New beginnings

This will eventually become No.73 in the Beachcombing series: Hulls Cove, March 6, 2014.

This is how the Beachcombing pieces start - sorting the debris from a day of beachcombing, looking for patterns, colors, likenesses. This one seems to be leaning toward warm greys and off-whites. 

And for another new beginning, I'm going to be moving this blog from the Blogger host over to Wordpress this month, and I'm not sure how that will affect the feed. Cross your fingers that it goes smoothly. I'm digitally literate but not fluent!

Notecards

I've made a whole bunch of new notecard designs in my Zazzle shop:

Single Sand Dollar by quercus_design

Aquamarine Sea Glass by quercus_design

 

Sea Glass Spectrum: Aquamarine to Emerald notecard by quercus_design

Single Sea Urchin by quercus_design

And a few phone cases, too:

Sea Urchin Case for iPhone 5S by quercus_design

Shark Tooth Heart case for iPhone 5C by quercus_design

New Christmas cards on Zazzle

It seems a bit early to be looking at holiday stuff, but I know a few people who are already starting to work on their Christmas lists. (Not me, I'm afraid. I'm a very last-minute card writer!) Anyway, for those of you are more organized,  I've added a couple of Christmas-themed cards to my Zazzle store -

Sea Urchin Christmas Tree by quercus_design

Vintage Santas notecard by quercus_design

Zazzle is having a sale right now - 50% off all cards - so thinking ahead could pay off.

Moose Island, October 12, 2013

I joined the MDI Photo Club a couple of months ago, and it has been such a treat to hang out with other camera-obsessed people. I've learned a lot from my fellow members! For example, last weekend we went on a field trip to Moose Island, a privately-owned island just off Seal Cove. (We had permission from the owners, don't worry!) It was overcast and a little cool, with the kind of grey skies that look empty and white in photos. Weather like that is dreadful for landscape photos, because everything looked washed out, flat, and uniformly grey. Grey sky, grey water, grey stones, even weathered grey shingles.

So I focused on beachcombing and exploring and threw away most of my photos in despair when I got home. A few days later we had our club meeting and I got to see everyone else's work. Well! Number one lesson I got was that washed-out grey days make for fabulous black and white photography. Number two lesson was that if I want to work in black-and-white I really need to get Nik's Silver Effects software for black-and-white conversion, as all the photos I liked had been adjusted with it. (Mine above were done in Adobe Elements.) But am I interested in black-and-white? Enough to learn yet another program? Is that how I see the world? Not so sure about that, but it is always good to know how to improve if I decide to pursue it.

I spent a lot of time watching the periwinkles crawl around between barnacles.

There was a surprising amount of beach glass, and some pretty feathers, which may be just the push I need to get my studio put back together so I can do a fresh Beachcombing series photo. I haven't been able to use my light box since June!

Waiting for the Perseids

The Milky Way seen from the Bar Harbor Yacht Club pier, looking back toward the mainland. 20 seconds, f3.5, ISO 800, 28mm. (Really wish I'd remembered a wider lens.)

 

I've decided we need a new verb, and I propose adapting 'to mother' to describe the times when one decides in one's capacity as Mother that the family will do something whether they like it or not. It is not precisely a synonym for 'to bully' and usually involves motherly statements like "You'll be glad you did" or "You'll remember this when you're old and have forgotten all about the video game you'd rather be playing." Also, "You can sleep anytime, the stars are falling right now."

So I mothered the whole family, including my very patient in-laws, into trekking out to a nice dark place around 10:30 last night to see if the Perseid meteor shower had started. We did see several dramatic shooting stars, and my son clambered into a rowboat to show us the bio-luminescent ripples around its oars. It was dark and peaceful out on the floats, and we could see the lights of Bar Harbor not too far off.

The show should peak tonight, so if you are in the Northern Hemisphere try to get out somewhere really dark. I plan to go back out around midnight by myself. I drag the others out on principle - it's my job as Mom to make damn sure they see miracles and build a little character - but trying to be Mom and Photographer at the same time rarely works. By the time I set up the camera and tripod basically blind (and then fetch my red-light headlamp from whomever has borrowed it so I can read my camera settings) and take a few 20-second exposures, everyone else is cold and ready to go home. Last night I had less moral authority than usual since I'd already made everyone sit through a two-and-a-half-hour performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so we called it quits after 30 minutes. I'm a loving tyrant.

Do you go star-gazing? What's your favorite place?


P.S. I'm still learning how to take this sort of photograph - I've got a Pinterest board full of night photography tutorials if you're interested.

P.P.S. And if you want regular updates on meteor showers, solar flares and other cool space activity, you can sign up for email bulletins from SpaceWeather.

The Asticou Azalea Garden, Northeast Harbor, Maine

The Asticou Azalea Garden is a local landmark, and like most locals, I rarely manage to visit our landmarks during their seasons. You New Yorkers out there, betcha only visit the Statue of Liberty when you've got enthusiastic houseguests, right? Same here.

Well, I finally made it to the Azalea Garden during peak bloom this week for the first time in seven years. Wow, what a show! Most of the year it is a calm Japanesque garden in shades of green and white, with granite bridges and a dry sand garden. In June, though, it goes from tea ceremony serenity to full-on Kabuki glitz. 

Azaleas in flaming orange, hot pink, vivid purple ...

and a few calmer patches of pale pinks and lavenders.  There are lots other rare and unusual plants here, many of them moved here from Reef Point (Beatrix Farrand's estate in Bar Harbor) when that garden was dismantled in the 1950s. This beauty:

is Paeonia obovata var. willmottiae, a woodland peony. I find that purple center mesmerizing.

For anyone planning a visit, the Garden is open during daylight hours from May through October. If you're anywhere nearby, go quickly, it's in full bloom right now!

Beachcombing series No.69 (Old Orchard Beach, Maine; April 27 and 29, 2013)

Old Orchard Beach, Maine; April 27 and 29, 2013

Old Orchard Beach is a classic Southern Maine tourist destination, with a long sand beach, a restaurant-lined pier, and an amusement park. I'd been there once in the summer when my kids were little, and just about lost my mind with all the crowds and the heat (and the over-excited toddlers.) In April, I love it. This time was gorgeous, sunny but not hot, and lots of people (but not crowds) were out enjoying the sudden end of a long winter. The beachcombing finds are a little different from what I see here in the north, most notably the skate egg case in the middle. I've never found one of those on Mount Desert Island. If you're not familiar with them, skates look a bit like rays (you've probably seen photos of manta rays), and we have seven species here in the North Atlantic. I can't tell which one this is.

Also in this photo are razor clam shells (Ensis directus), driftwood, sea glass, coralline (Corallina officinalis), a moon snail shell (Lunatia heros), a sanddollar (Echinarachnius parma), a blue mussel shell (Mytilus edulis), a lobster-claw band, a feather, an acorn, and an Atlantic Oyster shell (Crassostrea virginica). The snails and the oyster are shells I don't see often on my home turf. And the driftwood was fantastic. I have to say that Old Orchard Beach in late April was a treasure trove of small, beautifully rounded driftwood bits. There was even one piece, just above the egg case, that formed a perfect ring (but is just a little too small for my fingers.)

All together a very happy day of hunting!

I've been translated into Gallifreyan

Much to my astonishment, one of my photos was posted on the Dr. Who tumblr, where someone thinks this looks like Gallifreyan writing. Dr. Who is one of those shows I've been meaning to watch for years. I probably first started intending to watch it in the late 70s, and have been a regular non-watcher ever since, so I have no idea what Gallifreyan letters look like. But in one of those peculiar coincidences novelists like so much, I have a two-day series of medical tests coming up that will leave me alone in a hotel room in another city, and I had just announced to my friends that I plan to use the time to catch up on Dr. Who. So by the end of next month I may be able to say whether the Tumblr comment was true or not.

Incidentally, the photo has been re-posted 4,236 times so far, which unquestionably means it has been orphaned from the original link and is floating out in cyberspace, and I am kicking myself for not having put my name on it. I started signing everything I post online about a year ago, but haven't gone back to update older work. Ah well, if you see these watches in your internet travels, say hi for me, ok?

A Gift and an Experiment

jpg test

To be more precise, it is an experiment in giving a gift to you. Well, I hope it's a gift, anyway! I've wanted to make some photos available as desktop wallpapers to you for a while, and have had the darndest time figuring out how. I think Google Docs may be the answer, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to try this image out for me? It is 1600x1200, so it should fit all but the most gigantic monitors. It won't make a very nice print, but it will make a lovely background on your computer. Absolutely free, of course!

5/22 ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS 
1. Click on the photo. Just a regular click, not a right-click. It will open in Google Docs. (You don't need to have an account there.) 
2. When it opens in Google Docs, look at the top left of the screen. 

 See the little black arrow pointing down? Click that to download the photo. 
3. A window will pop up something like this:

Go ahead and save it. It will probably go into your Downloads folder, depending on how you've set up your computer. 
4. Open your System Preferences and choose Desktop. Select the Download folder (if that is where you saved the image.) Then select the image and choose "Fill screen."
5. Look at your desktop - there should be amber waves of grain in front of a sandy beach.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with the download process, if the copyright information is subtle enough, or any other constructive criticism that springs to mind.

Just two little notes about copyright:
1. Other bloggers, please don't share this as a direct download on your own blog, but feel free to link here so your readers can enjoy.
2. Please don't sell this image in any format or use it for commercial or editorial purposes.

And while we're here, anybody recognize that view?

Beachcombing series No.68: The Shore Path, November 3, 2012

The Shore Path, Bar Harbor, Maine; November 3, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.68)

Well now, here's the very last Beachcombing still life from 2012, number 68. After number 67 sat on my light table for six months I felt guilty, somehow, as if I'd been procrastinating on a process that should have been much more efficient. But when I finally got the test prints back, I really really liked the photo. It seemed brighter and more balanced and somehow more satisfying than many I did last year. And I like this one a lot. So maybe my object-arranging-mojo needed a break. I spent a lot of the winter inland, too. You'll have noticed there are photos of snowstorms and beavers and fox cubs and frog eggs, but there haven't been any beaches yet this year. It certainly wasn't a conscious decision, just that when I've wandered, my feet have been going into the swamps and the woods this spring rather than down to the shore. But a couple of weeks ago I took a mini-vacation with my sister and we spent two days walking along the coast in Ogunquit, Maine. It's taken me a long time to edit all the photos, but very soon you'll get a nice, long post full of views of southern Maine beaches. It was so exotic - they have sand over there!


Common Periwinkle (Littorina littorea), driftwood, schist and granite beach stones, lobster-claw band, Dog Whelk (Thais lapillus), White Pine cone (Pinus strobus), Rockweed (I think it's Fucus distichus) covered with Coiled Tube Worms (Spirorbis spirillum), rope, Blue Mussel (Mytilus edulis), Red Pine cone (Pinus resinosa), Coralline (Corallina officinalis), sea brick.

Hulls Cove, October 26, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.67)

Hulls Cove, Maine; October 26, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.67)

The first new Beachcombing series in six months! I don't know why it took so long to pull together, but I've been moving these pieces around on my light table since early November.

It was a gorgeous October day, warm and sunny with deep blue skies and a cold wind. Most of the debris that caught my eye was typical of what I usually find: clam, crab, whelk and slipper shells, driftwood, fishing rope and shotgun shells, all of them anonymous. I do know where the white mesh disk and the half-burned piece of wood came from, though, and it's an odd feeling to find something on the beach and know its history.

The plastic disk is one of 4 million that were accidentally released from a New Hampshire sewage treatment plant during a storm overflow in 2011. They washed up on beaches along the Massachusetts and New Hampshire coasts for months. In spite of official attempts to recover them, at least 400,000 are still at large. Now they have entered the currents that circle the Gulf of Maine. Harry Johnson has an excellent report on tracking their migrations in his column for the Portland Press Herald. And just look at it - two full years in the ocean, and it's practically like new, only a little dirty. Forget diamonds - plastic is forever.

The piece of burned wood was probably washed down onto the beach after a fire earlier in the month at the R.L.White carpentry shop just across the road. Fortunately no one was injured in the blaze, but R.L.White's has been around since 1903, and they lost all their historic tools, moldings, and a large quantity of old-growth lumber that they had stocked back in the '30s, all of those irreplaceable today. Weeks after the fire the beach was still littered with charred wood and tremendous quantities of wood shavings.

The seagulls distracted me from my gloomy meditations. Three of them, third-year juveniles, were splashing in the shallow water. (Mature herring gulls have a pure white head. First-years are brown, like the one in the background above. These with the grey wings and the mottled head are in their third year.) They would energetically shake their wings in the water, dunk their heads way under, and then stand, spread their wings and shake all the water off.

If they were bathing, it was a very aggressive bath. There was a first-year juvenile watching, and sometimes the older birds seemed to be threatening it and sometimes trying to impress it.

Eventually the younger bird seemed to get fed up, and chased one of the others. I watched for a long time, but I never did figure out what they were doing. Any bird-watchers out there who understand seagulls?

In the still life: Green Crabs (Carcinus maenas), plastic sewage treatment disk, acorns (Quercus sp.), driftwood, lobster-claw bands, Waved Whelk (Buccinum undatum), fishing rope, feathers, White Pine cone (Pinus strobus), Soft-shell Clam (Mya arenaria), Dog Whelk (Thais lapillus), plastic shotgun shell, Coralline (not sure of species), peach pit (Prunus persica), sea brick, Common Slipper Shell (Crepidula fornicata).

January 2013

Oh geez, it's February! Somehow the whole month of January has slipped by, and we've spent so long going through the Oaxaca photos I never got around to showing you how beautiful the winter has been here in Maine. Those of you who know me on Facebook have seen a couple of snowy photos, but let's have a quick catch-up so we'll be ready for the new month.

SNOWFALL

On January 16,  big fluffy snowflakes began falling at 8am. I've been wanting to try taking photos of falling snow, inspired by this article, so I headed out to the Jesup Path.

I ran into technical difficulties pretty quickly. The snow got increasingly wet, and the edge of my hood developed a slow drip. My gloves were damp and flakes melted as soon as they touched my coat. My camera will take a fair amount of wet weather, but I noticed droplets forming on the barrel of the zoom and decided to put it in its Rain Sleeve, which instantly fogged up, making it impossible to read the camera settings. Still, a fogged plastic bag is better than sucking water into the lens, so I muddled on. I had brought a microfiber cloth to dry my lens when it got droplets on it, but it never occurred to me that the cloth itself would get wet between my pocket and the camera lens! On the bright side, it turns out that small streaks on the lens don't necessarily ruin a photo.

SEAGULLS

 On the 19th, I slid down to the Bar after a morning snowfall to stalk the seagulls.

The whole flock was lined up on the tiniest sliver of mud, watching the tide inch closer and closer to their toes.

FROST

Toward the end of the month we had a spell of bitterly cold weather. When it dropped below 0ºF, my studio windows sprouted psychedelic frost patterns.

 

When I wake up and see the thermometer at -8ºF, I whoop and run around the house checking windows for cool frost patterns. 

If I weren't a photographer, I'd probably swear and go back to bed.

Buy Some Damn Art

Isn't that the best gallery name ever? Buy Some Damn Art is the online gallery of Kate Singleton, also known for her blog Arthound.  Kate launches a new show every week or so, and the work is up for six weeks. She has some amazing pieces right now, ranging from Erin Endicott's embroidered work:

Erin Endicott, Sutra 1, via Buy Some Damn Art

to Becca Stadtlander's colorful paintings:

Becca Stadtlander, Making Matcha, via Buy Some Damn Art

and, opening tomorrow, a special edition of six photos from the Beachcombing series! I'm nervous and excited about finding myself in such creative company.

 Here's the skinny on the show: there will be 6 photos, giclee printed at 20"x20" with Epson Ultrachrome archival inks on 100% cotton rag Somerset Velvet paper. This is the most beautiful paper - it's a thick, bright white cotton rag that's been really popular with printmakers, especially for etching. It's become equally popular for photographs - the surface is so velvety soft that it gives really rich detail and color. It's fairly expensive, as you might expect, so I don't use it often and don't offer it in my shop, but I just love the way photos feel on this stuff. Art geek moment!

See the little lines at the corners? The 20x20 photo is printed on a 22x22 sheet, and those lines are registration marks - the extra room and the marks make placing a mat much simpler.

Frost

 There was some very peculiar frost on my car's spare tire this morning. It looked like tiny feathers, or petals, standing up at a 45º angle. Kind of like ruffled fish scales? It must have a name. Everything has a name, if you ask the right person. The rest of the car was covered in ordinary flat frost, like this:

 A couple of weeks ago I found hoarfrost in the garden:

Frost is formed when water freezes directly from the air onto a surface that has cooled below freezing (it doesn't form dew first).  I think hoarfrost and rime form when the water vapor itself is supercooled, which means it's still vapor but is below freezing point, and it freezes instantly to anything it touches.

 To me, hoarfrost is needle-like, as opposed to the flat sort. Since even I can tell the difference between two types of frost, there's got to be a name for my feathery frost flakes.

 I've found a few interesting web sources on frost: one is at CalTech, another is here, and the last is at Britannica.

 And then there's the National Snow and Ice Data Center, for the serious ice nerd, where I just learned the awesome term cryosphere.