We had a forest fire here in Mountaintop, Pennsylvania earlier in the spring. It burned off several hundred acres, threatened several homes, and scared the crap out of other people who imagined that it would consume their properties. This is pretty much normal for April in our corner of the commonwealth.

I watched from the home of a friend, who has a deck with a spectacular view of the conflagration.  The action was perhaps a mile away, on the next ridge over.  Even from that distance, we could see the flames leaping far into the night sky, as though they would consume completely, everything in their path. As is usually the case, this does not happen. Millions of years of evolution have equipped trees and shrubs with the tools to survive wildfires; they tend to regrow rather stubbornly.

I drove through the affected area today.

Already, several weeks later, there are signs of healing with the green grasses and bracken ferns punctuating the charcoal forest floor. Some of the smaller trees as well as the less fire resistant species will die, but most seem to have survived. Much of the fire occurred on scrub barrens land, for which burning is the agent of perpetuation.

 Today, the chestnut oaks on the burn site are in bloom as though nothing significant had happened.

In a year, only the blackened tree trunks will suggest that there had been any forest disturbance here.

Nature, in this case fire, creates renewal. The results can be jarring when a favorite landscape is involved, but most often, the changes wrought by fire are natural and even helpful to the ecosystems involved.

 What is most disturbing is that a fire strips away the shroud that hides our human misdeeds. With the ferns and underbrush gone, it is the nonflammable human refuse that remains, revealing the obscene way, that at least here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, we tend to abuse our surroundings.

I have never understood what possesses a person to toss their garbage into the countryside.

If you don’t want to pay for garbage pick-up, find a dumpster somewhere, take it to work, to your parents, whatever.

 Please don’t do this.

 

 

I reside, as I have mentioned before, in a fairly rural part of eastern Pennsylvania.

As a landscape photographer, I am naturally drawn to certain scenes more than others.  I think like many people, when I drive around on country roads, in my case looking for fresh subjects for my work, my eyes are naturally drawn to farm infrastructure, and most especially, to barns.

  People seem to like barns. Images that contain them tend to be well received in gallery exhibitions, and importantly, they tend to sell.

They seem to evoke pleasant thoughts in viewers. Perhaps it involves a harkening to some imagined ancestral past, a back-to-the-earth sort yearning for the mythical farming life, free of the stresses of the modern workplace. This is absolutely mythical, because farming of any kind is far from stress-free.

   Perhaps it is something about their permanence. Most barns you see tend to be rather old. It‘s easy to imagine them being used by multiple generations of the same family. This is pleasant concept in our increasingly transient lifestyle.

  Often they show off their age. Commonly a barn will, over the years, drift far out of plumb. I will often encounter structures that lean precipitously, yet are still in use.

When they do begin to fail structurally, as often as not, they are allowed to die without intervention. I watched for years, a barn near my home with a pronounced saddle on the main roof line. Over time, and seemingly unnoticed by the farmers, it proceeded to fall in on itself. It was finally finished off by a wet November snowstorm, the wood structure collapsing completely into the stone foundation where it remains to this day.

   It seems to me that barns are all about function rather than esthetics. Gambrel roofs aren’t there to be pretty; they allow a farmer to store more hay in the loft than in a barn with a simple pitch. Cupolas aren’t for decoration, they’re for ventilation.

 Need a new wing to the structure? Build what you can, paint it with whatever pigment you have stored in the loft somewhere. What’s most important is that the new building will serve as a shelter for whatever new equipment or livestock you need to be housed.

I think it is this pragmatic approach to construction that makes barns visually interesting to non-farming folk.

Now all of this having been said, I sometimes feel that photographing barns is somehow cheating. It’s fairly easy to create a pleasant image with a barn as an anchor. Not uncommonly, as I round a bend on a country road and find yet another bucolic barn-containing rural scene, I pause and think. Do I really need this image? Will it add anything to the vast archive of similar bucolic barn-containing rural scenes already residing on my external hard drives? Shouldn’t I be looking for more novel and challenging subjects?

  Oh, but what the hell, it’s just another file for the hard drive.

 

 

Daffodil and Motorcycle

  As I have mentioned before in this space, the camera bodies that I utilize include the Nikon F-Mount system cameras. I have always preferred the ergonomics of the Nikon based cameras to their Canon counterparts. For me, these digital bodies, in particular, the professional level models have the best user interfaces on the market.

    This is all personal preference: Canon, Pentax, Sony, and Olympus all make systems with compelling features and good quality imaging chips, and I have used many of them in the past.

  Among the cameras made with the Nikon F-Mount, were cameras made by Fujifilm. I have always thought that there is something special about imagers designed by film manufacturers (Kodak makes imagers also, now used in high-end digital backs). The Fuji that I use is an S5,  a modified Nikon D200, with Fuji firmware and a unique sensor that gives it a wide dynamic range.

   Originally designed for the wedding industry to capture the bright whites, and dark tones in the attire of a typical bride and groom, it work very well for landscape situations where the light range is broad, or the color is particularly intense. The sensor has two sizes of photodiodes for a total of 12 million pixels arranged as a honeycomb.

   There are 6 million larger pixels that are responsible for most of the imaging duties. The addition 6 million small pixels are utilized to allow the camera to record very bright whites. They are set at a lower gain than the large pixels and thus don’t burn out with very bright scenes. The sensor layout increases the apparent resolution of the camera from the expected 6 Mp to more like 8-10 MP still lower than the resolution of many current DSLRs. Even so, I have printed images from my S5 as large as 20”x 30” which were happily accepted by professional art buyers without complaint.

  The camera has a small but dedicated following, who believe as do, I that the images produced by the Fuji have a unique tonality, and film-like quality, unlike other competitive products, in large part because of the unique sensor design.

   Fujifilm has not announced a successor to this camera. The dream of Fuji aficionados would be a true 12 MP (12 million small pixels, 12 million large pixels) full frame body built on the D-700 chassis. In the mean time, I’ll keep using the S5.

 

 I went with my daughter recently to visit Penn State, Main Campus where I am proud to say, she is accepted to the Schreyer’s Honors College.

 The people there put on a great show, we were treated exceedingly well. While Brigid was talking to some fellow prospects and current students, I wandered around, camera in hand.

It was the first in a promised run of summer-like weather in Pennsylvania. The campus lawns were as expected dotted with sheets, groups of students sitting in circles, girls in groups sunbathing, couples canoodling. My middle-aged parental mind-set was jolted back suddenly 32 (could it be?) years.

It was April of 1978. I was biology major in my junior year of college. Scranton had come through a particularly cold, snowy winter, which as a “townie” left me cold and miserable, slogging through the slush all winter after finding one of the few parking spots left, anywhere near the school, not blocked by moraines of plowed snow.

Also making me miserable were the twin scourges of the Biology curriculum,  Physics, and Physical Chemistry, two subject alien to my junk collecting, math averse, bio major brain. Unfortunately, these were important courses on a transcript that was soon to be in the hands of medical school admission committees. I had to study… and hard.

  So when as it often does in Pennsylvania, spring came with a rush and the first sunny 70 degree days began to string together,  I watched with envy from the library as my schoolmates lay blankets on the greening lawns of the Jesuit residence, and did what college kids have done on such days for the past 40 years.

 Balls and gloves and Frisbees were everywhere, the men clad only in shorts displaying their physical talents to  the assembled females on display after being shrouded all winter; their figures flattered by their swimwear, or tight tee shirts,  but still pallid from the cold grey winter.

I tried to cope by studying in a lawn chair in a secluded part of the property, with pleasant visits from my lovely, and more math adept girlfriend Cathy (who I married 3 years later). It was all too distracting. I retreated to the library, this time to the windowless basement, consoling myself with one thought:

 In less than a week, the exams will be over…and the women will be tanned.

Long ago, as a young man, I acquired my first SLR. It was a Fuji body with a 50mm f1.9 lens. Before this acquisition, I had only used “point and shoot cameras. The “fifty” was the standard lens for SLR bodies in those days, useful because 50mm for 35mm film, is a so-called “normal” lens; the field of view close to that of normal human visual perception. At the time, most zoom lenses were far inferior to their so-called single focal length “prime” lens. They also tended to be slow, with narrow apertures that limit subject isolation, and light gathering.

This lens/body combination had an extraordinary ability to recreate what I was actually seeing with my eyes to the film stock.

I remember the joy of discovery when my slides were developed. After many years of shooting compact cameras like the Olympus XA 2, I was able to capture the scene as I remembered it. The lens was razor sharp, and the format was liberating.  I was finally able to control the depth of field in an image. I was 18 years old, and I was hooked.

Later in life I became intrigued with digital imaging. The thought that I would be able to control the whole image path, from acquisition to print was irresistible.

 Affordable early digital cameras were modest devices. I was forced initially to abandon larger “sensor” photography for point and shoot digital cameras that were available before the millennial change (the few digital SLRs available were very expensive).  These cameras were rangefinder devices; it was hard to get a feel for how the final image would appear.

Many of us acquired digital SLRs in the early 2000s. These bodies, whether Canon or Nikon, had smaller than 35mm sensors, forcing a crop factor of 1.5 on the traditional system lenses. As a Nikon user, I began to collect F mount lenses including the Nikkor 50mm f1.8. On a DX format body, like my Fuji S5 or my Nikon D2x, this glass is a 75mm equivalent portrait lens, and I have used it to good effect in this role. I had a Nikkor 35mm f 2.0 that, with the crop factor, was close to a 50mm equivalent but I never felt as though I experienced the sense of immediacy that I experienced with my film SLR and a “normal” lens.

Last year, I purchased a Nikon D 700 which has a full size 35mm sensor (Nikon calls it the FX format) of extraordinary quality. Many of the zoom lenses I had collected were dedicated to the smaller DX format and were not useful. Happily I had begun to purchase a variety of prime lenses, suitable for the full 35mm sensors. I had also kept a lookout for pro level full frame zooms on EBay and have purchased several. These are also fine performers; technology has allowed zoom lenses to approach, and sometimes surpass the optics of earlier primes. Anyway, it is wonderful to use a lens at it traditional (for 35 mm) focal length again.

I keep coming back to that 50mm.  It’s small, discrete and pin sharp. The wide aperture allows me to shoot in low light, and creates a pleasant blur effect when desired, for shooting people. In short- it sees what I see.