Ketchum Run

  In the eastern United States, where there are mountains, there will be streams.   

    It’s inevitable. Elevated terrain enhances precipitation, which is absorbed by the soils, gathers together, and then works to find the easiest route off the mountain. In the moist, temperate climate of Pennsylvania Appalachians, this means that thousands of cold, swift brooks cleave the earth in their gathering rush to the valleys below. Many start as tiny flows, emerging from the rocks at a point somewhat below the crest of the ridge. Depending on the vertical rise of the land and the watershed they capture, they gather speed and volume as they cascade off the mountainside.   

    Mountain streams serve as the punctuation for the many long wilderness trails scattered throughout the commonwealth’s wild areas.  In planning a trek through the wilderness, attention must be given to the availability of water at points along the planned route. Knowing the location of streams is essential to avoid carrying large amounts of the heavy liquid.   

Small Stream on The Old Logger's Path

    Many of the small mountainside brooks are seasonal, with no surface water present during drier years. Coming upon a parched stream bed when you were counting on replenishing your water stores is a distinctly unpleasant experience.   

     Where the mountains are steeper, the topography becomes more interesting. In the deepest draws of the northern mountains, the sun rarely penetrates to the forest floor. Legions of ancient hemlocks line the steep side walls of these eastern canyons, cut by eons of the action of water against rock. Glens form, where the land forms force the water to fall abruptly in altitude, increasing its hydraulic power. Ricketts Glen is just one example of this; there are many other spectacular falls and glens which are often quite remote and visited only by intrepid souls.   

Falls at Mc Connell's Mill

    Hiking in the Tidaughten State Forest, deep in a within a mountain glen, I once found a mature American chestnut tree, blooming on a  spring morning. So remote was its location,  it was untouched by the blight, which kills its more accessible relatives while they are mere spindly adolescents.   

   Because of the severity of the terrain in ravines and draws, loggers in the past may not have had sufficient access for harvesting. These draw and ravines, deep in our state forests are wonderful places to experience true “Old Growth” forest. Here you can find four-to-five-hundred year old relics from our pre-colonial past, in this case White Pines and Hemlocks that tower two hundred feet and more over the forest floor.   

Giants on Boston Run

   The climate in these sheltered places is much more constant and gradual than on the nearby ridge tops. Shielded from the sun, snow lingers much deeper into spring.  It is cool here, even on hot summer days, especially where the streams run strongly into the warmer months.   

   On one of the more established hiking trails, such as the Loyalsock or the West Rim Trail, more often than not, a  stream crossing will have acquired a fire ring and informal tenting sites. These are generally fine places to overnight. On a clear winter nights, they can be warmer, the dense cover of conifers preventing radiational cooling.   

    Summer rain is shed initially by the hemlock canopy, making such places are a clever hiker’s refuge in wet weather. The rain comes down eventually however as the accumulated water drips slowly, over days, from the fine interlaced needles.   

  On a hot summer day, glens and ravines are cooled by the shade and the cold creek water. After the sun sets, cool air descends through the ravines from the mountaintops, clearing the air of biting insects, and providing a lovely sleeping experience.   

Morning Campsite

   Sadly, there is a real threat to these wonderful ecotones. An insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid is spreading throughout the state, threatening to wipe out the hemlocks that shelter these lovely places. There are efforts to control the parasites, but they have only partially successful. If they do not succeed, there will be a fundamental alteration of woodland and stream ecology in the eastern forest.   

 Visit these lovely places while you still can.

Little House

 When I am out on the road to do photography, I generally travel alone, my camera gear on the passenger seat beside me. I will often drive somewhat aimlessly, looking for roads and lanes I have never before traveled.

  Because of this, I tend to keep a GPS available in case I get lost. The coordinates for home base, wherever I am, are programmed in so that I can plot a reasonable course at the end of the drive.

    I love to come upon a scene that compels me to at least stop, and consider whether it should be added to the files on my memory card. Obviously, in the digital world, there is little to be lost by shooting a few frames. But one hopes to have developed enough judgment to decide just what will work, and what won’t, and avoid photographing the latter.

   I spend a lot of time on backroads. On a Sunday morning in early April in Pennsylvania, I took a drive in the hope of capturing some early spring images.

   I encountered this little house, on a winding lane east of Berwick, on a country lane that first climbed out of the river valley through a lovely, remote, hemlock ravine, and then opened up on a plateau over the Susquehanna River. I pulled over, and turned off the ignition, to avoid letting the engine’s vibrations blur the shot.

   I rolled down the driver’s side window, braced the camera on the door top, and shot several frames.

    I have no wish to intrude on people’s privacy, but I was drawn to this house, and especially its outgoing motif. I wish I had encountered the owner, but from their display, I feel I understand the personality of the occupants.

   Obviously they are religious. From their devotion to the Blessed Mother, they are likely Roman Catholic. Probably they’re a little serious and devout. Maybe they were at Mass when I shot this image.

   On the other hand, it had been cold, with snow on the ground until several weeks before this was shot. The fresh tablecloth, the flowers in the vase, and the grill at the ready suggest a desire to embrace the joy of early spring sun.

    We have a tendency to admire stylish, stately, homes, professionally decorated to a fair-thee-well, and thus devoid of character.

   I like this little cottage, and I think I would like the owner.

The quality of images on this blog has been one of the few frustrations of working on WordPress .com.   

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   I intended that imaging would comprise a lot of the site’s content. Unfortunately, the aggressive file compression used by WordPress  has resulted in blurred details on photos uploaded to the site.    

   However, their wonderful “Help” resources have given me a partial solution, namely linking to the photos URL on my repository gallery. Posted this way, images look better, though still not as good as on my Photo site. Glensummitimages.com.    

  Still, it’s a start.   

Staff Only

I have begun to update some of the posted images, but going forward the new method will be used exclusively.

April on the Hill Trail

    I think of myself as a Nikon/Fuji “shooter” yet I have always kept other equipment in my camera closet for use in situations where an expensive DSLR-lens combination would be at risk of loss due to dunking or dropping, or would be too heavy and or bulky to be practical.  

     For years I shot Olympus bodies in this role. These bodies were part of what was then a new system based on the Olympus/Panasonic “four thirds” standard: a sensor and lens mount designed to allow digital bodies to be smaller, yet to make better images. My Olympus bodies had nice image quality, were image stabilized, and there was stunning high quality optics available for the system. Even their “kit” lenses were sharp and very usable, but cheaply replaceable if damaged. The the body and lens were still fairly bulky, more so than was often convenient.  

     In January ’08 I acquired my first Panasonic G-1 a digital body of the new “micro four thirds” standard, an offshoot of the earlier specification. The same lens mount as was on the full “four thirds” cameras was utilized, but the lenses were much smaller and designed to focus on a sensor that was much closer to their posterior element. The sensor had a robust “live view” capability and the mirror and optical viewfinder was replaced with a very high quality LCD “finder” detailed enough to allow even manual focusing.  

     Because of this the overall package, with the kit lens was 20-30% less bulky than even the Olympus SLRs. The sensor at 12 million pixels produced highly detailed images. Though the sensor’s dynamic range was limited (see my Fuji article below) the electronic viewfinder allows exposure data to display as you compose the image (as opposed to after) that helps to optimize the exposure, and mitigate somewhat this limitation. The other attraction of this system is that it is very adaptable to lenses from other manufacturer. My Olympus lenses work beautifully with an adapter; so does some wonderful old Leica glass.  

    These cameras are seductive. I can carry the body with two stabilized lenses covering 35mm equivalent focal lengths of 28-400mm in a modest sized fanny pack. Without the camera motion that is induced by SLR “mirror slap”, tripods can be lighter. The system has limitations, but it can be a hiker’s dream.  

    Now I have acquired an upgraded version of the G1. The GH1 has a better sensor with more dynamic range and better high ISO capability. It sensor allows you to shoot in multiple formats without having to crop out pixels.  

Spring Forest Meadow

It has one other new feature.  

The GH1 like several other new SLRs or SLR-like bodies comes with video, in this case, fairly seriously high-definition, 1080p video. There is an on camera microphone, capable of recording rather accurate digital stereo sound (sorry about the heavy breathing).  

     This extends the imaging capabilities of this device into dimensions I hadn’t previously explored. Sound and motion add a dimension to imaging that  as a still photographer I am just starting to grapple with.  

I think it’s going to be fun.

As always, the images can be better viewed on Glensummitimage.com

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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.

The Henry Barn

   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.

On the Barn Wall

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.

Barn on Bear Cub Road

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.

Gettysburg Barn

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.

Fishing the Lehigh

In honor of the first day of the Trout Season for 2010, I offer this essay:

For the Pennsylvania angler, there are many forms of fishing to be experienced. From trolling the depths of Lake Erie for salmon, “still fishing” at night for catfish, jigging through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake, or riding a high-powered bass boat across a lake to a favorite weed bed, the choices are numerous. Without disparaging these pursuits however, fishing in Pennsylvania for me has always been about streams… and trout.

     The trout is a wonderful food-seeking engine. Whether brook, brown or rainbow, it is a sleek, torpedo, painted with precise and tasteful patterns of red, silver, brown and blue, aesthetic in a way unmatched by the pallid green of most other game fish.  For the most part, they exist in rivers and streams, searching for a variety of food sources including crayfish, minnows and most importantly, aquatic insects.

   Trout behavior is if nothing else, logical. They favor positions in the flow where they are protected from the current (and thus expend less energy), but have ready access to the main channel where the food is plentiful. Larger fish generally get the most favorable locations. Fishermen know this, they cast their lures into the relatively quiet water behind large rocks, or near to eddies and undercut banks.

    Pennsylvania is well known as a desirable trout fishing destination. It is our topography that determines this. With large regions of ridges and valleys; with mountains that are high enough, but not too high, our state is interlaced with excellent trout water. From the remote hemlock-shaded streams of the Allegheny National Forest, to the more open limestone creeks of the central state, to the upper Delaware River, the angling opportunities seem almost endless.

     Though there are many ways to fish for trout, fly-fishing is by far the most challenging. For most anglers, the goal of an outing is to catch multiple, preferably large, fish however you can.  Fly fishermen see it somewhat differently. Limiting themselves to the use of odd-looking wisps of feathers, hair, and thread as bait; they seek to present the quarry with unlikely replicas of the aquatic insects that on that month, day and hour, and in that particular creek, are the trout’s likely food source.

    To accomplish this with any consistency, one must not only understand trout and their behavior, but also the etymology of aquatic insects. Much of the fishing is “catch and release”, facilitated by the use of “barbless” hooks.  Thus in effect, the trout ceases to be a trophy, but becomes instead a judge, testing the accuracy of the fly tiers art, the gentleness of the cast, and the angler’s knowledge of stream biology.

     This is not to say that trophy fish are not pursued. Even in this gentle art, landing a huge, slack-jawed creature is an exiting and memorable event. The fish is handled gently, measured, and perhaps photographed, then as quickly as possible returned to the streams embrace.  A taxidermist may later immortalize it; working from the snapshots and dimensions to create a replica of that noble creature.

    As we later admire it, mounted perhaps on a den wall, it is fun to think that the magnificent spirit depicted there probably still exists. One can imagine it, grown slightly larger now, slipping quietly through the waters of that very same stream, waiting patiently for the next juicy morsel to float by.

On the Dike

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.