterling Range. Peak fall colors were almost certain at this location. The foliage didn’t disappoint, but the sky was overcast and rainy for the whole trip.

I was in the process of changing my approach to photography, and the aspect I struggled with the most was changing adjusting to conditions. But this trip tested me. I came back with over 700 images, but only a few handfuls satisfied me. I reached Smuggler’s notch towards the end of the trip, and the frustration was at the very high limit. But at smuggler’s notch is when I started to think differently about the composition and started to take deliberate photos rather than the obvious composition.

Ever since I moved to Boston I was obsessed with this statue of George Washington located in the Boston Public Garden. I have take about 100 shots of the statue and these three are the perspectives which I like the most. Hopefully u guys will enjoy these shots as much as I do......

P.S. the hazy brown color at the lower horizon is the smoke from Canadian Wildfires that engulfed Boston and most of northern New England this Memorial day weekend.

• Jewish Proverb.

Sand Beach, Acadia National park.

• Jackson Pollock.

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Here is another old photo back from the east coast. This is the Annisquam light, located about an hour north of Boston, MA. The lighthouse is a private residence and its incredibly difficult to reach as there are no correct directions and adding to that this is located in a small New England fishing village which has very narrow roads and absolutely no parking.

I took this shot the second time I visited, there is a beach to the east of the lighthouse which is a playground for local children and it has a small rock formation on the beach with interesting texture and cracks. I had this spot in mind from my visit before and wanted to use the crack in the rock as leading line to the main subject.

Thanks for visiting, hope everybody enjoys the picture.

• Jack Welch.

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In yesterday's post, I talked a bit about changing my approach to photography. The main reason why I embarked on this general change in thought process is partially due to some of the photo trips that I took while on the north coast. I used to take a lot of shots and used to come up with very few keepers, this approach continued after the move to the west coast as well, but gradually, I started to bring some of the practices that great photographers often employ to great success.

The first step was a change in approach towards my photo trips. I started to look at them as a first trip on many as opposed to thinking that this is my only chance to visit. The second step was to familiarize the area before taking out the camera itself. Many great photographers followed the practice, and it helped me immensely in getting over the FOMO. We started to spend more time exploring, hiking and generally enjoying the spots before waiting for the right conditions for taking photos. My wife helped with this immeasurably by acquiring a phone gimbal and by taking out short videos of our trips. It has helped me a lot in making meaningful images rather than spraying and praying for good shots.

This shot is taken on a road trip to Vermont, shortly before I moved to the west coast. The Moss Glen Falls is a popular roadside attraction and draws a lot of leaf peepers. I had to wait a good amount of time to get the fall all to myself. This type of event would have frustrated me a lot in the past, but I had allocated enough time into the plan, and this allowed me to relax and plan the shots that I wanted.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I shot this at the Walden pond near Concord, MA during last fall. This is one of my fav location to go for a walk and this cabin is an exact replica of the one Thoreau lived in when he wrote the book, Walden. It was gorgeous fall day but the light was fading quiet fast, This model is located near the car park and as I was getting out of my car I found that no one was around and so I could get an uncluttered shot. www.flickr.com/photos/sanu29/5152422362

I love the color of the leaves around combined with the green ones and the trees on either side which provided me with a natural frame. Normally I don't frame with subject bang in the middle but I think the leading walkway and trees make this shot work. Thank you all for looking, commenting and faving....

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Richard L. Evans.

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In my early twenty’s, I moved to Boston to pursue my master’s degree. Along with the intensive semester load and my TA, I had very little spare time. I didn’t think about photography until I started my first job. I was living close to New Hampshire, and there was a waterfall a few steps away from my apartment. Now armed with my past experiences, I thought I was ready. I hiked up to the waterfall and composed a shot on my brand new D5000. The result was a shaky mess of a photo and left me even more confused.

I spend quite a bit of time to resolve the issues I faced. My gorilla pod was not sturdy enough, so I had to be very careful with how I activated the shutter. I managed to overcome that with the self-timer functionality. I used a small aperture of f18 to compensate for my 2-second exposure and finally got an image that looked good on the camera LCD. I rushed back home and started post-processing. The photo didn’t look as good on the bigger screen highlights were blown where light shafts peeked through the foliage, and the diffraction at f18 made the image very soft. It took me a while to understand why it was happening, but I kept on returning to the waterfall to perfect my technique.

Finally, after several tries, I managed to get a recipe for a successful waterfall shot. The ideal shutter speed is between 1-4 seconds and aperture between 5.6 to 11. I use the lowest iso available on the camera and an ND filter if necessary. A 2-stop ND Grad 150x100 filter is one of the most useful accessories that you can add to your camera gear. It took me way more time to make a good composition of a waterfall, though, but that’s a subject for whole another post.

Below in comments are the links to my other attempts at the same place.

• Horace.

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Castle Hill Lighthouse is located on Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island at the end of the historic Ocean Drive and is an active navigation aid for the United States Coast Guard and boaters entering the East Passage between Jamestown, Rhode Island on Conanicut Island, and Newport, Rhode Island on Aquidneck Island. The lighthouse was completed in 1890 on property formerly belonging to the famous naturalist, oceanographer, and zoologist Alexander Agassiz of Harvard University.

This an old picture that I took during my east coast days. This photo was largely abandoned since I had trouble getting a decent enough output from focus stacking the four images. I wanted to try my luck again with all the advancements in photoshop in recent years and lo and behold photoshop processed a great output this time with great focus across the frame. While processing the image, I had a feeling that this shot will work better as a black & white as the colors were pretty mute from this angle but contrast was plenty with this image. So I showed my wife both the color and monochrome outputs and she voted for this one. Thanks for visiting.

• Mother Teresa.

Please view this on black.

Crystal cascade is rated as one of the best waterfalls in NH and I wanted to visit the falls before I left for New York. Most of the directions posted online for the falls state that its located just a short walk from the Appalachian Mountain Club Pinkham Notch Visitor Center on the way to White mountain auto road. So naturally, on my way back from there I went to the falls.

The nice lady behind the information counter told me that it's just a short distance from the parking lot, the distance was indeed short but was a little steep. I was really tired from a whole day of driving especially the nerve-racking Mt Washington drive and was in no condition for a climb. It took me almost 40 minutes to cover what other people were covering in 10 minutes but the waterfall was worth the effort, there is a nice viewpoint but getting to the base of the fall requires some skills and is impossible with a DSLR and a hefty tripod.

The Glen Ellis Falls is quite close to this one and is equally majestic. you will have to stop at the parking lot and take a tunnel to cross the highway and there is a beautiful pathway that will help you make it to the bottom of the falls.

-Khalil Gibran.

Waterfall Bridge, Acadia National Park, ME

I took this shot while I visited Acadia National Park last October. I was hoping to catch the great fall colors Maine is famous for but the leaves hadn’t turned yet and it was a bit disappointing. On the second day there we took a walk among the carriage paths of Acadia and came across this beautiful waterfall.

There are two bridges very close to each other which act as a vantage point for a small and a large waterfall. The small waterfall was way too dry to get a shot of but this one didn’t disappoint. The water quantity was just right and the fall was indeed pretty tall. I got of the vantage point and went to the bottom of the falls for this shot used a polarizer and a 0.9 ND filter to slow the shutterspeed.