Ice Shack Seal Cove Pond. 5.0 sec at f/4.0 iso 50 with B+W 110 ND. 21mm on 17-40 f/4.0 5DMKII

Technical stuff: sometimes I like to make my long exposures shorter and retain some of the edges of the clouds if there is an angry enough sky- along with a larger aperture that will also soften the plane of the sky, this style of short Le evokes feelings of Wizard of Oz skies or something. 

Also- recently a friend lent me a book about Robert Frank and his making of "The Americans" called "Looking In Robert Frank's The Americans" 

which is an awesome study of black and white photography and America in the 1950's and the amazing character of Robert Frank but what really struck me as the most from flipping through those images was the massive in-your-face, almost sometimes completely visually obliterating- grain. Grain like an eye ball full of beach sand, not to say that I didn't like it- the grain gave some of those images an abstract and impressionistic quality that is completely beautiful. Kind of like this: ( not quite the same on the web, nevertheless..) 

or this: 

Like I said earlier, web compression does these images no justice, but what I'm seeing that I like about the grain is the dimensionality at the transitions of contrasty edges- not to mention the body of the midtones, but that's something else entirely- anyways, our super high fidelity cameras with massively clean high iso's make such a perfect image that sometimes there isn't any depth in the highlight to shadows transitions. It's just a feeling- don't hold me to this in ten years. Our cameras grain, when we can see it, usually looks pretty terrible and not very organic- it's kind of like a bug screen looking feel of the pixels- that's when you push the image too much and make the pixels angry. That's bad. Recently though (which is to say for maybe the last ten 'serious' images I've approached) I've been experimenting with adding just a little grain with my workflow through Nik Silver Efex and I'm liking it. Funny that- honestly I used to think post process added grain was lame, a trick to hide processing errors and just like adding a texture layer, akin to replacing a sky- but now not so much. I'm thinking that the right amount can fill out the body of the specular highlights just right, to gain depth. Well check back with me in six months in regards to this one and see what I say then, but I think this one is gonna stick for a bit. Any thoughts as to adding grain my friends?

Bass Harbor Marsh snowfield

Todays potd: made at 2:04 up the street at the Bass Harbor Marsh- I had grand plans to shoot some of the "pure as the driven snow" snow drifts at a couple of different locations this afternoon but when I went to start my little grocery-getter-diesel it didn't even click, although the radio and lights were working... so that worried me, not typical. It's getting up there in the old mileage department but this was a symptom that I would not expect. So even though I was all geared up to hit it and would have just taken the lady's truck I figured to at least take a look under the hood- and this was what I found: 

this should not be here-

So I figured the starter had shorted or something and I set up a hair drier to evaporate the snow that would make it not go, and headed out to shoot for a bit in the lady's truck. Later when I'd gotten back and checked it again it turned over in the weakest of ways so at least nothing was ruined I figure, just gotta give it a jump, so here's what I figure happened: in the 60 knot blizzard winds of the other night snow piled up in the engine compartment and shorted the battery or the starter to the point where it drained it to a trickle- crazy I know, but anybody else have any ideas? Whatever- have a good one champs- Nate!

Winter Rosebud

Well if you live in the Northeast I hope you like snow! There's a real blizzard with 24 inches of fluffy dry blowing snow expected over the next two days- and I couldn't be happier about that! I've always loved storms if for no other reason than that they bring change and are unpredictable. The power will probably go out and it's definitely no time to be traveling but beyond that I can't wait to see how bad it gets!

Stay safe out there and go ahead and take the weekend off- Nate!