Huge Photo Walk

I went on an epic photographing journey today. I went to two locations and I walked something like four miles. Who even am I?

I paid for it with chores though. The cellar has been put back together after twice being blown off by a contractor. I won’t say it is “clean” but I will say it is drastically “cleaner” and that’s good enough for me. Speaking of contractors, yet another is scheduled to come by tomorrow to fix a piece of broken furniture in my step son’s room. Along with cleaning the cellar, I got everything ready for that too. Now it’s time to post some photos and then its time to nap.

I had a bunch on my photo to-do list this morning. One, shoot the sunrise (which required me getting out of bed at 4:00am and being on the road toward Hampton Beach, NH by 4:20… yikes!). Two put a roll of 35mm film through my new (to me) Nikon N90. Three, complete the Frugal Film Project for this month. Four, use the crap out of the 70–210mm zoom lens I got with the N90 on my Nikon Z5 via the FTZii adapter that I mistakenly called the F2Zii adapter in a post yesterday. Five, if possible finish off the roll of film in my Nikon FG-20 that’s been sitting there since March or so. In all five cases, mission accomplished.

I did not ship out the film for developing yet. I am planning on taking the N90 to my nephew’s high school graduation party next week (CONGRATULATIONS!!!!) and I might try to sneak in a second photowalk next Sunday too, if the weather cooperates. I’ll wait until after that to ship out the film. As usual, the day of blog post is only digital photos. Unlike all of my previous posts with images shot on my Z5, this one has a zoom lens. Not only a zoom lens, but a 70–210mm zoom lens!

First stop, Hampton Beach where the sky was completely clear and I saw the sun come out of the water. Success!

I love how the sunrise lights up the windows

The huge zoom let me steal a shot of this dude fishing. He was far away but the lens brought him close.

I drove up the coast a ways to get a different view. This time from way up a hill. The tide was so far out you had to walk half way to France to get to the water. It kinda took some of the granduer out of it for me. Oh well.

The next stop was the two Rail Trails in Newburyport, MA. One is called Clipper, I think, and the other is called Harbor… I think. The plan was to shoot film while walking away from the car, and then to shoot digital while walking back. So these first shorts are on the Harbor trail after I turned around. The sun reflecting off the water was kinda brutal. My Z5 and N90 both had fast enough shutter speeds to handle it, but my FG-20 and my Lomo Lubitell were struggling. I’m a tiny bit nervous about how some of those shots are going to turn out.

Zoomed way in on that little boat heading out to sea

See what I mean about the sun reflecting?

Hey look, a lighthouse! I think it’s a restaurant

The new lens managed some blurry background at f/4!

What do you call a boat like this? Is it a catamaran?

The new lens managed some major blurry background at f/5.6! Wow!

I took a lot of pictures of stairs for some reason

And there you have it. A shit load of pointless pics that I had a lot of fun taking. The film version will come… someday… maybe.

Photos

It’s been a while but I did something mildly creative this morning. Not really, but a little bit.

For the first time since August I filled up a back pack with cameras and went outside a-shootin’. Digital, film, the works.

More often than not when I start feeling the photo-takin’ need I head to the ocean at sunrise. That’s what I did today. As sunrises go it sort of blew chunks. The forecast I read last night said it would be clear skies at sunrise today. It was not. Not even close. There was a little gap between the horizon and the cloud cover that sort of let me see the sun when it rose, but it was a pretty underwhelming view. Thanks to our friend the Nikon Z5 with the cheap-ish 85mm Chinese made lens I can show you what I’m talking about…

At least the waves looked cool. They were about as high as this little corner of the Atlantic Ocean gets.

There’s our friend, Mr Sun. It was trying its best to break through.

My sunrise stop this morning was at Salisbury Beach which is on the Massachusetts side of the state line. I was planning on starting at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, but I needed to stop for gas and I knew there were a few stations on the way to Salisbury so I wouldn’t have to go out of my way. Also, Salisbury is closer to home so it gave me more time to take care of things before the sun came up.

After a few minutes on the beach I wandered around the area a little bit looking for things to shoot… and I ended up more or less shooting the same things that I almost always shoot when I go there. Oh well.

Someday I will be there when these lights are actually on.

Artsy chair pic alert:

Lame life preserver pic alert:

Every now and then the sun would break through the clouds and we’d get a few seconds of glorious golden hour light but the clouds kept getting in the way and blocking the sun. It was a little frustrating.

After a few minutes of wandering around I got in the car and drove up to Hampton Beach. That’s two towns North across the New Hampshire state line. I stopped at a usual fishing boat view. Again, the sun kept breaking through and going away. I think I got some good light here using one of the film cameras, but not so much using the digital.

As usual, let’s all say hello to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plan before it blows up and melts everyone.

Out on the beach itself, would it surprise anyone to learn that this pic was a total accident? It probably shouldn’t.

The seagulls were my friends today. They mostly didn’t run away from me.

Again, when the sun cooperated the view was fantastic.

I left Hampton Beach and headed South to Plum Island to say hello to the Merrimack River and the Plum Island Lighthouse. I made the obligatory stop at the airfield as well.

By this time the sky was pretty blue. The clouds were losing the battle.

Is the water at Plum Island the bluest water on Earth? It’s gotta be in the running, right?

I mean… seriously… just look at that.

I don’t know anything about this boat except that I shoot it every time I come here.

And in closing… the Plum Island Lighthouse… which has to be the most underwhelming lighthouse in the world. I mean it’s not even as tall as the trees that surround it. It’s also not even on the water. It’s a little ways down the street from the river. How effective can it be?

There you have it. A few highlights from this morning’s wanderings. I also shot some film. I had a black and white roll in my FG-20 that was loaded back in August and still had a few shots left (Kentmere 400). Last night I put a roll of Lomography 800 into Dad’s K1000 and a roll of Kodak Gold 200 into my medium format camera. I finished all three rolls and mailed them off to the lab to get them developed. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long to share the film version of this masterpiece of a post. Be on the lookout.

Will there be another photowalk tomorrow? Depends on the weather. I am off work again on Tuesday too so there could be something then, again if the weather cooperates. Hopefully it will be better than today but who knows.

It felt good to just go outside and shoot stuff, even if it was really cold on the water. Summer is coming. Maybe some day soon I’ll be able to repeat this experience without wearing a winter jacket. That would be sweet, huh?

That Time of Year

It is that time of year again. The time where my loyal readers (all zero of you) start getting inundated with posts where I say something like, just you watch… tomorrow I’m going to go to the ocean and take pics of the sunrise.

I haven’t taken a photo-walk or anything like that since last August. Eight months. I have the day off tomorrow and the forecast calls for clear skies at sunrise. Let’s do this!

The way this works is… I say I am going to go to the ocean to take pics of the sunrise the next day, and then the next day arrives and I stay in bed. That’s how these things usually go. Will that be the case this time?

Probably.

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.

Flickr Turning 20?

Flickr, the photography site that I have been an avid user of since 2009, even though it’s been sort of overlooked and forgotten by most of the social media and photography universe, is going to celebrate it’s 20th birthday next month. The big day is a few days after my wife’s birthday, and a week-ish after my step son’s birthday, which is also my nephew’s birthday.

https://www.threads.net/@flickr/post/C2f3EUUyu8R

I guess Threads embeds still don’t work with wordpress.com. Hmmm…

This might work better… friggin’ zuckerberg…

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Anyway, they have a bunch of things planned including some photowalks. I don’t see anything scheduled for Boston and even if they do schedule something it’s 99.9999% guaranteed that I would not join in, even from a social distance. Still… it would be nice, right? Granted, not nice enough for me to try to get something started. No way in hell would Mr Introvert do something crazy like that. No thank you.

Anyway, Flickr’s birthday is February 10th. Take some pictures to celebrate.