Industry Meets Nature

In my final series of photos from our Adirondack photography trip, industrial images sort of meld with nature. Kind a perfect summary of my day, I guess.  We drove down a dead end road that terminated with this bridge, which is now closed to vehicular traffic.  It turned out to be a great vantage point for seeing the intense fall foliage underneath the lowering gray skies.  It also turned out to be a favorite hangout for a lot of gnarly, industrious spiders.

This wheel barrow was found somewhere along the dead end road, right near the lovely red ivy.  I thought they were painfully picturesque.

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Pipeline Shapes

This is a continuation of my Adirondack Industrial photos.  While looking for some waterfalls (which we never did find, come to think of it), we turned down a side road and ran into this enormous pipeline.  D thought it was transporting water from a reservoir for power generation, and although he told me the reservoir, I can't remember the name.  I just thought it was incredibly cool... and incredibly enormous.  Here are my favorite shots of it.

First, for scale, here's a picture my husband took of me on top of it.  I'm relatively certain I shouldn't have been up there, but it was all for the sake of art...  When on top of it like that, I could feel the vibrations of the water rushing through the line.

Here it is, stretching into the trees.  It reminds me of a giant blue caterpillar:

I love all the details of the rivets and rust.

One lowly bee, perhaps trying to warm herself in the weak sun?

It looked to us like this old wooden water tower was at the end of the line, but how it's used is a bit of a mystery.  I could make several guesses, but have no real information to go off.  Anyone know the history of this pipeline?  This is my husband's shot of the tower, as it came out better than any I took of it.  I can't imagine there are too many wooden water towers still in use.

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Greenwood Creek State Forest

I am guessing these are probably more what folks have in mind when they think of autumnal photos in the Adirondacks.  On our photography trip, the first place we stopped was Greenwood Creek State Forest.  Here's where D began his photography lessons for the day.

I took about a zillion photos here, but only liked a handful.  As so often happens with my photography, I am either in the groove or not, and for some reason gorgeous fall leaves and waterfalls weren't as inspiring for me on Sunday as they would normally be.  Apparently I was more in the mood for industrial decay (see previous post).  Still, I do really like some of these:

A photography lesson in progress between D and spouse:

And here I am, just hanging out on a big rock while taking a break from snapping pictures.

Among the things I experimented with was the aperture, which affects the depth of field.  Although I knew what changing the aperture does for the depth of field, I made a point of taking the same shot with extreme differences in the aperture setting, just for comparison's sake.  I thought this was an amazing example of the power of the aperture.  The first was taken at an f 6.3 , and the second at f 36. (No, M, I did not bother to identify the type of fungus... yet):

I also fiddled with the shutter speed, the effect of which is so beautifully illustrated by moving water.  The first is a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second, and the second at 1/5 of a second:

And just some more water, leaves, and rocks:

 

I just about had the camera in the water for this one:

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Photographing Adirondack Industry

I have been so ridiculously busy lately that my blogging has really suffered.  I'm not complaining, mind you - we've been doing so many fun things with great people.  For the most part, it's been a decision among frolicking, blogging, or sleeping.  The latter two have suffered.  Take this past weekend, for example:

We attended a BBQ on Saturday, hosted by our friend M and his housemate, that started early afternoon and lasted well into the night.  It was a blast.  Great people, very fun games.  I'm not very good at horseshoes.  I hadn't played badminton in umpteen years, and discovered that I'm so-so at it (but would be better when there wasn't so much wind).  I had never played frisbee at night before with a frisbee that has LED lights embedded in the rim.  I'm downright awful at frisbee, even in daylight.  But thankfully I was playing with folks who were both better than I am and remarkably understanding about my shots that kept flying over the neighbor's fence and into the back corner of the yard where the dog poo had been shoveled earlier in the day (oops).

Too fun.  I could have stayed frolicking all night, but...

Sunday we had to get up at the crack of dawn to do some Adirondacks photography with our friend D.  I am NOT a morning person.  Getting me out of bed before 6 a.m. requires a cattle prod and coffee so strong the stirrer stands up on its own in it. 

Once awake, though, it was a wonderful day.  Our friend D has done work as a professional photographer, and spent much of his day giving my husband and me lessons.  He, too, is a Nikon guy, so knew how to use our camera.  D hauled out all his old equipment for us to play with. 

For the Nikon camera nerds, here's the info on what we shot with.  Others probably want to skip this geeky paragraph:

Spouse took a roll of 35 mm on D's old Nikon F4, which was essentially the best-of-the-best Nikon film camera from about 15 years ago.  My husband also used D's old D70 (which is the same camera I have) for part of the day.  Mostly Spouse used D's Tokina 28-70 f2.8 lens, which is a sweet lens.  Sooo much brighter than the Tamron 18-200 I have.  He also did some shooting with D's Nikon 20mm f2 lens.  (I love wide angle lenses!)  D used his Nikon D300, which I think he has a Nikon 18-200 lens with VR on.  I even took a few photos with a kit cardboard pinhole camera I made.  That little sucker will be the feature of a blog post, once I have the photos from it, if any turn out at all (I'm skeptical).

It was quite ridiculous: among the 3 of us, we had 6 cameras and probably at least 10 lenses. 

Photos from Sunday will be appearing for the next few days, I presume.  I took more than 450 photos.  Sorting through and editing those is going to be quite an undertaking!  The lighting was not great - heavily overcast.  I still wound up with a lot of underexposed photos, even under D's excellent tutilage.  While we checked my D70's light meter at one setting, I think we should have spent more time determining whether its light meter is really functioning properly.  Regardless, I did get some nice photos.

My favorite shots of the day, rather surprisingly, were not the typical fall foliage and Adirondack waterfalls shots.  Instead, my favorites turned out to be some more industrial shots I took of old rusting bridges, crumbling factory towers, and water pipelines.  Here are a few I particularly liked, mostly of rust:

 

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