Stations Procession

Litchfield, Connecticut

Annual event at the Lourdes in Litchfield shrine, tucked into the woods in the Litchfield Hills of northwestern CT. The weather was appropriately somber.

Protest March Pictures in a Web Gallery

Kent, Connecticut

There's been some interest in the pictures, posted here, that I made during the MarchForOurLives in the small community of Kent, CT. So I made up an online Web Gallery with two dozen of the pictures, larger and much better "web reproductions" than the presentation you see here at Blogger. If you'd like to take a closer look, click on over to the Web Gallery with this Link.

UPDATE:
While I was there, I added two galleries to the "Month By Month" section, September and October of 2017. These galleries each show a dozen of the pictures posted here during each month, again at larger size and much better definition than the Blogger presentation. They're near the top of the Online Galleries at my site.

UPDATE TWO:
Don't bother heading over to the links now. Something went haywire creating/uploading the modified Muse files and the whole site is out of whack until I find out what's wrong. I'd been planning to choose and learn a new web creation program because Adobe is phasing out Muse—maybe that's going to turn into a rush proposition.

UPDATE THREE:

The site seems to be working now. I discovered that a change I made several days ago to the site's navigation system renamed one of the Muse pages even though I didn't directly work on that page, which led me not to upload it when updating the site. This had no immediate effect, but at some point after adding new pages it brought on:

“Some files on the server may be missing or incorrect. Clear browser cache and try again. If the problem persists please contact website author.”

Then it devolved into a javascript error as well. So I local-exported the site from Muse again, then began methodically to upload all dozen items (files/folders) in the Muse Export folder. One of them (the page with changed name) didn't bring up an "Overwrite?" dialog. Oops. I continued to overwrite all 12 items in the export folder, and deleted the changed file's previous incarnation. Then I got the missing files message again in Safari. So I launched Firefox and it went to the site smoothly. Not finding any way to manually clear the cache in Safari, I opened the Onyx maintenance program and used it to 'clear browser cache' and tried Safari again. That worked. So I learned something important about a program that Adobe is phasing out. Terrific.

Preparing for the Hunt

Kent, Connecticut

We'd arrived ahead of time for the Saturday MarchForOurLives to check on the locations along the route, and wondered why a woman was walking around the lawns surrounding the town hall, apparently scattering junk on the grounds. Turns out there were multiple events that morning, the other being an Easter Egg Hunt.

March in Kent, Part Four

Kent, Connecticut, 3/24/18

Last post from the March for Our Lives in Kent. More  protest signs, more calls to vote for change.

March in Kent, Part Three

Kent, Connecticut, 3/24/18

The signs can do the talking.

Young and Old

Kent, Connecticut

There'll be a few more posts from the March for Our Lives this morning—I'll let the people in the pictures do the talking with their signs and shirts.

March for Our Lives: Kent, Connecticut

Big turnout at Kent—someone reported to the organizers that it was around 500, and that’s with the local prep schools on spring break and most of the students away. 

A group of kids came up north on Route 7 from New Milford High School and were warmly welcomed by the crowd, which consisted mainly of adults, mostly parent and grandparent age. This was interesting since New Milford made the national news yesterday: a lawyer for a group (anonymous so far) of New Milford High School parents is suing the school administration and board for allowing the students to join the school walkouts March 14. Claims of politicization on the public school budget, and so forth. At least some of the NMH students were up for more of the same.

More pictures of the marchers and signs tomorrow.

SPINELESS

Woodbury, Connecticut

I was looking over the New Releases shelves at the local library and spotted (on the spine of the book of course) the title, "SPINELESS." I figured it would be some ruthless political treatise, but instead, it turns out to be about jellyfish. So I checked it out at the desk and find it quite interesting.

For two weeks, since our three-day power outage, I've been struggling with a strained back acquired unloading the car when we got back into the house with the power restored. I'm planning to cover a "March For Our Lives" tomorrow but have decided to scale back from heading to the state capital and work with a march in a much smaller rural town where I shouldn't have to walk and maneuver so much. Hope to have some interesting results to post over the weekend.

POSTED

Woodbury, Connecticut

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Torrington, Connecticut

Almost looks like an Art Installation, but I think it's just wear and tear. Despite a lot of urban renewal, there are still vacant storefronts like this right in the middle of the city on Main Street.

PIZZA

Torrington, Connecticut

This is in a mixed commercial/residential section of the city on South Main Street. It appears to have been a private house that was converted to a pizza parlor. For several years when I walked by I noticed there was a busted plastic sign for "South End Pizza" though the place didn't seem to be operational. When I came by last Sunday, there was a much larger interior-lit plastic sign (the old one sat horizontal between the posts) with a new name and some neon in a front window, so there must have been a revival, though the SUV with at least one flat tire sitting on the lawn doesn't look promising.

Bricks

Torrington, Connecticut

I'm quite sure the last time I walked past this Main Street shopwindow the business was a fancy-looking bakery. There's been a lot of urban renewal in Torrington recently, including a burgeoning arts scene, but it doesn't always take for every business venture.

Sittin' on the Sidewalk

Torrington, Connecticut

The building is a restaurant and bar. Not sure what the symbolism is here.

Chores

Thomaston, Connecticut

Yesterday was get the salt off the car day. They used so much salt on the roads in the recent storm, it was hard to say what color the car was.

Trumps in the Windows

Thomaston, Connecticut

I couldn't figure out what business the small Main Street store front engaged in.

Post Office Flags

Woodbury, Connecticut

Artists and Revolutionaries, Plus, Web Site Notes

Hudson, New York

Artists and Revolutionaries is the name of the store. Don't know how accurate the name might be as a description.

Before the storm and power outage interrupted, I was just finishing an overhaul of my website at www.carlweese.com. The frontend of the site is set up in Muse and has pretty nice navigation features, but the content heart of the site is the Online Galleries page, which is another matter. It's a Muse page, but mainly consists of links to pages I made over the past nearly twenty years in at least half a dozen different web page generation programs. I don't want to remake all the pages, not just because I'm lazy, but also because they're kind of a history of my web presence over two decades. For example the earliest pages have scans of platinum prints that aren't up to my current standards (I mean the scanned files on the web page, not the original prints). The earliest galleries are ones that I made by hand in programs like PageMill, and many had broken links that I've managed to fix now, I think. The pictures in the galleries go back as far as forty-eight years ago.

More recent galleries were generated from within Photoshop using the Bridge Output Module. I'm very disappointed this been discontinued in the current PSCC. A pale imitation of it is available in Lightroom (which I dislike, though of course I have it as part of the CC suite). 

I've added several new galleries to the Online Galleries page. At the top is the first of a "Four Seasons" portfolio from a local forest preserve. I shot the pictures in the gallery/folio with digital capture, then made enlarged digital negatives and printed them in platinum/palladium at11 inches wide on 11x15 sheets. Then I made copy photos with the same digital capture equipment (much better results than scanning) to make the files for the web gallery.

Next, there are two new "Month By Month" galleries. Each of these is a tight edit of the pictures posted to my Working Pictures blog—twelve from each month. It's largely an editing exercise, with the monthly collection of twelve establishing a goal for the editing. Perhaps because digital capture leads people to overshoot, I see a lot of complaints about all the time people think they are wasting, editing their pictures. I disagree that this is time wasted. Editing is an essential tool for understanding our own work. David Vestal said that your contact sheets are your photographic autobiography. He also said that people shooting color (at the time that automatically meant slides—color transparencies) suffered from the lack of contact sheets. They lost the learning experience of keeping, and returning to view/edit, all of the exposures made. Over the years I have returned to my contact sheets of 35mm work and found pictures that I now liked better than the ones I printed at the time. Now that I've been doing digital capture as a part of my serious work for fourteen years, I'm finding the same thing; returning to pictures made several years ago, I not infrequently disagree with my original edit.

One of the best ways to improve our next photographs is to study the ones we've already made. In the process of editing, the rejects may be more informative, may teach us more, than the most successful pictures.

Here We Go Again

Woodbury, Connecticut

Not predicted to be a deep fall, but at 9:30 in the morning it's dark and heavy enough.

Green House

Hudson, New York

A great stormy looking sky over Hudson a week ago Saturday, but no storm developed. I guess the building is actually a garage or carriage house.

More Damage

Woodbury, Connecticut

This is what the super-heavy snowfall looked like at dusk Wednesday, around six o'clock. Sadly, here's what that beautiful pine on the right looks like this afternoon:

Improved Situation Update

Friday late afternoon when we checked the house there were lights on in both directions on Washington Road, except for half a dozen customers clustered right around us. It was about 48°F in the house and we gave up. Packed up the cats and overnight gear and drove to an on the market family property half an hour away—where we'd determined the electric service was on. We turned up the heat, coaxed the cats out of their travel boxes and set up to camp out. We were just settling in when we saw flashing lights in the driveway. A "helpful" country neighbor had called 911 because there were lights on in the house. After a pleasant conversation with the constabulary, we tried to get some sleep for practically the first time since Tuesday night. With limited success.

Before turning in, I got the utility company's phone/computer emergency reporting and response mechanism to let me laboriously enter data (and only if you have your account numbers! I'll have to place them in a file saved to iCloud, and maybe a slip of paper in my wallet! Who memorizes their electric account numbers because you might need them?). Along with obviously out of date responses, it confirmed that it was registering this report at eight-something Friday evening, and that the estimate for restoration was before six o'clock Sunday evening. Oh, great. Nothing about the system gave me any reassurance that they knew about the small island of special customers still with no service. We had, however, seen crews in the general area before making the transfer for the night, so we hoped they did know the details.

We drove back this morning and found nothing changed, drove to the senior/warming center and found it closed, making us think nobody knew about the little cluster of abandoned customers. After pulling my car up really close to the building we were able to catch their wifi signal and check email and the other now-essential things you have to be online to do. I got out the utility bill with the account number and went through the whole routine again on my iPhone, was again told that the report was being registered, but this time they said it would be fixed by six today—Saturday.

When the town library opened at ten, we moved there, got online, and did this and that, but couldn't stay awake. So back to the house—still cold but not frozen—then drove to our hideout with the heat turned on, where we spent the afternoon trying to catch up some sleep. With the stressed-out cats. When we returned to the house just before six, there were no signs of lights, but after parking the car in the small hand-cleared area and carefully walking the rest of the ice-covered drive, we could hear The Dragon. The high-powered burner of the state-off-the-art steam boiler that heats our antique house. It was toasty inside. An electric clock on the stove let me estimate the power had come back on about 4:30 PM, making the utility's prediction pretty accurate, and my suspicion that they'd been ignorant of our little pocket, a little unjust. We special few are just, for some unknown reason, at the extreme back of the line.

Being cold is debilitating. For anyone, but especially since we're not young anymore. I feel like I need a week off—from everything—to get back on keel. But we have to deal with insurance about the tree on the barn, and damage it did, sooner rather than later to make sure any damage doesn't get worse.

But not tonight.

More Update

Woodbury, Connecticut

Here's the storm late Wednesday.

And here's the barn with the split off maple leader, early this morning. Power still out and the utility is not being responsive about timing or even outage maps.

Update

Logged on from our town's senior center, which also serves as a "warming center" during weather emergencies.

The big storm dropped several inches of very heavy wet snow. Not only did our power go out about six last evening, but a huge leader of a maple tree snapped off and landed on our barn. Punched a hole in the wall siding, and I can't tell whether there's damage to roof with the top of the tree siting on it, on top of the snow. Power's been out for over 24 hours, reports are that it cold be two or three days, and it's supposed to be 20°F tonight. The snow was so heavy our snowblower couldn't move it and we had to shovel by hand, enough to get a car out the driveway. So things don't look good at all.

532

Hudson, New York

Ducks in a Row

Milford, Connecticut

Foggy winter morning at Long Island Sound.

Standing with Dreamers

Hudson, New York