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: