I’ve been feeling more than usually stuck around here lately, and maybe just a little bit tired after a solid year of being isolated in…well, nature! I haven’t seen my youngest son in 15 months and have been missing my visits with him in NYC, where he’s lived for several years now. Today I started poking around in my Lightroom catalog and decided to edit a few pictures from the trips I made in 2019. When we finally emerge from the woods of COVID, I wonder if I’ll remember how to take pictures in city light again. It’ll be fun to find out.
Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour. –Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
I’ve always been an avid reader of fiction and drama but have struggled a bit with poetry. Seems counterintuitive for a photographer, right? There’s an obvious affinity between photographs and poems. And in a way I do “get” poems–but I really have to work hard to go beyond a quick, intuitive grasp of their meaning, every single time. I need a teacher who can be my guide. In high school and in college, I had classes that unlocked poetry for me in the moment (the way I had one semester of drawing during which I actually could draw!) and that have stayed with me over the years. This winter and spring, I’ve been carrying one of those classes with me on my photo walks. Modern American Poetry, which I took one spring at Middlebury, was one of those illuminating courses that stretched my brain until it hurt and opened me up to new ways of thinking. It was also the only class I ever took that required me to memorize lines of poetry: on our final exam, we had to be able to quote from the poems we’d studied and to show that we had learned the words by heart. After complaining at an epic level, I memorized poems, some of which have never left me.
Earth’s the right place for love; I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. —Robert Frost, Birches
It was the middle of May; Vermont was hot by then, and my friends and I were studying, sprawled in a top-floor lounge where we waited to pick our dorm rooms for the next year. Room draw, with its lottery numbers and air of destiny, was cheerful but nerve-wracking, heightening my sense of urgency as I memorized “Fire and Ice” and “The Anecdote of the Jar.” There’s no drama like college drama. I came away from room draw with a single in my first-choice dorm, and I did just fine on that poetry exam.
All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. –Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Could I “explain” those poems to you now? No–and I wouldn’t want to try. Poems and photographs don’t hold up well under clumsy dissection. It takes a really gifted teacher to show you how to crack open a poem and see its essence, even for a moment–the way a skilled director and ensemble of actors can illuminate a play and bring its intricacies to the surface in the living moment, in real time. But if you’re lucky, and if you had to memorize, the lines you remember will float to the surface when you need them.
The garden flew round with the angel, The angel flew round with the clouds, And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round And the clouds flew round with the clouds. –Wallace Stevens, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
Along with a few poems, a phrase from my lit-major days has always stuck with me–I’ve always loved the concept of the “pathetic fallacy.” Especially when life’s unpredictable and the world feels full of drama, we’re tempted to attribute human feelings and intentions to the natural world around us. As a photographer, I know at least some of my own patterns: my images are full of intertwining vines, trees that support each other’s branches, new growth surging out of the dried-up leftovers of winter. This year’s beautiful spring is not the first spring I’ve photographed on Red Hill. February and April both began with double rainbows appearing at the foot of my property; it doesn’t mean my fortunes are changing. But these things are beautiful in and of themselves. That is their meaning.
For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept. –Robert Frost, The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
Being home most of the time has given me a slower, richer, deeper view of my surroundings. From my kitchen window, I’ve seen a pair of little gray birds perching on a paradise tree at the edge of the driveway. I’ve always hated that tree–it’s invasive and spindly and should have been cut down ages ago–but now I see its value as a safety zone for these songbirds. Today I got a good enough picture through the window to identify the species: Eastern Phoebe. And immediately I remembered a Robert Frost poem that talks about phoebes swooping in and out of a burned-down house. One of my phoebes is in the center picture above, and the memory sparked this post. We gaze at the flowering trees, the migrating songbirds, the illuminated clouds in the sky, the double rainbows, and it’s our nature to make them into metaphors. These days, though, maybe one last word from Frost is more helpful than the innocent phoebe or the dogwood blossoms. In a 1954 interview, after being asked the most important thing he’d learned about life, Frost said this:
“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.
In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles . . . with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged . . . tempted to say this is the end, the finish.
But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.“
Since September, I’ve been taking photo walks on a trail that runs alongside a river. I walk about five times a week, on the same path and for about the same distance (2.5 miles in total). Not surprisingly, I find myself returning to the same photographic ideas, sometimes with different combinations of camera and lens, always because the light reveals more detail as the sun’s angle drops, or because the colors soften as the leaves wither and fall off the trees. The woods and river are constantly changing, and my images examine those gradual daily changes.
I should be walking faster with an eye toward exercise, but instead my eye slows me down every time I have the impulse to make a picture. Often the process amounts to target practice, and the pictures are just additions to the burgeoning compost pile of my Lightroom catalog, but sometimes the impulse pays off. I don’t consider myself to be a landscape photographer or a nature photographer, but nevertheless I find myself out there almost every day, taking pictures of this particular landscape and the specific plants and creatures that live there. I’m learning from it, and I’m noticing more. Water is especially challenging to photograph: do you focus on the reflection, on the surface, or on what’s submerged beneath it? The rocks and trees have beautiful forms and textures, but most of my images only consider one or the other, not both at the same time. Maybe, over time, a direction will emerge. In the meantime, I walk with my camera.
The cameras I use are small, mirrorless Fujifilms. It’s ridiculous, but I have three now. The first one I got was an X-E2, a small rangefinder that I keep equipped with an old Leica 35mm lens. It’s easy to carry, and I love the optics (if not always the manual focus) of the lens. When I realized how much I loved working with this format, I got an X-Pro2. It reminds me of my old Leica rangefinder, and it’s usually paired with a 23mm f/2 Fuji lens. It’s fast and fun to shoot with, but despite the ergonomics and fantastic autofocus, it’s turning out not to be my favorite for the trail. To my surprise, that honor ends up going to my newest Fuji, an X-T3 (new this past summer) that works spectacularly with my two zoom lenses. I know the “correct” philosophy is to prefer prime lenses, but I love carrying a zoom on my walks, as it gives me more flexibility and lets me avoid changing lenses outdoors (mirrorless sensors are exposed to the elements when you remove the lens). I keep a set of nice-quality closeup filters in my bag when I use the shorter (18-55) zoom, but I really love the foreshortening and subject isolation provided by the longer (55-200) zoom, as well as having that extra reach when the park’s resident heron shows up in the river on a sunny day. I’d like to say I have a strict routine or a disciplined method of choosing which camera/lens combination to bring, but really it depends on the time of day, the weather, and what I feel like playing with that day. I shoot JPEG files and have settled on using primarily the “classic chrome” film simulation with all three bodies, giving the pictures a more consistent look and saving me hours of tedious editing. Like many Fujifilm converts, I’ve found that this approach really feels more like shooting film and has put the fun back into making color pictures.
The last few weeks have been difficult, and I’ve been preoccupied with thoughts of loss and change. It’s been strengthening to get out into the sun and cold air. Today, on the solstice, it seemed especially important to share some pictures in recognition of the arrival of true winter and the start of a gradual return to longer days. The light was soft and beautiful as I began my walk, and I spotted (though didn’t photograph) a red fox climbing the bank across the river from me. I felt so lucky to be here with my eyes wide open at the turning of the year.
Rivanna River, Charlottesville, Virginia (November/December 2019)
For the last three summers, I’ve been lucky enough to stay with friends and family in New York and New England for a few days in July. It’s my annual odyssey north. I drive alone, stopping in New York, Connecticut, and southern Maine along the way. and ending up in Acadia. I take my time and stop to explore, take pictures, and generally indulge my inclination to wander. Although I grew up in West Virginia, my mom’s family lived in northwestern Connecticut and we would visit them in the summer, sometimes staying for a month or more. And after spending my college years in Vermont, it was natural to want to return to those New England roots for vacations. For many years, my family and I camped in Vermont, stayed in tents and cabins in Bar Harbor, Rangeley and Great East Lake in Maine, and drove through the lakes and mountains of New England just to see what we could see. Our vacations were always in the middle of August when the lake water was warm and the traffic was a bit lighter than July, and to me those road trips will always symbolize summer.
Among the highlights of my trip these days is spending a little time with a friend whose family owns an old house in Maine–on Mt. Desert Island, in Northeast Harbor. Light pours into the house, reflected from the nearby water, and the rooms are filled with a sense of family history. It’s like walking into a complicated historical novel or onto the set of a film. Here are a few images from my visit this past July. It’s a privilege to spend time in this well-loved and beautiful space.
A tenth season, to be specific–this was the tenth summer that I’ve done production photography for Charlottesville Opera (formerly Ash Lawn Opera Festival). Under the leadership of a new general director who arrived in early spring, the opera put together a somewhat different array of productions, including a “favorites” staged concert and a Young Artists production of the Peter Brooks “Tragedy of Carmen,” held in a smaller venue (Grisham Auditorium at St. Anne’s-Belfield, the school where I just finished a 24-year teaching career). In both shows, conductor Steven Jarvi and the orchestra were on the stage rather than in the pit, which created both challenges and some cool opportunities for photographs.
Here are a few pictures from the “Encore!” concert and “Tragedy of Carmen”–these wonderful performances sounded as beautiful as they looked!
After a hiatus of over five years, I am reviving this blog as a platform for sharing my images and my growth as a photographer. What’s new: I have just begun my first day of NO school. After 32 years of teaching at the high-school level, I retired from my full-time teaching job and am rediscovering my momentum and purpose as a photographer. Also new: after nine years of working almost exclusively with a full-frame DSLR, I have switched over to primarily working with APS-C mirrorless cameras–specifically the Fujifilm X-series, which I love. As part of my focus on working from home, I’ve been making a lot of pictures of the evening and night sky from the deck outside my kitchen. Here are some initial edits from this series–I hope to expand and refine this project as the year goes on. One of my biggest concerns about retiring from teaching is the potential loss of a sense of purpose and direction, so this phase of “The View from Red Hill” will be geared toward providing a structure for my first year “out.” For now: here are some clouds and stars.
The view from Red Hill 
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