At the entrance to the Walden Pond preserve is a replica of the original cabin Thoreau built for himself and lived in for over two years.

Photographed with a Leica M9 and 21mm Elmarit lens at f/16 and 1/3 second.

Sunrise from a window of the Inn where I am staying in Concord, MA.

A pistachio breakfast muffin from the Maine Streets Cafe in Concord.  Hmmm...I wonder if this is the real reason why the British redcoats marched here in 1775.

Walden Pond - Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."  Henry David Thoreau from Walden, 1854

I am at Walden Pond photographing it for much the same reason that brought Thoreau here to live for two plus years.  I am exploring the possibility of doing a photo book on the area over the course of a year.  

The pond is a simple place in nature.  It has none of the grandeur of the American West. It is an easy subject if all you want is a simple picture to show that you were here.  It is a difficult subject if you want to bring out the subtleties of nature that attracted Thoreau and brought him here to live and explore.

I woke up to a cold, sub-freezing temperature.  The pond had partially frozen over night leaving a thin crust of ice along the shore.  The photo below was taken at sunset after the daily sun had time to melt some of the thin ice that had cracked into geometric patterns.

Taken with a Nikon D800 and 24-70mm lens set to 28mm with an aperture of f/22 to achieve maximum depth of field.

City Steam

On a cold day in New York I was walking along Fifth Avenue and saw the steam rising from an open manhole where work was in progress.  As the steam rose in the air it blocked out most of the city and left only the distant tip of the Empire State Building visible against a cloudy sky.  I had the Sony DSC-RX100 camera with me and took a series of compositions.

I usually keep the RX100 set to a square crop in black and white mode.  It is also set to capture in both RAW and jpg.  The jpg version captures the scene as a black & white square, but the 16-bit RAW color version captures the entire visual information of the scene in case I want to change anything later.  Using a black & white viewing mode allows me to more clearly visualize the graphic composition of a scene.

I processed the image to the warm-toned look of a platinum print.

Nothing says New York like a yellow taxi cab

I took these photos while gathering some material for a redo of my web site, which will specialize in images of New York City.

All photos were taken with a Nikon D600 and the new 70-200mm f/4 lens.  The pan blur images were taken at a shutter speed of around 1/20 second.

The morning after the night before

While running an errand this morning I came upon some of the residue from the previous night's New Years Eve celebrations littering the city streets.  I grabbed these shots with the Sony DSC-RX100, which I always have with me, and applied some "Instagram-ish" technique later in Photoshop because it seemed appropriate to the subject.

Some things are just a little too random to explain, as was this pair of shoes and socks I found on Park Avenue.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

In a specialty food store I saw these quail eggs and thought they would make a nice photo subject.

This photo is a composite of nine images done similarly to the photo of port wine I did for the December 26 blog post.  Each image was focused at a different point and all were  assembled later to achieve a sharp area from the foreground to the last egg.

What to do with quail egg props after you are finished photographing them?  Fry them, and put them over some left over ham, ciabatta toast with olive oil and ground pepper.  Very tasty props.