Tag: farm

Indoor Ring with Hay

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When the weather outside is frightful (pardon the cliché), an indoor ring is good for two very important duties: (1) keeping the hay dry to feed the horses and (2) riding. This photograph has symmetry highlighted by the very bright windows; when a very bright light source shines through a lens (and it’s particularly noticeable with this prime lens), it creates an image of itself on the inverse side of the center of the image. In this particular case, that inverted image appears over the pony, indicating that the pony is across the inversion point from the window.

Indoor Ring with Hay

New England Home

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Homes designed to weather the fierce winters of northern New England and the North Country have a particular structure: Something vaguely Scandinavian and reminiscent of a Viking longhouse. When the sun sets and the clouds gather for our (current) proper winter, I’m glad for the equivalence.

New England Home

Escape the Suburbs

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The gradient from dense, urban (and suburban) areas to rural and natural settings is one of my favorite photographic subjects—and the subject of most of my favorite photographs. In this particular aerial shot from the in-between area over Pennsylvania, the sun has mostly set, leaving shadows and a few orange reflections in the overly ordered geometry of subdivisions. Down the winding highway, beyond the hills, in the less-dense and more agrarian land, the sun still casts a warm glow.

Escape the Suburbs

Kentucky Horse Farm

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The grassy, rolling, limestone-based Kentucky countryside looks too perfect. Precise fencing geometries and gently rippling ponds are just too much. I’m reminded of the famous Microsoft Windows XP default wallpaper, “Bliss.” The key to making both images work, I think, is an overall very clean image with just enough small details and imperfections at the edges to show you that it must be real.

Kentucky Horse Farm

Helping Out on the Farm

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The narrow depth of field exaggerates an image that flashed past me in an instant while we traveled: a few children, playing in the crunchy remains of winter outside a barn. Ignoring the safety orange hat and the electrical conduit traveling up the side of the barn, and this seems like an image that could have come from any point in the past 150 years.

Helping Out on the Farm

Icicles, or Almost Canada

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Dotting the road to Ogdensburg’s bridge to Canada are tiny, abandoned houses like this one. It’s rather charming, and just a bit sad, but mostly it reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and the obversations that a society can retreat from the frontiers and back into the cities over time. Sprawl and civilization are not inevitable.

Icicles, or Almost Canada

Madden Indoor

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Here’s a little (huge panorama) teaser from an upcoming story I’ll have in Horse & Style Magazine, covering the barn and home of Olympic gold medal winner Beezie Madden. I was particularly enamored with this shot of the indoor ring, distorted to a fantastical shape by the panorama process. With all of this wood and wide beams, I can think of nothing more than a Viking longhouse (built at horse-scale, of course.)

Madden Indoor

Scary Farm

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For Halloween, what better scary and spooky sight than an abandoned farm? The creepier part comes in the origin of this particular farm: this is part of the abandoned set of “I Dreamed of Africa” in Zulu-Nyala near Hluhluwe, South Africa. So this is an abandoned, decaying facsimile of someone’s imagined African paradise. Eerie!

Scary Farm

Oregon and Washington

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Aerial photography presents a magical, avian view of the world around us, but until I (someday) get a quadcopter drone, commercial air travel is my best friend. (Other than the fact that pretty much all other aspects of commercial air travel are pretty miserable.)

In any case, this photograph of the Columbia River, with Oregon on the right of the image and Washington on the upper-left, does a good job of capturing the strange mish-mash of agriculture, residences, and industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Oregon and Washington