Borrowing a Bit of Florida Color - PTAS

Today's Picture Tells A Story finds me in Poinciana Florida vising my father and step-mother (though she's been a mother in my life for all but my first five years).

Sony A7iii w/Sony 90mm f2.8 Macro

1/200, f5, ISO2000

Processed in Capture One Pro 12

After a rough day of traveling yesterday, today was dedicated to relaxing and taking things easy, facilitated by a front of heavy rain that made going out a dubious prospect. That front brought with it a significant cold snap... by Florida standards at least. A cold January night in Florida is, of course, an unseasonably warm day back home in Maine.

The world here teams with life and color compared to the monochromatic New England winter, with its near-constant cloud cover, snow, and barrenness. Many days in the northeast, the only splash of color to be found is the evergreen trees, though those are more often than not white with snow themselves. Even winter sea is dark as ink against the gray sky.

That isn't to say that winter in the north can't be stunning in its starkness, it absolutely can. I'd be a strange "Winter" to think otherwise.

And Maine as a state can be so remarkable in its natural beauty as that it sometimes feel like cheating being a photographer there.

But the warmth and liveliness of more southern regions are easier on my spirits, as well as on my worn body, compared to the brutal cold and darkness of this season back home. That said, they are also a forbidden, if delectable, fruit.

Reality is that at the moment, it simply isn't feasible for my family to imagine living someplace like this. There are scant regions of the US that are safe and welcoming, legally or culturally, for queer and trans people.

We decided years ago that local protections (city/county) weren't reliable enough in the face of state laws that didn't provide legal protections. And while the national culture has shifted remarkably fast on gay rights, things lag behind for trans people. Meanwhile, the law is well behind both, and the current administration has made concrete moves level to curtail federal protection of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.

The only option that jumps out for living warm-ish year-round while having our rights enshrined in law is Southern California, an region both exceedingly costly to live, and whose resources are dangerously strained by the people already living there.

So until/unless things change, I'll experience winter warmth only in visits, returning next weekend to the harsh elegance of the northern winter. Look for another Florida dispatch for next week's PTAS, which will probably go live after I'm already on a plane heading back to Maine.

Note: I apologize if the color or exposure on this shot isn’t quite up to par, I’m working from an un-calibrated laptop over a cell-phone hotspot

New Year’s Day - Now With 100% Less Sunrise, Plus PTAS Returns Weekly for 2020

The way I see it, I have quite a bit in common with my little car. As long as I keep her batteries topped off and plan things well, there’s really proven to be nowhere she can’t take me. It’s been an adjustment coming from a petrol car, but there are great resources out there to help, and we’ve adjusted well. 

I’ve got to learn to do the same in terms of taking care of myself, including doing what I can to keep my mental and physical “batteries” in the green.

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2019's Long Night - Solstice in Three Photos

It occurs to me as I sit down to write up my 2019 Long Night journey, that I haven’t written anything substantive in over ten months, not since I wrote my mom’s eulogy. For that matter, I also have done little scenic or landscape photography in that same time. The idea of taking those kinds of photos without being able to share them with mom has simply been too painful. 

In a year that has, for many reasons, including losing my mother, felt like a year-long slog through an unending Long Night, I set out into my Solstice vigil low on sleep and high on anxiety, but determined to honor the turning of the year.

Sunset

Over a year since moving away from Old Orchard Beach, it’s on that familiar stretch of sand that I find myself saying goodbye to the waning sun. The popular resort town becomes a shadow of its summer-self by this time of year. The amusement park looms skeletal over the pier area, where all but a few businesses are shuttered. In the winter, it’s occasionally possible to stand on the beach and not see another soul. 

I have the beach to myself on this grey, chill, solstice eve. Just when I had resigned myself to relying on my watch to tell me when the sun officially set though, a brief break in the clouds graces me with a last glimpse of light before the Long Night sets its teeth into the world.

Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm f2.8 @21mm
ISO 2500 1/125 f7.1
Processed in Capture One

Deep of the Night

In a similar vein to my 2018 deep of the night photo, my 2019 clever conceptual photo plan proves untenable. This year I go through with executing the photos, at no small inconvenience and discomfort, but the results are dismal. 

However, I find myself oddly relieved. The idea that failed was a revisit of a successful mid vigil shot from a few years ago, with only minor variation. Moreover, it took (kept?) my solstice journey in an emotionally dark place.  As much as it makes sense, it’s not the energy I want to carry into the waxing year. 

Looking for something more joyous and whimsical, I bundle up and trudge down the road. In the bitter cold and inky darkness, with a silly grin on my face, I spend some time getting a photo that my husband has been asking for for weeks. Our neighbors about a half mile away have decked one of their dump trucks in lights, with Santa in the cab behind the iced over windows. It’s just so ridiculous and fun, a perfect bit of levity in the depths of the Long Night.

Sony A7iii w/Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 @75mm
ISO 160 3.2 seconds f8
Processed in Capture One

Sunrise

For the dawn of the waxing year, I find myself at a spot I’ve considered each year for sunrise at the end of my solstice vigil, but never actually visited. I’m relieved at how easy it is to get to, and the view down the Saco River is beautiful as the approaching sun begins setting the scattered clouds ablaze. My spot is perfectly positioned for the rising sun, something that is more difficult to find on the Maine coast than one might imagine.

I’m in position a solid half hour before the sun is scheduled to break the horizon, and shoot dozens of photos as the dawn paints the sky in blues, purples, and finally, yellows as the day begins to break. After each shot, I tuck my hands quickly into my pockets, thawing them with the rechargeable electric hand-warmer I have stashed there. 

When the sun is well and truly hung in the sky, and the most visually exciting elements of sunrise have passed, I turn to head back. A local, in his tennis-ball yellow Jeep (a color GM calls “Shock”) has stopped behind me to watch the sunrise, and generously offers me a ride back to the lot where I’ve parked. For the first time in three years, solstice dawn has brought color and a view of the sun, rather than simply a brightening of a cloud-shrouded sky. That, plus the kindness of a passing stranger, has me feeling lighter and easier than when I set out into the Long Night just over fifteen hours earlier.

Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm 2.8 @20mm
ISO 100 1/160 f8
Processed in Capture One

2018 - A Solstice in Gray

Into the Long Night - Saco Heath

Just over an hour before sunset, with my camera belt strapped to my waist and traction spikes on my boots, I set off into the fog-blanketed gloom of the Saco Heath Preserve. Unseasonably warm rain pattered on the hood of my raincoat, and for once I was all alone as I traveled the slick boardwalk that wends through the woods and fragile marshlands.

The sparse heath and leaden sky seemed to me a fitting send-off for the final daylight of a year suffused with gloom. From a global perspective, the fact that the world didn't end in nuclear fire was perhaps the best thing that could be said for 2018. While political and cultural turmoil swept across the globe, along the way battering or obliterating the pillars of order and freedom that shaped the world my parents and I grew up in, illness and death also hit close to home for my family. Few people I suspect, will be sad to see this past year recede into memory.

Yet even on a wet and miserable winter day, there are glimpses of life and beauty on the Saco Heath. Shrubs and trees that have adapted to its hostile soil persist from year to year, and even in the deepest part of winter still to come, there will be green, living things to be seen there. In that too, the Heath seems a fitting place to see out the waning year, for there were victories and triumphs in my life since the last winter solstice as well.

The fading of the light isn't blatant the way it is on a clear day. Rather than brilliant gold sun being swallowed into blue twilight, the gray filling the sky merely grows imperceptibly deeper with every moment, the steadily climbing Auto-ISO numbers on my camera revealing what my eyes don't fully experience. At 4:08pm the alarm on my phone goes off, telling me that somewhere beyond the gray, the sun is at that moment vanishing below the horizon. I turn towards where the sun would be if I could see it, and shoot this photo, capturing the moment the world around me slipped quietly into the Longest Night.

Sony A7iii w/Sony 16-35mm f4 @21mm

ISO8000 1/20 f6.3

Processed in Capture One and finished in Photoshop

Deep of the Long Night - Personal Fire

Deep into the night, I set off for Portland to shoot what I thought could be quite interesting photos. When my first shooting location didn't pan out, I headed to what I considered my “plan B,” where, after a treacherous hour of negotiating slick rocks in the rain, I fundamentally failed to capture the shot I had envisioned. Frustrated, sore, and soaked to the bone with chill water, I retreated to my car for the return trip home.

So, because sometimes the most powerful light in the darkness is the one we create for ourselves, I decided to build for myself a tiny fire to beat back the night. I was limited in the scope of what I could make, not having yet managed to get the permits required to have even a camp fire. Instead I sawed up some fatwood/rich lighter into small pieces and built a hot, smoky little fire in an antique cast iron cauldron. The following quite enjoyable forty minutes or so of turning my camera to the heart of the fire in the deep of the longest night went a long way to soothing the frustration I felt at the failure of my grander plans for the second photo of my solstice vigil.

Sony A7iii w/Nikkor 55mm f3.5 AI

ISO1250 1/320

Processed in Capture One and finished with Topaz Studio

End of the Long Night - Rural Substation

The dawn of the waxing year came gradually, without a blazing sun rising to banish the night. Instead, the world around me slowly and evenly brightened, as behind thick shrouding clouds the sun began its march across the sky. The sun didn't even create a brighter spot against the flat, even, gray filling the world. Without the Photographer's Ephemaris to tell me where and when the sun was rising, I would have been unable to pinpoint its location or note when exactly the waxing year had begun. After a half hour past sunrise, I reluctantly returned home to finally get some rest.

Sony A7iii w/Minolta MD 35-70 f3.5 Macro

ISO ISO500 1/60

Processed in Capture One and Photoshop

Grandpa Richard - Picture Tells A Story

I used to write a weekly column for Bil Browning's The Bilerico Project called Picture Tells A Story. My grandfather died suddenly this afternoon, and for whatever twist of how I manage grief, I knew that the best thing I could do for myself was go shoot the sunset and write a PTAS about grandpa, so here it is.

Sunset at Camp Ellis Maine - May 8th 2018
Sony A7ii w/Minolta MD 35-70mm f3.5 Macro

Grandpa Richard - Picture Tells A Story

When the sun rose on May 8th, my grandfather was alive, for all I know he even watched it. But by the time the sun set, he was gone. I took this photo standing on the dock at Camp Ellis, watching as for the first time in over ninety-four years, the sun set on a world without him in it. Everyone reacts to grief differently, and I knew that what I needed this evening was to watch and capture this sunset.

I'm fond of saying that grandpa was a rock for his family, and for so many other people. He was a point of stability, doing what he could to support, ground, and shore up the people he cared about. But at the same time, as is common with rock, flexibility wasn't often his virtue. Those he cared about too often found themselves dashed against him by the waves of life, and he could leave figurative scrapes and bruises on our spirits without ever being aware of it.

The last few years had been especially hard on my grandfather. For a man who grew up in Brooklyn having his milk delivered by horse and buggy, life in the internet age was often frustrating and alienating. To his last day, he remained sharp, independent, and engaged in life, which he first had shared with his childhood sweetheart, my grandmother, for well over fifty years, and then with his beloved companion Barbra for more than another decade.

But that sharpness came with a cost of its own. As a man who believed strongly in the American Dream and the potential for business and capitalism to be a force for social good, the Great Recession and corporate shift to seeing seeing employees as disposable, with businesses having no sense of loyalty other than to their shareholders, frustrated him to no end. Having grown up before the Second World War, in which he served in the Army, he had experienced no small amount of anti-semitism in his life. The rise of the Alt Right and the accession of Donald Trump to the presidency worried and disgusted him as an American, a Jew, and a businessman from NYC.

Beyond that though, grandpa often saw himself as the last man standing of the people who had made up so much of his life. All his childhood, and even most of his long-time adulthood friends are gone, as are his brothers, and the sister he never got to meet. My uncle was probably the person left on earth who had known my grandfather the longest. It's a strange and difficult thing to outlive one's past.

There is not enough room on the page to delve into the ways my grandfather shaped who I am today, in ways both good and not-so-good. But what I will say is that throughout my whole life, I never once doubted that he loved me. And for all his inflexibility in much of his life, he worked hard to roll with myriad challenges of loving me as his grandson. Through the development of my severe Tourette, to my coming out as queer, my polyamorous relationships, even my... less than conventional career paths, grandpa was often puzzled and dubious, but always loving.

So while the sun set on a world without him in it anymore, I take solace in knowing that I carry his love, and as long as the sun rises on I, and so many others he cared about, he continues to be part of our world.