Maine

JanieM

Until I took up with Steve from Mendocino, I mostly took pictures ad hoc as I went about my daily life, except for fall color, sunsets, lake reflections … well, okay, I did make some special efforts to take pictures. In the past couple of years I’ve stuck with the habit of keeping a camera in my pocket at all times, or grabbing it and going outside when comthing catches my eye. But I’ve also greatly increased the number of excursions devoted specifically to taking pictures. 1, 6, 8, and 9 in this set are from trips like that. The rest were caught in passing.

Note on names: I tend to give names (lakes, towns, roads, etc.) for the sake of anyone who might live around here, or visit, and wonder where the pictures were taken.

Thanks to Steve from Mendocino, as always, for all his help, editing and otherwise.

On The Road – JanieM – Maine #12Post + Comments (17)

JanieM

Long ago I had a neighbor who was a professor of psychology. One day we were talking about my extreme night owl habits, which a number of people in my life have ascribed to rebelliousness, laziness, or any number of other remediable factors.

No, said the professor, studies show that being a night person or a morning person is pretty much built in to people’s physiology. “We call it ‘larks and nightingales,’” he said.

As a lifelong nightingale who has seldom seen the sunrise, I’ve been informed many times that I’m missing a lot. I believe what my morning person friends tell me, but it’s just as hard for me to get up at dawn as it would be for them to stay up being productive until the wee hours.

These days, though, I’ll do a lot for the sake of a good picture. So one morning this fall I dragged myself out of bed and went across the road to the town beach with a camera.

It was indeed beautiful, as a couple of the pictures in this set confirm.

On The Road – JanieM – Maine #10Post + Comments (24)

JanieM

We’re back in Maine as far as pictures go, but for conversation’s sake I want to grab a loose thread from the Mendocino series and weave some afterthoughts around it.

From Mendo #4:

Each place has taught me something about photography, and vice versa. Taking pictures has reminded me that the landscape is one of the main reasons I moved to Maine. Visiting Mendocino surprised me photographically, because the colors, light, and subject matter are so different from home that they required me to think more instead of just falling into the shot.

A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan) commented on that thread:

Since I live in Mendocino County and have never visited Maine, I wish you would talk a bit more about this – I find it fascinating.

I wrote a long but not exactly on point reply, then raised the question with Steve later in the day. Our exchange went something like this:

Janie: someone else asked this in one of the earlier posts, and I find it bafflingly hard to put it into words; it’s relatively easy to talk about the different mix of trees, the shape of the hills, etc, but quite hard to talk about the light….

Steve: thinking out loud for a moment . . . there seems to be more magenta in the landscape here . . . and maybe yellow . . . the colors in Maine seem to be more discrete; here they tend to run together more

Janie: that is wonderful . . . and it also clarifies something for me about the colors! because I think that’s exactly it, and part of why i was so flummoxed for a while. But it’s a hard thing for someone who isn’t as visually sophisticated as you to pick up, much less articulate it. I have felt it, but could never quite put my finger on it beyond feeling like “Mendocino isn’t as colorful,” or it’s more subtle, or something. And this fits with the fact that I find summer less fruitful for picture-taking in Maine than the other seasons . . . it’s all green! There’s far less color variation in the landscape than in the other seasons.

Steve: also something I think is important . . . parcel sizes seem to be larger here . . . pretty much all the rural land between Ukiah and the coast is 40 acres or more . . . with many bigger parcels held by large timber companies . . . that 40 acre minimum is by law . . . and the supervisors at one point over 20 years ago turned down an application to halve the forty acre parcels owned by the Shandels . . . the supervisors said that would change the entire sense of the county and they weren’t going to allow it.

Madeleine also commented in Mendo #4:

It seemed to me that your photos, JanieM, of Mendocino environs are different both in content and hmmm style. But the Keene farm photo returned to Maine. The two yellowish lines of the track caught my eye first, in its green field, and a bit later the scattered sheep. But then I noticed layers—very Maine, I think—the dense wall of evergreens, a backdrop to the individual greening trees capturing the house, and forward to the bright green field, scattered sheep, and parallel lines of track.

Madeleine’s comment gave me a lot to ponder. I think she’s right about the Keene farm photo, and it’s partly because that scene was more Maine-like than a lot of the countryside in Mendocino County. So when the opportunity presented itself, I reverted to form! More often I didn’t know what to shoot a lot of the time because I was facing an unfamiliar landscape, however beautiful.

As to unfamiliar landscapes, an article Steve sent me from PetaPixel magazine echoes something I said in my first barn post [my bold]:

[Australian photographer Christian] Spencer, who has been living in the Brazilian rainforest for the majority of the last decade, has captured macaws, emus, and green-headed tanagers. He tells PetaPixel that he has been a professional painter for the last 25 years, but only bought his first camera at age 37, eight years ago.

“A large proportion of the photos have been taken in Brazil and the rest in my home country, Australia,” he says. “[There are] many challenges in all types of photography, including in the rainforest, but your best tool is observation. It’s only with years and years of observation that you can capture secret moments and rhythms of the rainforest.”

Lots to ponder on the road to becoming a better photographer.

On The Road – JanieM – Weavings (Maine #8)Post + Comments (24)

JanieM

With this set, I leave the backstory to the imagination of the viewer.

On The Road – JanieM – Mysteries of Maine (Maine #6)Post + Comments (10)

JanieM

A miscellaneous set, each with its own bit of story.

On The Road – JanieM – Maine #5Post + Comments (16)

JanieM

Central Maine is rich in lakes and rivers. Lucky me, I live across the road from a lake that has been the object of my attention since I moved here in 1987. I didn’t note down when the ice started to form that first winter, but after waiting and waiting and waiting, I did record the date when it was finally gone: April 12, 1988, my first spring on this property.

I called it “ice-off,” though I soon learned that people around here call it “ice-out.” Some folks drive the fifteen miles around the lake, which takes about half an hour, again and again until they’re sure all the ice is gone. Sometimes the Augusta paper reports their findings. I’m lazier, and my definition is simpler: when I can’t see any more ice from my house, it’s officially “ice-off.”

Except that even then it’s not really simple. Some years the wind blows a big plate of ice south out of sight, only to blow it back the next day. Some years the ice really does just seem to melt; other years it breaks up into big chunks that float around for days. Sometimes it seems to be gone, only to re-form along the shore overnight, as if November has come again. Sometimes it’s all gone except for a thin strip on the far shore in a spot that never gets any sun. So does that count as ice-off, or not? Only I can say!

For my first twenty-two years here, the ice always disappeared during the month of April, with April 1 the earliest date (2006) and April 28 the latest (2001). Then we had March 23 in 2010 and March 25 in 2012. Since then it’s been back in April. I have never seen any ice on the lake in May.

The first picture in this set is a shot of new ice behind a dam not far from where I live. There are plenty more scattered around in the galleries at www.janiemat.com, from Gallery 4 of which this meditation on winter is adapted. Thanks as always to Steve from Mendocino, whose energy and design skills made the website possible.

On The Road – JanieM – Maine #4Post + Comments (11)