New England Fall - Part 8

This post ends my series on my trip to New England which I'm sure most of you are tired of reading about by now.  I just wanted to finish up with a couple of quick thoughts about the one thing I didn't enjoy about my trip, other than the fact that I missed fall peak colors yet again this year.  This is something that always bothers me no matter where I am in the United States: Telephone Poles, Billboards, and wires...

It seems like any time there is something to take photos of, you can't find an angle to shoot it where you don't have at least one of those three things in your shot, distracting from the view!  The more beautiful the view you have, the more signs, poles, wires, etc you have to deal with.  It's almost like someone sees a spot that is really pretty, and they decide that's the perfect spot for a HUGE billboard or the perfect location for a telephone pole with wires coming in from every angle possible.  LOL

There were so many cool buildings and towns and vistas that I would have loved to take photos of, where the photo was ruined by that kind of stuff.   I know there isn't really anything we can do about it as I don't think we'll ever see a time where all of our powerlines are buried and run underground like they are in Europe, but I dream about it all the time.  *sigh*

Okay, so maybe this was a little tongue in cheek and just me trying to be a little funny but anyone reading this that has pulled out their camera to shot something that caught their eye probably gets it!  :)

Here is an example of why it drives me crazy... here were tow more churches from my trip that were so very cool looking.  They almost looked more like castles than churches to me, and I wandered all the way around them, trying to find some way to shoot a photo of them without all those distractions in the way.  I almost gave up and just put the camera away, but the buildings were just too cool to not take a few photos.

AND now when I look at those photos... All I see is light poles, telephone and power cables and signs.  Yes, sometimes those things can be fixed in Photoshop but wouldn't it be a prettier world if we could look that stuff like this without all of that other stuff in the way?  :)

I hope you enjoyed reading my little rambling stories about my trip and hope the photos at least kept it interesting.  I should have actually written this series while I was on the road or at least as soon as I came back.  I think I could have made it a lot more entertaining while I was in the moment.

I plan on posting from the road on my next trip... which will be to Scotland, one week from today.  I hope some of you check in to follow my trip and I will do my best to post every night with photos if I can. Photos without powerlines and signs in every shot.  :)

New England Fall - Part 7

When I travel somewhere I've never been before, there always seems to be something that really stands out to me as I start to look around.  I'm not sure why but I almost always start to pick up on patterns of some kind.  I've been trying to think of good examples to help explain what I mean, but the only thing that comes to mind on this trip is how one of the first things I noticed, was a large number of older buildings throughout the towns and the states in the North East that shared the same unique architecture that I hadn't seen anywhere else before.  They had these cool bell towers that were topped off with what almost looked a crown. I wish I could have found more information about the origin of the design and whether these buildings were all built around the same time or not.  Here is a photo showing what I mean.

I also couldn't be sure if most of the buildings of that style were churches, or used for something else.  Some had signs out front to make it pretty easy to know what they were, but every not and then I'd see one and find out it was a library or a city hall.  It didn't matter though, I thought they were all very cool looking building.

The other thing I noticed is the number of churches as well.  I lost count of how many churches I saw as I drove around, but after a while, it started to feel like there was one church for every 1000 people in the state.  Well, okay maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but I think it was the highest concentration of churches I'd ever seen outside of the bible belt.

So many of them had the look of that one in the photo above, but every now and then I would run across some a little more unique.  Here are a few photos of some of them that I found very cool looking.  There is something about brick churches that really draws my eye.  Most look best when shot in black and white to me.

But like all things, there are always exceptions to the rule.  This shot was nowhere near as nice in black and white and the color version.  Mostly because the trees had some color left in them and the fact that it also had a very boring clear blue sky.  I was able to add a tiny bit of interest to the sky by waiting until the sun got low enough to just poke out from behind the church, letting me shoot it with that starburst effect.

And just to really show how there is always an exception to the rule, the builders of this church decided to be different than all the rest by not only avoiding using a pointed steeple, they figured why use square walls?  I think this might be the only circular church I've ever heard of and for sure the only one I've ever tried to shoot. 

It was a challenge to shoot a cool photo of thing.  Buildings always look better to me when shot at an angle where you use the walls to add perspective and depth to the photo.  Without square walls, there was just no way to do that.  I mean come on... didn't those people who built this thing think about us photographers when they designed it?  ;-)

New England Fall - Part 5

After I left Sleepy Hollow Farm, I had a pretty long list of things to try to find and to see if they would make for any cool photos or not.  The list consisted of a lot of covered bridges and a handful of farms and barns, and a couple of old mills I was excited to check out.  I had put most of those locations into my GPS, but hadn't really done a good job of keeping track of which ones had the most potential so I decided to just pull up the closest places and drive past as many as I could, just to see what they looked like.  I knew that there wouldn't be many places that were famous on my list so there was no rush to get to any one place in particular.  

I drove past a number of bridges that afternoon, and hate to say it, but was very disappointed to find out that most of the covered bridges in Vermont and New Hampshire seem to have been built to be used, with very little thought to making them pleasing to look at.  LOL  That's not to say that covered bridges still aren't cool to look at and drive over, but most of the ones I was running across really didn't lend to "pretty" photos.  Maybe if the weather conditions had been different they could have been great to photograph, but I wasn't that lucky on this trip.

So once I realized the covered bridges weren't going to be a goldmine of photo opportunities, I turned my attention to looking for a couple of the farms and barns that were on my list.  Luckily I did know that there were three more farms on my list that would at give me a chance to take some more nice photos.

This was the first of those three. This was Stonewall Farm which sits in a nice out of the way valley that made for a beautiful drive. The clouds had really begun to move in by the time I got here so the light wasn't great but I still managed to get a photo that I liked of one of the barns and what looked like the main farmhouse running off behind it.

Stonewall Farm

I kind of wish I would have stuck around here for a little longer just to see if the sun would break through the sky and light up the barn and trees a little better.  It's getting really late so I'm going to cut this entry short.  If you're still here and reading this though, here are a couple of more photos I'll toss in to those post.  These weren't really taken anywhere near here each other, but they do keep to the theme of farms and barns. :)

This was a very cool old barn I saw, that was really weathered and painted white, and it just lent itself to a black and white photo

Then one day while just driving some random back roads, I came across a field where the hay was sitting out there in this cool pattern and it totally caught my eye as having the potential for a fun shot so I did a quick u-turn and pulled off the side of the road to take this photo.   It didn't turn out how I had first hoped, but I still liked it.

One thing I was really loving was the number of great red barns scattered all over each state.  Some were much harder to get good photos of, but these two were a couple of my favorites from the trip as well.

While shooting the "big picture" stuff, I try hard to look for little details or even possible abstract type shots but it's certainly not a strong point of my photography.  I have a great photographer friend that loves the details and always seems to see things I don't when we shoot photos together, and I try to see if I can maybe find something she would shoot if she was there.   This probably would be a shot she took, but hey, I kind of liked it for its simplicity and just something about the reflection in the old glass against that red was pretty cool.

New England Fall - Part 2

After spending a good hour at Grist Mill taking photos and then exploring the area around there for a little while, I decided it was time to start working my way north and into Vermont.  One of the first things I noticed once the sun came up, was that most of the trees in Massachusettes were still green, but there were a few bare trees sprinkled in among them, so it got my hopes up that maybe I would still get lucky and find fall colors as I drove north.

 I had marked a few places to check out on my trip north and with how pretty the day was, it made for a really nice drive just exploring as I went.  There was a small town along the way, where the town square was built around a nice little pond, and I thought it might have the potential to be a beautiful photo in the right kind of light. When I got there though, the skies were mostly blue and it was just too close to mid-day to really get any kind of special photo there, but I still stopped to walk around and enjoy it, and took some shots to try to figure out what would be the perfect spot for a photo if I make it back out this way again in better conditions.  This spot has great potential to give you a beautiful photo at sunrise or sunset, or maybe when covered in snow and the pond is frozen over.  I love the location and wished I lived closer so I could visit it over an over again until I get that great photo here.  Even just catching all those trees at peak fall color would have made a world of difference to this shot.

Well, now that I've put this on my list to revisit someday, it was time to explore some more.  I could see why people talk in such glowing terms about the Northeast because I was passing so many pretty towns, on small country roads that just made me smile and think of the photos I could try to take there.  Even some of the everyday buildings would catch my eye and make me want to take pictures just to see what I could get.

I mean, something like this isn't a normal hot spot for photography, but the shape of the building and the way the light was hitting it as I came down the road, caused me to stop, and then I couldn't help but think how cool it could look if those trees behind it were bursting with fall colors or once again, everything was covered in snow.

I was starting to notice that my luck for catching great fall colors wasn't looking too good for this trip though.  From what I was seeing, I was about a week too late and many of the trees had already lost all of their leaves.  Those that hadn't lost their leaves were already past peak color...

Was I disappointed?  Yeah, I do have to admit I found myself kind of bummed at this point in time and decided I would just make the best of the trip that I could and use it more as a scouting trip than I'd hoped it would be.  Since I'd never been here before, it was the perfect chance to explore even more than I would have if I'd been totally concentrating on taking photos instead.

I knew there would still be opportunities for some nice photos, but they would just have to be things that didn't fully depend on fall colors to really make them special.  I'd already seen a number of cool old barns and some covered bridges and so I'd just set my sites on taking photos of them more than of the landscape.

My next two stops did wonders to cheer me up and put me back in the right frame of mind.  

Okay, so the fall colors aren't looking so great right now and it's looking like I had bad timing, but I can see now that there will still be some great photos to be had and that has me excited again.