The Evening Primrose are taking a beating. We put the bird feeder on a tree branch overhead. The squirrels and chipmunks routinely feed from this feeder and will then jump down onto the flowers. Naughty little animals. Tsk, tsk.
Our main vegetable garden
Let’s not forget the vegetables. We have them in a few spots but this is the largest. My wife put down a biodegradable landscaping paper to keep the weeds down around the plants and then filled in with mulch around the borders. I took this on Friday and it’s already changed quite a bit.
Cabooses have always been my favorite type of train car. I stumbled on this one yesterday while visiting a historic train depot in Ashland, NH. I get the sense that it is becoming a permenent fixture as part of the depot’s museum. Here are some of the details that I could capture.
This is a challenging year to be a photographer. Okay, it’s a challenging year to be anything. Before March, I finally arrived at a point where I felt some improvement in approaching people and making good images of them. The shoot I did at our town’s local ice fishing contest was among my most popular because of both the subject matter and the people. The last few months, I’ve posted daily but it’s been a steady rotation of still lifes and landscapes with the occasional small animal or bird for variety.
The Flume Covered Bridge – Lincoln
As social distancing rules relaxed in the US, I hoped to be able to get out to some local cities and the coast to try to get some variety in my images. Unfortunately, the news has reported that the coast is jammed with people and that parking restrictions aimed at limiting the number of people have caused problems. At this time, even though our area continues to have a relatively low incidence of COVID-19, other parts of the US that relaxed restrictions are seeing an increased incidence of coronavirus. The safe money says to stay close to home.
Contoocook Railroad Covered Bridge – Contoocook
For a while, I’ve considered trying to photograph as many of New Hampshire’s fifty-four historic covered bridges as I can. It’s not easy. They are spread fairly far out. To get the four located in the northernmost part of the state along the Canadian border, I have to drive three and a half hours one way to arrive there. But, there’s not a lot else to do this summer. And let’s face it, this is something I can do without encountering throngs of people.
Using websites, I made a list of all the historic covered bridges and their locations. It’s easy to see groupings that go together logically for a single trip in which I could photograph three or four bridges at a time. And certainly, there will be other things to see along the way. The photographs here are of bridges that I had previously visited and made images of in my travels. They are the “low hanging fruit”. So let’s see if I can get all of them, shall we?
In these times we all have to work safely with what’s available to us.
All of the historic bridges that I’ve photographed can be seen on a new page at this site called Historic Covered Bridges of New Hampshire. You can find it here.
Back before we all had cars, and malls and Amazon (Yes, there was a time before Amazon), people who lived outside the city shopped at the local general store. It was called this because it sold general merchandise. Think of it as a much smaller Walmart that sold only the basics. You could get your groceries, hardware, and things for your home. These were often one of the gathering places in the community. The store might be paired with a gas station and serve as a bus or stage coach stop. It might also have housed the town’s post office.
His general store dates back to 1828. Below are some historic photos of the store that I copied from the store’s website.
These three industrial looking wheels have been made into lawn ornaments outside a former mill in Harrisville, NH. I liked the look of the patterns and curves against the straight lines of the brick wall behind it. A color version is below.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted an image of a flower taken through a magnifying glass (see below). I’d seen Lensballs advertise on social media but they were expensive. The Lensball costs $44 and then there is a special holder and a better bag…yada, yada, yada. My friend Lois, told me she bought an “imitation” Lensball (aka copy, fake, knock-off, wanna-be) on Amazon for $20. Actually, she got three in different sizes for that price. I bought one plus a bag and stand for $18. (BTW – Lois has a very fun blog that you can find here .)
Using it is not as easy as it looks. (And there are a million YouTube videos that make it look easy.) I’ve tried a few different things and the image above is the best I’ve done. There have been a few attempts that did not work out. It’s something to play with. I have ideas for other shoots, so stay tuned.
This week my wife’s garden has produced a few new varieties of flowers. I love the regularity with which they appear. And each is only around for a week or two making its presence feel special.
I was going through old drafts of unpublished blog posts and found this graphic of a painting of Frank Sinatra on a restaurant’s security door. Who knows what other treasures are in my unpublished drafts.
Harrisville is an old mill town. This is part of the pond that held water to power the mills. The image below shows this same area but with one of the mills in the foreground. I would have shown more of the mills, but the light just wasn’t right for that.
