Morning Photos

Finally! The sky was clear at sunrise on a weekend. I took four, count ’em four, cameras out with me. My digital, Nikon Z5, my two 35mm, Dad’s Pentax K1000 and my Nikon FG-20, and my new/ebay medium format experiment, Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal.

The 35mm cameras each had a roll already started. My goal was to finish them off. The Lubitel… what the hell, Robert. I’ve had the camera for months and had not completed even a single test roll. I had already messed up the first roll by over advancing it once and blowing a shot, and then flashing the film when the camera back popped open on its own once. My goal was to finish that roll and then put a second roll through and hope that something worked on one of them enough to let me know if the camera actually works or not. Besides all of that film fun, I just wanted to take a bunch of pics with my Z5 because it’s super fun.

I completed all of those goals. I now have four rolls of film to develop. I’ll place an order today and ship them out tomorrow. The two 120 rolls were fucked up even more than I already knew. I didn’t have any trouble with the second one… or so I thought. The camera can be setup to shoot in 6×6 format or in 4.5×6. I was using the 4.5×6 numbers for advancing the film after each (well… most… there are going to be a bunch of double exposures because I am too stupid to operate a manual camera, I guess) but upon further review, the camera is clearly set up to shoot a square format… so every single shot is going to overlap. Moron.

Anyway… here are a bunch of digital pics.

Hampton Beach, NH at sunrise!

These are from a spot in North Hampton, NH, just a little north of Hampton Beach.

These are from a little spot on route 1A just south of Hampton Beach. I don’t know if it is in Seabrook or in the town of Hampton Beach, but you can see the Seabrook nuclear power plant from here so… kaboom.

After that spot I drove home, but didn’t go home. I went to the Spicket Falls Dam in downtown Methuen. We’ve had massive rains over the last week so the river was roaring.

At this point I still had a few shots left in two of the film cameras so I went over to Greycourt Park where I got my brand new sneakers soaking wet by walking around in the grass. It was nice.

What is that baseball doing there? Who left that behind?

And there you have it. Finally, a photography kinda morning. You would think this would hold me over for a little while at least, but nope. I want to go out again right now. Right Freakin’ Now.

First Day of Winter

Well… it’s winter again. Again. Literally winter, as opposed to the last three plus months which was figuratively winter. Literal winter runs from December to March. Here in New England, figurative winter runs from September 1st through sometime in late June. The upside of the first day of winter is that from now on the days start getting longer. The downside is that it’s going to get colder and more awful with each passing day, and it’s going to take so long for the days to get longer enough that it matters that it won’t make any real difference for months.

I hate winter.

December 21st puts us in the home stretch for xmas. I am still waiting for the amazonians to deliver a couple of things so the wrapping is still not complete. I have to go out and pick up a few things today as well. That includes some food supplies for xmas eve, xmas dinner, and our slightly delayed annual xmas eve party which happens on the Sunday after xmas this year. I also need to bring my work-holiday gift to my sister’s today so we can have it with xmas dinner.

I need to play guitar but there probably won’t be time for it. I need to go out and take pictures of stuff but the weather likely won’t let me. Ugh.

Lots to do, but I can’t do anything until I clean the tiny amount of snow we got yesterday off of the cars and the driveway. Ugh.

I hate winter. Remember that time a few years ago when we went to Florida in January and the weather was warm? Can we maybe do that again?

Good Family Weekend

From a family point of view, this weekend was wonderful. From a creative projects point of view though this weekend didn’t happen. No music, no photo projects beyond just snapping a few with my phone.

I literally would not change a thing, but maybe over the next week I’ll do some creative stuff. Just to balance the karmic scales, you know?

Here’s a film photo to hold me over for tonight.

Salisbury Beach

Just before sunset, the pier on film. My second roll of pro-level film. Unlike the first crack at it, these are pretty underwhelming. And yet… I want more… and more… and more…

This Morning’s Photo Adventure Part 3/3

I headed in the direction of home… south. I stopped at a little marina type place right across the water from the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. At this point in time I am not glowing in the dark.

And this is the point where I realized that my ISO was set to 1600. I changed it to 100 but I was almost done for the day so there aren’t many low ISO pics. Oh well.

And there we have it. All of the pics (well, most of them at least) from my morning photo fun experience at the ocean. I shot a whole roll of film to go along with all of this. Maybe I’ll get it developed at some future date in 2025 or something.

This Morning’s Photo Adventure Part 2/3

I drove North from Hampton Beach looking for a place to pull off that had a nice view. There were a bunch of potential spots, but they all had no parking signs. This spot had a no parking sign too but I was a total rebel and pulled over anyway. If you know this area, you’ll recognize the spot.

This Morning’s Photo Adventure Part 1/3

I stopped in three places this morning. I will post each stop separately, though almost all of the pictures I took were at this first spot.

Stop number one was the same spot as last week’s cloudy sunrise failure. Hampton Beach. Just a smidge north of the main beach area. Last week the tide was out and the clouds were in. This week the tide was in and the clouds were nowhere to be seen. I got there about 10 minutes before the sun came up. I only had a short stretch of very rocky beach between me and the sea wall. It was enough.

This next photo is a very happy accident. I had put my digital camera (Nikon Z5) down to take some pre-sunrise film pics (Dad’s Pentax K1000). It was getting very close to sunrise time so I switched back to digital and just put it up to my eye and focused on the horizon. I was looking due East (totally by accident) at the exact moment the sun broke the water. Like, the exact moment. I saw it through the view finder. I did not see a green flash though.

This photo is from about one heartbeat after the sunrise started. Can you see the little guy off in the distance?

This photo demonstrates my one screw up in a very positive way. When I am at home taking pictures of the cats I keep the ISO on my Z5 pretty high. 1600, usually. When I go outside I lower the ISO to 100 or 200, depending on how much light there is. I just like the way things look when the ISO is way low. Today… I forgot to lower it. All of these are at ISO 1600, which means the camera takes in more light (ISO is supposed to be like film speed, the higher the number the more light) which meant I could use a way faster shutter speed, which means the birds who randomly photo bombed me are not blurry at all.

I know I already posted this next photo, but it is my favorite of the day by so many hundreds of miles that I am posting it again.

And there we have it. The first of three posts from this morning’s photo fun. I am very pleased with how these came out, even if the ISO is way too high. The next post will be from the side of the road (route 1A) a few miles north of this spot. The second post is from a few miles south at a little beach spot in Seabrook, across the water from the nuclear power plant and where there is a little marina or something with lots of boats tied up for the night.

I just hope all of the film shots came out okay.

Success

I’m sure I will post a ton of pictures later, but for now let’s just say that this morning’s sunrise goofiness was a success.

Today’s Daily Road Trip

The last two day trips have taken us North, one to New Hampshire and the other to Maine. Today we went South to Rhode Island. We went down to Westerly and then came back up the coast through Narraganset and Newport. We stopped for pictures at a couple of spots in Westerly. That town is a New England flavored paradise. I could totally live there.