Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Greens in the Late Winter Forest

Washington, Connecticut

At Steep Rock Preserve in late March. Vivid green mosses in the otherwise nearly monochrome brown woods.










Sunday, March 29, 2020

At Burr Pond

Torrington, Connecticut

Hiking around the state park, 3/27/20. The calendar says Spring but it's still cold winter sunlight.






Wednesday, March 25, 2020

At the Grocery Market

Woodbury, Connecticut

It was time to resupply, so we were off to the local grocery market at 7:30 this morning. There were few patrons and for the most part the shelves and cases were well stocked. There were social distance signs everywhere.


I should have made a wider shot to show the fully stocked produce section, but you can see that our cart has all the vegetables and fruits we were looking for.


Flour and pasta were conspicuously scarce, along with most paper products, but otherwise the center aisle packaged goods were all OK.


Being a vegetarian I usually don't notice the large butcher shop section at the back of the store, but this morning I saw that while the cases with pre-packaged meats were fully stocked, the cases for custom cut meats and seafood were completely empty. Of course the hot food buffet at the front of the store was shut down and empty. Bread, which was all gone ten days ago, was in good supply though less varied and plentiful than usual.


More signs, and sparse pasta shelves. Click on any picture for a larger, more legible view.

More Monday Snow

Washington, Connecticut


Tuesday, March 24, 2020

'ZINES!


Something new and different—magazines printed with MagCloud.



Last fall I set myself a project of creating a series of photo collections tailored to fit the MagCloud print-on-demand magazine medium. I had several projects in mind, beginning with what I've called my "Off Topic" pictures made on my 2012 Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip. There was nothing casual about the Off Topic pictures. I thought it was essential for me to take every opportunity to make the sort of pictures I post here in all the new-to-me places I might wind up while chasing the DI theaters. Just doing the primary project without looking up to breathe never seemed like a good idea.


Turns out, I like the Off Topic pictures as much as the primary project.

This past summer I was designing a personal project (a large PDF album for a fifty year reunion of a scholarship group) and decided to check out MagCloud for the first time in several years. I learned that, unlike a few years ago, I could work directly with InDesign and produce my own design, not limited to pre-designed templates. So I did one and ordered a copy as a proof. Of course it doesn't look like digital prints from one of my photo quality printers, but it conveys a solid representation of what my intent was for the pictures and offers a lot of good reproductions for very little money. The magazine format also lets me sequence the pictures and lay them out in ways that I hope let them enhance and reinforce each other. I made and ordered proof copies of a couple more issues and have studied and evaluated them off and on over several months. Now I've decided to activate the MagCloud sales mechanism and make the 'Zines available.


You can view the projects at the links below, and decide if you're interested. You can buy a print magazine with a free digital version for all your devises or just buy the digital. Of course, if you fall in love with one of the pictures, you could contact me to buy a full tilt print.

Here are the links to the product pages at MagCloud:

Off Topic: Cross Country, 2012

Off Topic: Pennsylvania, 2007-2008

Off Topic: VA/WV, 2015-16
https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1642479?__r=6137

All three in the "collection" should show at each link. I've found that MagCloud's packaging of the magazines is well designed and protective, and with my test orders I found that when ordering more than one they bundled them into a single package for less total shipping cost than getting one at a time. However, last I checked international shipping was prohibitively expensive.

In Yesterday's Snowstorm

Washington, Connecticut


Sunday, March 22, 2020

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Partial Shutdown, 3/19/20

Torrington, Connecticut

Rural and small town northwestern Connecticut is not under lockdown, so I decided to go up to Torrington and have a look around, since I could certainly avoid any "social contact," much less mingling with groups of people. The streets and sidewalks were not exactly deserted, but vehicle and foot traffic were drastically less than normal on a Thursday afternoon. Restaurants are on orders to function only for take out or delivery. Most of the ones in the center of town had home made signs declaring that they're open for take-out/deliveries, but several others were just plain closed. A downtown drug store was doing only curbside pickup or deliveries. A used clothing thrift store was open. The several art galleries that are part of a downtown renewal effort that has been going well, were all closed. A large indoor children's playspace in former Main Street storefronts, part of that urban renewal, was of course closed and dark.


Click on any of the pictures to get a better view that will make the signs more legible.



This is not what Main Street, looking north from the Five Corners, usually looks like at two in the afternoon, even on a rainy day.

Decorative Plants

New York, New York






Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Tree Portraits

Litchfield, Connecticut

Made recently at White Memorial Conservation Center.