The cold snap lasted only two weeks and the lake ice finally froze over. You can see the trail of the last vestage of flowing water as it surcommed to the cold.  It has been  a very odd year, normally the die-hard fish craze anglers are out on the ice in late December. This year it was late January.  Then only two weeks later the temperatures headed back up an the lake is now unworthy of traveling on.  With a few weeks of winter left, we may not have another deep freeze, so this has been a no-ice winter, …an extreme rarity andone for the record books….

I am sure most photographers know that shooting at white snow causes your camera sensor to make the image a dull grey. That is just a condition of the technology and not you.  A few tip to avoid this are, boost your exposure up by 1 full stop, another trick that I use is to point my camera up to the blue sky and set your exposure.  Also with the sun, you’ll tend to want to be in AWB, snow typically has a cool blue hue to in, but then again its up to you, a little warm (if you set color balance to cloudy or shade0 might be what you looking for.  Finally, you might want to try using your NIK plug-in color effects pro $ setting bleach bypass, you can get some interesting ‘white’  results.

I was reading thru a few web sites on aviation, and for some reason an article on the British Air Force selling all their Harriers to the US got me thinking about the small old school airfield in Rhinebeck, NY.  I have written about the airfield on a few occasions and it still is not out of my system. It might be because as a young kid of 14, my dad and I adventured out to the very rural and very small airfield on a father/son trip. My dad’s passion was flight, 20 years in service as a bomber pilot and retired, he talked about making the trip like it was a pilgrimage.

We lived on the NH seacoast so the trip for us was about four hours, it was a beautiful mid summers day. Back then there was no internet, so you needed to call ahead to do your planning, GPS, not invented yet, you used a map, cell phone (ha), and it was a standard shift in the old car.  So a trip took more effort and it had more satisfaction on arrival. Now I grew up across the street from an active grass airfield so driving to the aerdrome did not have much impact in that respect. The airfield also had those old rusty hangers with that musty ancient dust smell imbedded in the walls and plane fabric.

Yes, I said fabric, these planes are all fabric, no metal. They are wood. They are engines that are over 100 years old. One of kind. I remember my father searching out for the owner of Rhinebeck, (a very interesting man with a passion and foresight for aviation history way ahead of his time) and they reminisced for hours, first planes, Jennies, Piper cubs, engines, airfields, barnstorming. I now wish that the portable tape recorder like you have in your smart phone was around, because their conversation was a language that was reserved and earned between two airman who respected each other as active participants and witnesses of early flight and their heros.

So when my professional career landed me in upstate NY, some 25 years after that father /son trip, I headed back over to the Aerodrome. Half expecting to see the encroachment of the years on my youthful memories. Low and behold, it was a step back in time. The same aircraft, preserved and cared for by over the years by these stewards of aviation. I met up with a man who had been at the airfield for thirty years, so a direct link to my past. At 91 years of age, his eyes still glistened with fantasy of flight stories and did not hesitate with a story which beget another story….amazing……

Yet, I was here on one hand as a photographer.  I had talked my self into purchasing the Nikon 200-400 f/4 and had a TC-1.7 and I wanted to work on Image taking and at the same time have some archival memory of these pre WW2 planes. The weather was perfect, to perfect, not a cloud around. This is a killer problems for avaition photography. Planes fly and move in the sky, so no clouds, how do you show motion ? I recall reading that taking an image of plane on a blank bald blue sky was like shooting a brick. No passion, no movement….So what to do, of course , who cares, I’m shooting bricks for an hour, working on panning, f stops, speed, aperture….Working the practice…. It was soon going to have a pay off.

Rhinebeck has a sort of aerial skit that last a few hours, where they get these old planes up and down under the pretense of an old Snidely whiplash cartoon.  A one point of the show, they announced that in the old barnstorming days of the 1920s, a performance trick that the better pilots would try to pull off was to have two planes go up, and at around 1,500 the pilot of one plane would toss a roll of toilet paper out the side and the pilot of the lower flying training plane would try to sever the TP before it floated to earth.

So there is the photo challenge, Blue sky, TP for gesture/motion and use your panning skills to capture everything crisply on focus and on time…..ha…I thought I’d give it a shot….I’m not sure whose finger was on the shutter but I was able to come away with a nice image that I hope you’ll enjoy to look at.

Link Rhinebeck Aerodrome

During the summer I traveled up thru Massachusetts and stopped at a nature preserve.  I hiked a two mile loop in the overcast skies and then took a fork in the trail which led me to the waters edge.  I set up for some wildlife shots but nothing came my way. It was almost desolate, the river wrapped thru a large expanse of brackish sea grass but there was nothing moving. What’s a photographer to do ?

In front of me was my subject. I challenged myself to not shoot just a silhouette but to see if I could push the exposure so that I had 100% of shadows detail. To help accomplish this I used my split .09 soft grad over the top left side of the camera lens, which allowed me to push that exposure without blowing out the subject.  The idea here is to practice and push yourself, maybe in another time or setting, these tips will come in handy. ,,

• Nikon D3s
• 24-120mm
• f/16 @1/30
• Lee .09 Soft split grad

However out of frustration came a Google search and search and search and try and try and try until I discovered this little gem of a software.  Most Mac users are using another MAC software called Drag Thing to store their most used applications. Shown below is my Drag Thing folder category named Photo, and I can tell you that A Better Finder Rename 8 is a go to application time and time again and has save me all sorts of time and frustration when I have had an issue with a file name or number sequence.

A BetterFinder Rename

The user interface is very clean, simple and intuitive to use.  Once you have opened the application, you can drag the folder that you want to work on directly onto the application window on the left panel, ‘Current Name’ .  The inspector on the far left lets you define what you want to do, i.e. remove text, re-sequence or you can activate more than one action.  The application panel to the far right ‘ Change to’ shows you the preliminary results and if all is okay then you can ‘perform renames’ and the application goes thru all your file names and cleanly updates them all……

Better Finder User Interface

As a user of this software for many years on a number of different machines I have watched this software constantly improve and evolve. It keeps getting better with time. You can tell when a piece of software has a developer and team who are passionate about quality and performance and that is when they release new flawless performance updates every month.

• Version 8.94 is OS X 10. 6 and 10.7 Lion OSX Compatible
• Version 8.76 is OS X 10.5
• There is a windows version
• Tutorials are available

This is one application that you will want to keep handy and for a trial download or if you want to dig deeper follow this Link: A Better Finder Rename

We had an interesting pattern of clouds roll in yesterday and it was time to take some Images. This has been a  NO-Snow winter so far. The temperatures have been unseasonably mild and the air dry.  It is peculiar weather when compared to the fact that I was in several feet of snow the same time last year.  Generally speaking people are split between missing the cold and snow and this new milder winter.   I am missing my shots of snow laced trees and walking across frozen lake ice to get new perspectives of shorelines.

Yet, an interesting pattern of clouds starts me wandering around and I came to this expansive tree. I was shooting the Nikon 24mm f/1.8G wide angle and knew I had all the lens I needed to grab the full breath of the tree and sky.  I was on the deck for this Image, waiting for an interesting cloud pattern to align somewhat with the silhouetted branches. It took awhile but I was able to get close to what I was looking for. The tree itself has chaotic branch formations with small caps on their tips which reminded me of whoville while I took the Image.

I was reflecting on what I was doing a year ago by going over some of my older Images.  When I came to this image, it dawned on me that we are drawn not only to the luminance of light but also how we must create our own light.  It was a year ago that I met with my daughter in Boston’s Quincey Market to later visit the admissions office of the college of her dreams.  She had heard the dad speech a few times about  ’sometimes the boat does not come into the harbor and you have to swim out to it’ and decided that it was time for her to take matters in her own hands.  I was very proud to be her emotional escort that morning.  A lot has happened since that day, she’s done very well her first semester and she is on a path that she created and which is nurtured by her family and friends.

It seems that we all at times are asked to make new demands of ourselves and then take our ideas to action and to chase that Light we have created.  The enemy of Creating Your Light is a shadow of self doubt which has an inky harbor of inactivity but once you start creating your light it has infinite variations in directions and intensity to match your passion and dreams. Go Maddy !

Traveling thru Vermont a few months ago, a friend suggested that I goto the rural town of Winhall. What a friend and what a suggestion ! There are not to many other places that you can spend hours walking around that are full of rural scenic images. Here I was able to spend some time  on this simple stream as the sun was glazing a rock and water with its light. The only real challenge for me as the sun and shadows painted the scenery was to predict the best moment for my click.  I used my Nikon 70-200 to compress the elements and the midmorning sun needed to be tamed a bit, so I was at f/22.

I figured last night that with the approaching snowstorm that I would head over for some bison photos. Funny thing, the bison were located in a field that was not approachable. So it was time to make snow cones out of snowflakes.  I traveled thru the backroads looking for something that would ‘tug at my heart strings’, it was then that I passed this small pond.  I thought I caught a glimpse of something moving in the water so I looped back.

That little maneuver took longer than planned because of snow and sand plows but I found a place to park and began to scope it out. I was lucky that I had my big glass with me (200-400 w/tc2) and my RRS gimbal head, so I was set up for some birding ! The fun part about this was that the pond was 3/4 frozen and these winter critters were not about to scamper away to the far side of the pond.  I moved very slowly so as not to agitate them to much and after a while they settled into their preening routines. When they go into their preening you know that you’ve been accepted as a peaceful intruder into the environment.

The next part is really the toughest. Patience. Waiting for the moment that your critters to do something unique and being prepared to take your shot in low temps can test your resolve. Yet, I remained focused on knowing that you need to find a single subject and then spend your effort bring out the best.  There were four pair of geese on the pond, and I thought the pair here would show the best in an Image. So I waited for them and they didn’t disappoint.

Hawks fascinate me. I seem to see them everywhere and all the time. I remember telling someone that I see them so often that I must have been reincarnated from a hawk.  The reply was that maybe I used to be a mouse !  This is just a simple shot near my house. I used the 24-120mm. The mood is simple, low setting sunlight. Sometime you want a longer lens and a better environmental Image. However, sometimes you don’t get what you want in an Image, so it’s your choice, pass it up or take a simple snap.