Beach Photographs …Thoughts in Sagaponack

It’s true. I’ve photographed this scene in many combinations over the years. Beach…sky…a lonely piece of ocean…the vacated shore with a lovely reddish tinge. How many photographs are there? Is there a point when the image is no longer a challenge?

For me, there’s no simple answer.  Sometimes the photograph isn’t in the cards. Other times it’s like you never saw any of it before.

I get up before the dawn, and this  habit of early rising comes with drawbacks for sure. On the other hand, these dark mornings will find me in my workroom. That can be good because there’s a window there with a view to the east. This is where I watch the sky while sipping from my mug. That’s the routine; that’s where my day began earlier this week about an hour before taking this picture.

As you may have heard, many photographs begin in a darkened room.

The drive to the beach took about ten or twelve minutes. I needed headlights but the night was melting away. By the time I turned  into Sagaponack, the sky was injected with color. The sun hadn’t risen but that was good because it meant the timing was right.

As I drove past the store I was trying my best to slow down but it was difficult because adrenaline was flowing. The game of chasing photographs is a strange one; the creative process is readying itself but there’s also a consciousness of prosaic details.

On this morning the rules were simple: I needed to get to the beach before the sun came up and my camera had to be ready to work.

Surprisingly, the beach was deserted (even in February, a bit unusual).   Sand had blown into the edges of the parking lot–a surefire way to tell it’s off-season. Heading up the path between the dunes I could sense that a warm day was enroute.  All around me– the ingredients  that would soon become the elements of my picture.

Dawn:

Out on the ocean, the sun nudged itself to the surface.  Two gulls flew down to the shore and the breeze faded. After a moment, the sun became airborne and Sagg Main exploded into a winter color bath.

It’s true that I’d seen this all before but I took some photographs with refreshed confidence that nothing ever really happens twice.

November Light – Sagg Main Beach

This recent scene from Sagg Main demonstrates the sun’s current position relative to the beach at sunrise. It shines directly down the beach and sets the place ablaze. You won’t see that here in summer. Another interesting thing about the picture is the graceful pattern formed by the tire tracks – something which I’m usually trying to avoid!

 The picture was photographed with the Panasonic Lumix Gf2.

Sagg Main Beach – Photograph At Sunrise

In Sagaponack yesterday morning there was a conspicuous blanket of frost on the farm fields despite the presence of an offshore mist. The haze around the ocean these days is due to warmer water temperatures that have yet to catch up to the air. In a way, those conditions make this a November-specific picture.

btw… the photograph was taken with my Panasonic Lumix GF2 and a 14mm lens.

Southampton Photographs – Walking The North End Graveyard

A few weeks ago my old Dodge Ram was in for another round of surgery in Southampton. I decided to kill some time (so to speak) by taking a stroll around the North End Graveyard.

The place was beguiling. I walked between the graves eating my lunch, noting familiar Southampton surnames on every other stone. Oddly enough, some of the carvings on headstones recalled Native American petroglyphs I’ve seen in the American southwest (not all that remarkable since all that was required in either case was a stone, a chisel and someone with a bit of inventiveness).

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. It requires no beliefs, celebrates imagination and encourages us to enjoy ourselves. What more do we need out of a holiday? Despite it’s lugubrious origins, it now takes itself far less seriously than its competition. While visiting the graveyard, the thought occurred to me to take a few photographs for Halloween this year.

I had my camera with me, but really needed a tripod. As a secondary problem, there was a guy mowing the grass.  I had a hunch that taking pictures would be much more seductive if I had a few less distractions.  I returned a week later hoping for some peace and quiet…(not much to ask  of a graveyard).

There’s an interesting aspect to photographing tombstones. You might think that shooting at dusk would optimize the results. Admittedly, that can lead to evocative pictures, but shooting at noon on a sunny day is the best way to see them in relief. In the photograph to the left, Thomas Cooper’s headstone is seen in magnificent relief complete with it’s collection of lichens. Truthfully, the image would be impossible to take any other time of the day.

For many of these pictures I was nose to nose with the headstones. This called for lying on my stomach in order to focus the camera. If you can believe it, being this close to 250 year old tombstones for the better part of an afternoon was actually serious fun.  I had no idea who all these people were and what their lives were all about, but when the names on the tombstones are all you have, your imagination gets to work.

A few days later I photographed the Old Burying Ground in Sag Harbor:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/sag-harbor-photographs-the-old-burying-ground/

If you’d like me to post a slideshow of all the headstones I photographed at North End, leave me a comment.

How Bridgehampton Got It’s Name

In 1686, an ambitious settler known as Ezekiel Sandford was hired by The Town of Southampton to build a small bridge over Sagg Pond connecting Sagaponack with what was then known as Mecox. Sandford’s sturdy bridge held up for nearly a hundred years and is the reason we now have a place called Bridgehampton. Nowadays the bridge is accessed from Bridge Lane, and after all these years it’s still situated on a quiet backroad where it spans the same salty creek.  To photograph this scene I was standing on the current bridge looking south.  It was good morning for photography because it had arrived with appealing light. In the picture, the catamaran and canoes appear to spring seamlessly from the surrounding hazy marshes, an effect which I like and which can be amplified by a very dense fog.  In Bridgehampton this time of the year, such fogs come rolling in just in time for breakfast. Perhaps Ezekiel Sandford would’ve recognized the light, and some of the elements of the place where he once constructed a bridge.

Water Mill Photographs – Hayground Farm

A panoramic image – one with layered rows of cabbage, sunflowers and Cosmos – taken in the Hayground area of Water Mill in much warmer weather.

We must be patient. Spring is coming.

Southampton Photographs – Meadow Lane Boathouse

A morning kayak trip across Shinnecock Bay yielded several photographs of the historic Meadow Lane boathouse. Although this structure rises from the marshy flats of Eastern Long Island, much about it reminds me of similar abandoned buildings from the high plains – both from an historical context and also because of its sequestered setting. For Southampton, the boathouse is a footnote to a local history which is all but gone. It stands (at least for now) as a monument to former times. Approaching it from the bay by kayak is a good way to get a feel for this place – a building far more connected to the sea than the land.

Other photographs of abandoned structures from the west and elsewhere may be seen by clicking on this link:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/category/viewpoints/solitary-structures/

Here’s a link to another photograph from Shinnecock Bay on the same kayak outing:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/southampton-photographs-great-egrets-and-duck-blind-shinnecock-bay/

 

 

 

Sagaponack Photographs – Cutting Garden

Sagaponack is contrast. It’s a place where traditional Long Island potato barns now live side by side with dwellings that can only be described as radically modern.  A short but astonishing walk will take you from one of the smallest public schools in the state to the largest home in the nation. Buisnessweek described Sagaponack as the most expensive small town in the country, but it’s also a place where farmers still wake up to plant cauliflower.

From a photographic point of view, fog can be an exquisite equalizer. Sagaponack gets more than its fair share, which is not surprising considering there’s ocean in town that backs up to potato fields. Truthfully, the place should be as famous for its fogs as it is for its fortunes.  In a Sagaponack haze, things are delightfully seamless.  In a proper fog, this is one of the loveliest places around.

These images admittedly have a biased view. I’m an unabashed fan of fields and what you might call a classical definition of open space. I’d rather watch flowers blooming than Bloomberg News. I have sentimental ties to Eastern Long Island agriculture. I like ducks and broccoli. In the fall the potatoes in our fields can smell as good as roasting coffee. Have I already said I love fog?

Above and below – roadside views of a cutting garden on Parsonage Lane.

Kayaking and Photographing Great Peconic Bay

The Sebonac Creek estuary in North Sea is one of the better places in the area to find yourself in a sea kayak. Pleasantly under-developed, you can chart a route in any direction and count on some peace and quiet. To the south is Bullhead Bay – and from there the creek meanders three miles to Scallop Pond. There is also much to see by heading through one of the two inlets into Great Peconic Bay. You can paddle around Cow Neck Point or down along the beach adjoining the National Golf Links. A more adventurous trip is to track across to the North Fork, circumnavigating Robins Island – a paddle that takes most of a day. It’s something I’ve done, but only after some planning with respect to wind and tides. In this picture, the view is from the beach near the Links looking west. Across the bay a distant moraine rises from the Pine Barrens near Riverhead and Flanders.  A couple of years ago I hiked to the top of one of those hills with my brother and we stumbled upon the opposing view. Beyond the forest was a secluded view into Great Peconic Bay where we caught sight of Robins Island and the cliffs in Southampton where I took this picture.

Paumanok Path Photographs

Below you’ll find a group of images which I captured last autumn at three different locations on Long Island’s Paumanok Path – a hiking trail largely brought about through the efforts of groups like the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference and the Southampton and East Hampton Trail Preservation Societies.  It is enjoyed  by a core of devoted hikers, mountain bikers, and naturalists here on Long Island, but for better or worse, the path is little known elsewhere.

Lying beyond the bulk of the island’s celebrated suburbs and traffic jams, the trail winds its way through an array of preserves for an astonishing 125 miles. Over several days it’s possible to walk from Rocky Point east to Riverhead, eventually entering the quiet forests of the South Fork and proceeding for another thirty miles to the Montauk Lighthouse. Your hike will conclude with a view of the ocean surf as it pounds the offshore boulders. During your hike you would have bypassed the villages of eastern Long Island in relative solitude, occasionally crossing a road. Your tired feet would’ve enjoyed the distinct tread of a long walk in sandy woods across pine needles. This is not wilderness and you would have had to tolerate the sporadic sound of distant cars, but you would’ve listened to more birdsongs than complaints on your walk, and you might’ve encountered more turtles and turkeys than other human beings. If you completed this hike, you’d understand one reason why  the woods occupying the fish-tailed half of Long Island are a well-kept secret.

Before reaching Riverhead, The Paumanok Path traverses a group of protected land parcels totaling more than 100,000 acres.  This is the pine barrens near Manorville where Pitch Pines grow in seemingly endless numbers. It  crosses through countless kettle holes and goes up and down glacial moraines. In Hampton Bays you can walk to tea-colored ponds ringed by rare Atlantic White Cedars. Further out in East Hampton there are hundreds of acres of White Pines said to be a remnant population from the last ice age, and in Amagansett you’ll find beech forests that might remind you of places you once visited in New England. In the Point Woods near Montauk you can stand beneath a canopy of salt-blown trees hundreds of years old, and from bluffs in Hither Woods you can gaze from the trail north across a glassy bay to Gardiners Island and beyond.

In November, wild cranberries may be picked in places along the trail and those who won’t be stopped by the presence of ticks can snack on blueberries in  July almost anywhere. Indeed, the biodiversity of both plants and animals which thrive along the Paumanok Path rivals that of many wild places in our country much larger and far more famous. If you live here you may not have known you had such a good place to walk, and if you’ve been told that Long Island’s best hikes are in shopping malls then you’ve been misled.

Now to the pictures. The photograph of the maple leaves and pine needles was taken near Chatfield’s Hole in the Northwest Woods area of East Hampton. The image of the lily pads was taken while standing in the murky waist-deep water of Scoy Pond near Cedar Point. The detail of the Scrub Oak leaves was shot near Manorville where the trees grow in profuse tangles. All these places can be accessed from the Paumanok Path. There seems to be no end to possible studies of details like these along the path- especially in the fall.

Southampton Photographs – Great Egrets and Duck Blind, Shinnecock Bay

A worthwhile excursion by sea kayak (assuming the winds are cooperating) takes you from the landing east of the Shinnecock Canal over to the marshy area which backs up to Meadow Lane in Southampton. The bay is shallow, easy to cross and is a place that’s full of expectations for rare birds.

Early on the morning I took this picture, getting over to the beach was no issue. The sky had intriguing color and there was a captivating chill in the air. Once in the marshes, I spent some time floating about in the vicinity of the old boathouse. I was occupied by short paddle strokes and subsequent long glides over mud banks which were pleasantly stuffed with mussels. It’s the quiet in places like this that appeals the most– and I was trying to keep it that way because I had a hunch that something interesting lay ahead.  I’d packed my camera in a dry bag just in case and the bag was stuffed under my spray skirt.

Just west of the boathouse I suddenly came upon two Great Egrets sunning on top of a duck blind. These birds are by no means rare in Southampton, but good photographs of them are– especially if the photographer is nervous about keeping his camera dry and isn’t looking for reasons to capsize his boat. They watched with suspicious eyes.

With a bit of luck, I managed to locate my camera, change a lens, brace myself with a paddle float, and capture an image just as the birds flew off.