Thunder Snow
The thunder snow skipped us, but still got some pretty snow!
Winter decided to stick around, so you should expect more snow pictures for the near future. This week’s snow total was forecasted to land somewhere between one inch and one foot, unsurprisingly we ended up with a total somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately the thunder snow from today’s storm ended up northeast of us in Boston. Thunder Snow is awesome, but I don’t envy the feet of snow they’ll be getting.
I convinced Rebecca to walk around campus yesterday during the first bit of snow and shot most of the images above. Stumbling across organ maintenance in the Vassar Chapel is one of those happy accidents that reinforces how idyllic campus can be in the winter. I get a little absorbed in trees, and the grounds provide a lot of fodder for that obsession. The old growth spruce trees on campus are gorgeous in the snow, even if they can get a little weird when they start dropping sap.
The last 5 images are from the heavier snow this morning. I picked up the Laowa 100mm macro last week for some film scanning and all this snow has been a great excuse to break it out. Our living room has a bay of leaded storm windows, and the best (worst) thing about them is that humidity gets trapped between the storm window and the more modern internal windows. Because of that moisture we get some great frost across the inside of the panes, and the older glass is just cloudy enough to act like a bit of a diffuser. The Laowa can shoot at 2:1 magnification and I stuck on some extension tubes to bump it up to around 2.5:1 magnification, which means the depth of field is an exceedingly thin sliver. I haven’t picked up a macro rail yet but I think that might be a future pick up, because my attempts to hand hold images for stacking have not panned out with that thin of a depth of field!
We also made another trip to the Trevor Zoo after last weekend’s snow, so enjoy an extra derpy triptych of my favorite animals!
Catalog Cleaning
Cleaning and retrospection should get together more often.
The cold this week sapped most of my will to wander around with a camera, so I decided to get a jump start on spring cleaning. I spent most of the time resleeving negatives and trying to find better options for archival binders, but I also spent some time backing up my digital catalog. Maintenance of digital storage is always a little annoying; it’s a combination checking the health of multiple drives, backing them up, fighting with a certain company’s cloud storage, and trying to determine the value of having some photos easily accessible while having others backed up and put away. It necessitates some retrospection, and will probably encourage some updating of the rest of my site before too long.
While paring down some of my stuff from last year, I realized the largest proportion of it was what I shot of the Jeff Jackson campaign in North Carolina over the summer. It was definitely a change from what I normally shoot, but it was also an absolute joy. I put in about 1000 miles across the state, traveling between townhalls that ran the gamut of a dozen attendees to a couple hundred. Getting to know Jeff and a couple of the people working on the campaign over those months was great, and highlighted the human part of campaigning that I feel gets overshadowed in most reporting.
Jeff would frequently show up, walk around the crowd shaking hands and getting names, then normally someone from the local party would make a short introduction and hand the “stage” to Jeff. In the public sphere, the handshakes and smiles are the foremost consideration. Campaigns and media alike portray politicking that way because it’s what readers and constituents expect. Even looking back at the pictures I made, the majority of them fit into the framing of, “Voter talks, politician listens. Politician talks, voters listen.” Part of that comes down to access. For smaller campaigns you won’t have a reporter embedded for months on end largely because local media doesn’t have the budget for that anymore. If a candidate has a large enough profile to drive national coverage it is most often either a short piece about the horse race or a longer form article about the horses in the race. What often gets lost in the shuffle is the connections at smaller townhalls like these.
Having the opportunity to experience these townhalls as someone who wasn’t a staffer, reporter, or potential voter, let me feel like I had enough distance to see it a little differently, and looking back at some of the images I made I realized I was letting that perspective slip in between the handshakes and laugh lines. Attendees were frequently looking for some kind of answer to the problems they knew one person couldn’t solve. A woman in Davidson County questioning the state of our politics six month down the road from 1/6. A man in Yadkin County fighting with insurance, medicare, and poor healthcare access for a end of life care for a loved one. A woman in Sanford County trying to organize programs for LGBTQIA+ youth to find community and acceptance in the rural South. A Veteran in Cabarrus County asking for more conversation on gun control and mental healthcare access. Nearly every townhall I photographed had at least one attendee who spoke up on an issue passionately enough that it found resonance in the other attendees, and it was hard not to see that reflected in Jeff or his staff. It was a little bit of projection on my part but I found myself frequently shooting through the crowd looking for an empathetic face, at Jeff’s townhalls and in the political photography I’ve done since then.
I haven’t had the opportunity to shoot much political work since moving up north, in part because of Covid but mostly because of where we are in the political calendar. Hopefully things calm down enough in the summer that I can catch a few townhalls and start to flesh some of these thoughts out a bit more.
Warm Christmas
Record setting heat can occasionally make for a pretty winter.
We made the excessively long drive back to Oklahoma for the holidays this year, and I decided it was a good opportunity to break in the RB67. I packed up my RB67, the 180mm f4.5, my brother’s Rollei that I’ve been borrowing since the before times, about a dozen rolls of 120, a couple digital bodies, a handful of 50mm lenses, cords, cables, straps, and just about anything else I could justify for a week long trip of family seclusion. If it isn’t evident, I have problems packing efficiently for trips like that.I had lofty goals of stopping along the way for things that looked interesting but that clearly didn’t happen. Not because there wasn’t anything interesting between the Hudson River and the Arkansas River, but because 24 hours of driving in 2 days doesn’t leave a lot of room for pleasure stops. When we did make it to Oklahoma, the RB67 was just about the only camera that left a bag or case, and the record setting days of 70 degrees meant I spent a lot of time shooting outside around the house and farm.
Because of the location of the cold shoe on the side of the RB67 I still haven’t decided on a light meter yet, so most of the rolls ended up getting shot with a quick meter from my phone before the first shot, then just eyeballing exposure values after the fact. After shooting around a hundred frames on the RB67 that way though, I’m starting to get a lot more comfortable just trusting my gut. I initially grabbed the Mamiya 180mm f4.5 C because I wanted something cheap to make sure the body worked before investing in some more expensive glass. Now though, I’m just in love with the lens. I’ve always found myself gravitating towards the long side of normal or short side of telephoto, wanting something in the 65mm to 90mm range for most shooting. I thought I would want to find a 127mm f3.5 KL as soon as I could, but the 180mm is just such a beautiful lens. The out of focus rendering is smooth, fall off isn’t busy, it’s sharp enough wide open for close portraits, and the color rendition is gorgeous. I still expect I’ll track down a few more lenses for the system because I have gear acquisition problems, but I also expect the 180mm will be the lens on the body the majority of the time.
Since we got back from Oklahoma before the new year, the 67 has been sitting on the shelf. Getting these scans back is definitely going to make me refresh my Ektar stock and find something new to shoot soon.
First Snow
The first snow seems like a good time to start something new.
This is our first winter in the Hudson Valley so I’m not sure if it’s a normal one or not, but I’ve been impatiently waiting for the first real snow of the season for months. I also decided first snow is a good reason to actually start the blog side of this site. I’ve been putting it off for awhile, partially because I don’t like the word blog and have been failing to be clever enough to come up with an alternative, so welcome to what I’m calling Rolls! For the most part, it will just be an outlet for what’s rambling around in my head. The majority of the time it’ll just be photos from the week. Occasionally it might be talking about a piece of kit or some hardware news. If you know me you know I’m prone to geeking out over the next best thing, but I’ll be doing my best to keep that to a minimum. I’ll likely pick on technical details of some photos, but my intention will be to keep it all relevant to the photography.
I woke up this morning and immediately opened the blinds to see how much snow we got overnight. I’m realizing I might have liked the frequent snows in Michigan a little more than I realized, even if I hated the shoveling. After having almost no snowfall last year in North Carolina, I was definitely excited for it today. I woke Rebecca up and asked if she wanted to walk around campus, and after the coffee and breakfast she was awake enough to say yes. I’ve spent the last 6 months walking around Vassar’s campus with a variety of lenses, but wasn’t sure what I’d want to take today. I normally take the Samyang 45 1.8 when I’m in that mood, but knew I’d want something a little longer. I very rarely want to take a zoom when I’m shooting something akin to street, but ended up settling on Tamron’s 28-75 which fit the day perfectly. Usually we walk around Main and over towards the Quad, but decided today was a good day to take a stroll around Sunset Lake and Graduation Hill. I was hoping to find sledding, but for the most part we just found a few sled trails from earlier in the morning. We did spot what I will continue to call a river otter in the creek by Sunset Lake, but I wasn’t quick enough to catch it before it swam down the bank.
I don’t shoot the 28-75 often, mostly because it just feels like such a boring lens. It covers 90% of the focal length you’d want 80% of the time, but normal zooms just feel like they do everything average. Tamron’s 28-75 (not the new G2 version) is optically fine; it’s sharp enough wide open, sharper stopping down, and the bokeh is decent enough. Said another way, it’s a little soft wide open, the bokeh is a little on the busy side, it has a bit more distortion than I’d like, and the vignette can get a little strong. It’s fine at everything it does, it’s just not fun. That said, the convenience of a normal zoom is unparalleled and I knew it’d cover just about everything I’d want for the walk around campus.
After lunch Rebecca had to keep working on coursework for the semester, so I decided to take a trip to the Trevor Zoo. I was lucky enough to show up at zoo animal dinner time, and the snow kept just about everyone else away. As soon as I walked in I looked for the river otters in the creek beside the bridge, and found one of them sledding down the hill in the enclosure just to run back up and do so again. The red pandas are almost always the highlight of any trip to the Trevor Zoo, and watching them munching on their bamboo like our cat munches on our palm tree was what I was hoping for. The vultures were out of their normal area, perching over the owl and bobcat enclosure to make themselves look as ominous as ever. One of the great horned owls was apparently feeling lazy enough to watch a white-throated sparrow peck at their dinner.
I’m a sucker for zoo photography. As a kid I always wanted to go to the zoo more. I lived off of whatever issue of the Zoobooks the library had, and finally living close enough to a zoo to just drive over on a lark is such a great convenience. I expect that to happen a lot over the next year.