Author: johntodaro

First Snow

first snow

Thanks to all who visited the show at Ashawagh Hall over the weekend. We had a large turnout for the reception, everyone’s work looked great. I’ll be busy with print orders for the next few weeks–thanks again, everyone!

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Below: a photograph of the bluffs at Barcelona Neck this morning, from the beach at Mile Hill Road.

Panasonic G3 – 20mm

Finback

finback

A 60′ Finback Whale washed up yesterday in Amagansett. The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation said it was an adult female. No clear cause of death had been determined, but a ship strike hasn’t yet been ruled out.  Finbacks are common, although it’s quite extraordinary to see one washed up. Coincidentally, an infant Pygmy Sperm Whale beached two miles west of the Finback yesterday–a very unusual species in these waters.  The infant was weak, and apparently separated from his mother. Unfortunately, it had to be put down by officials.

Sad day on the beach–a quiet crowd gathering in the fog to see the whales.

Panasonic G3- 14mm – wide converter.

finback

Dreamscape

dreamscape

The picture was taken a few years ago on a swampy riverbank in North Carolina. The branches are from Baldcypress. Among the pictures I’ve taken with a normal lens, this one’s a personal favorite.

Hasselblad 503 CX – 80mm Planar – drum scan from color negative

Art in the New Year at Ashawagh Hall

Killcare

Killcare is a home I’ve photographed many times. This one was from two years ago, and I’ll printing it for my upcoming show at Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton.

The show will take place on Martin Luther King weekend (Jan 19-21), and the hours on Saturday and Sunday are from 10 to 8 and on Monday from 10 to 4.  There will be a reception on Saturday January 19th from 5pm until 8pm. I’ll be showing many of my new black and whites along with other landscapes and recent work.

Our show announcement:

MLKArtintheNewYearGrey

In addition to myself, the show features the work of painters Cynthia Loewen, Lynn Martell, Alyce Peifer, Jerry Schwabe and Pam Vossen. Mary Milne will also be showing her wonderful fusion glass.

Everyone has new work for the show and all have displayed extensively in the area, including at Guild Hall, the Crazy Monkey Gallery, Chrysallis and elsewhere.

Cynthia Loewen is a realist painter (and stipple artist) from East Hampton and the founder of the very publicized Community Arts Project in Springs. She will be showing many recent oils and also some drawings and portraits.

Lynn Martell is a gifted watercolorist and oil painter who studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan and who has displayed extensively in East Hampton and in Greenport. She will have many new pieces at the show.

Alyce Peifer has displayed in juried shows throughout Long Island and in NYC. She will be showing a number of new landscapes and seascapes which reflect the many lovely aspects of our local light.

Jerry Schwabe works in various media including sculpture, oils, acrylics and watercolors. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and also at the Art Students League. His award-winning work has been displayed at many solo shows in East Hampton.

Pam Vossen studied at the Art League of Long Island, and has shown at BJ Spoke, Chrysallis and Guild Hall. Recently she has been producing beautiful oil landscapes, along with still lifes and pastel portraits. She’ll have lots of new work at the show.

Mary works in spectacular multilayered fusion glass and studied at Pratt, Urban Glass and also at The New York School For Interior Design. Her work is decorative and sculptural and demonstrates her sensitive handling of colors.

Ashawagh Hall is located at 780 Springs-Fireplace Road in the historic area of Springs. From the hall, it’s just a short walk to Accabonac Harbor, The Springs General Store and the Pollock-Krasner House.  Email me if you have any further questions about the show or if you need assistance with directions.

Note: The upcoming January show was rescheduled to its current date after hurricane Sandy.   Comments from my original October post are logged below.

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By the way, the original post for Killcare (with details about that water ripple) can be read here:

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/wainscott-photographs-the-house-on-the-beach/

 

Traveling Light

traveling light

I’ve borrowed a title from the Billie Holiday songbook here, a double entendre of sorts, at least with respect to this picture.  Billie’s tune is a classic, but I’m partial to the less well-known Chet Baker cover, released many years ago on his Baker’s Holiday LP (1965). Have a listen, and enjoy the very lovely and well-suited footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E41o0RFbriA

Panasonic GF2 – Olympus 45mm

The Art Barge: November Wide View

This was the view in Napeague this morning with the wide converter put to work on The Art Barge. During the high season, the structure serves as home for the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art where there there is full menu of art classes.  D’Amico was the founding director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Barge was originally a Navy barge–brought to this location in 1960.

A link to the Institute, with more on its history:

http://www.theartbarge.com/

Viginti Septem

Two weeks ago I published 26 close-up images of buoys which I photographed in the days following Hurricane Sandy. This is the 27th picture, and the last of that series. You might recall that I numbered the buoys in Latin.

All these pictures are located in a new sidebar gallery entitled Flotsam. Joining them, are another three which I photographed last year and which previously resided in my Jazz gallery. The thirty pictures are assembled in a vertical line of thumbnails as if they’ve been tethered together on a rope. That suits them fine, since they are buoys after all.

Have a look:

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/gallery-10-flotsam/

A sister gallery–Jazz, may be seen here:

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/gallery-9-jazz/

And–if you missed the two posts with the story behind the project you can check out these links:

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/thoughts-about-hurricanes/

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/lost-buoys-dragged-from-flotsam/

Long Beach, Sag Harbor

This begins a new series of cul de sacs, road ends and deserted public beaches–all subjects which are edgy by nature and which look better when no one’s “home” (my opinion).

Some of these pictures (such as this one), will go into a new sidebar gallery entitled Off Season. Others will be on display in Road Work, although clearly some pictures will have their feet in both categories. Here’s the link to the new gallery:

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/gallery-13-off-season/

I live in a place where the off season is greater than the “on”, so there’s a large window of opportunity. There’s also lots of road ends here because we’ve got all sorts of ways to get to a beach.

This picture is from Long Beach in Sag Harbor–photographed earlier this morning with a normal lens (a focal length which lends itself to the subject for reasons I can’t quite explain).

Panasonic G3-20mm

After The Storm

It’s been looking like this a lot lately, especially with an outgoing tide. We’ve had mercurial skies and rough water–as if the Atlantic hasn’t yet purged itself of the hurricane. We’ve also got an unusually wide sandbar with lots of driftwood littering the beach. I’ve been assuming this was created by all the sand which was washed off the dunes during the storm.

The ocean looks pretty nice, but the dunes are looking disheveled.

7am today – Panasonic G3 – 14mm – wide converter

Lover’s Quarrel (monochrome)

This is a photograph from Santa Fe which I recently began printing in black and white. In the earlier color version (link below), I was hearing too much of a “southwestern accent”…adobe walls…turquoise trim.

Perhaps the point of the picture was getting a little drowned out by color.

Canon G 10/August 2011

https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/lovers-quarrel/lovers-quarrel-2/

Lost Buoys Dragged From Flotsam

In a post earlier today I talked about how this project came about.  Here’s some details on how the pictures were made:

Buoys float, because they’re made of styrofoam. I was hoping that some of that buoyancy would be apparent in these pictures. With that in mind, I looked for whimsical points of view. Later, I tried to do the same with the treatments. Buoys are cone-shaped or cylindrical–about a foot tall. I decide to emphasize the curvature rather than try to fool you into thinking you’re looking at a flat plain. The curvature became most apparent with a little bit of vignetting. Most of these pictures were taken from about a foot away with a Canon G 10.

Buoys are marked up by fisherman. They paint them with stripes and carve numbers into them so that they can ID their traps. When buoys break free of their lines, they float around for months–aging, cracking, and acquiring all sorts of grit. I’ve come across some that have been out there for so long that they resemble shrunken heads. Eventually they arrive here in flotsam, with the nicest ones fully ripened. To me, the best specimens have great complexity of colors and textures. This happens after many months of marination out there in the brine.

The pictures work differently depending on whether you view them large or small. My wife tells me that they resemble little tiles. Perhaps they’d make good icons for desktop folders. The enlarged images are more revelatory because of the cues formed by scale and subject. If I decide to print them I’m not sure how I might want to size them, or if it even matters. Click on any picture you want to see bigger, or to leave a comment on a specific piece.

I began by entitling these pictures with odd or fanciful names. That wasn’t working so I changed them to Roman Numerals. After thinking about it for awhile I settled on the Latin characters for numbers. I don’t speak the language, but they say there’s romance in it.

Sound Clouds

I’ve been intending to load up some cloud images. These were shot over Long Island Sound late one afternoon while traveling on the ferry from New London.

For a change of pace, I’ll talk a little bit about the workflow.

A bit of post-processing was involved here, but in this instance, it involved some “dial restraint”.  There are lots of sexy things you can do to a picture in Photoshop, but I decided to avoid most of those today, and in fact, went the other direction.

I wanted a baby blue sky with pastel shades that look like they could float out of the picture. In order to do that,  I had to reduce blue and cyan saturation. So I desaturated, maybe about 15%.  I then applied a slight increase of yellow and red saturation in the highlights which sweetened up the clouds just a touch. To me, this is something like applying a tiny bit of blush. Another color adjustment involved going into selective color and tweaking blue and cyan ever-so-lightly so that those colors would be a little bit less magenta. I’m not that crazy about blue skies with a magenta bias.

There were a couple more things to do. I could’ve created a stormier sky here, especially if I leaned into the left slider on the levels. A similar thing could’ve been achieved had I selected a polarizing or a graduated ND filter.  I took a look at those options but decided to do nothing. The sky had a native gradation which I liked, and so, except for a wee bit of lightening, I left the levels alone.  On plenty of other occasions,  I’ll want to take advantage of curves, levels and filters because I’m aiming for a different sort of look.

As a final act of non-action, I sharpened nothing here today because my 14mm Panasonic lens delivered a group of clouds that were agreeably diffuse. Photoshop can be like a candy store, but of course it’s not good to eat too much.

More cloudy pictures forecasted.

Lunch – Lobster Roll

Lunch (aka The Lobster Roll) is the venerable seafood restaurant which has been holding its own out on the Napeague strip for many decades. It’s a simple place that sits within earshot of the breaking surf. I’ve admired it over the years because it reminds me of those American roadsides which once blanketed this country–the places which have been supplanted by what Zippy The Pinhead called “creeping stripmallification”.

Lunch is easy on the eye, and I’ve been thinking that the place deserves a portrait. October brings good light to Napeague. This is what it looked like down there this morning.

Panasonic G3/14mm/wide converter

(Note: I’m allergic to shellfish, so don’t ask for reviews. I’ve heard the Lobster Rolls are good.)

Leaves In Mud – Trout Pond, Sag Harbor

Since we’re so close to New England, the fall colors on Long Island are generally overlooked. We have no mountains, but we do have wetlands. Here on the east end, the wetland foliage is now at its peak and Trout Pond in Sag Harbor is especially vibrant. Late yesterday afternoon I photographed these leaves in the muddy shallows along the south end of the pond. It’s a pleasant hike along the edge, and if you’re feeling ambitious, you can continue onto the trails which climb the glacial moraine south of Sag Harbor. There you enter woods dominated by oaks and Mountain Laurel.

Handheld G3 Panasonic/45mm M. Zuiko

October Oceanscape

Here’s another from yesterday’s cloudless sunrise, this time looking west away from the sun. To the right is a clump of Seaside Goldenrod, a showy autumn wildflower which blooms right out onto the beach.

The colors here remind me of hand-colored postcards from 75 years ago.

Panasonic G3/14mm/wide converter

Ship Lantern At Dusk

I took this photograph about a month ago on the Cross Sound Ferry (a service that operates between New London and Orient).  The trip takes about an hour and a half,  passing just west of Fisher’s Island, and eventually skirting along the inside edge of Plum Island into the port at Orient.

I always book the trip for dusk or dawn because I love to explore the nooks and crannies of the ship in this sort of light.

Panasonic G3/14mm/wide converter

Beach Pavilion Off Season

I photographed this scene in Rhode Island last April on a stormy day with high winds. The pavilion was hunkered down on the beach looking like a spacecraft that had just made an emergency landing. Taking the picture involved a considerable amount of bracing in order to hold the camera still.

For me, beaches are most compelling in their off season clothes.

Sassafras

Sassafras leaves come in three shapes–all appearing on the same tree. Some are ovals, some are shaped like mittens and some are shaped like these (shall we call them three-fingered hands?)

The roots of the saplings smell like root beer.