Backyard "Road" Trip

It's been some time since I wrote our last blog, and I feared I might be getting a bit rusty. Our trip to Bar Harbor, although still very much present in my mind's eye, seems like light years ago now. I began to think I might need to warm up a bit for two upcoming blogs I will be writing - one about the craft show and booksale Salmon Falls Photography is participating in this coming Saturday at the Plymouth Public Library and then the Hughes/Donahue Gallery Show that will be taking place on the weekend of June 26th and 27th.

So I decided to take a photographic road trip around my own backyard . . . and my front yard and my side yard - a regular circumnavigation of the old homestead. Photo ops are everywhere and they don't always require that you get in a car or truck or hop on motorcycle to drive someplace that's a distance away from home.

Those of us who live in New England are blessed with photo ops that come and go so quickly - changes in the weather that happen in the blink of an eye, changes in the seasons that result in ever-evolving colors in our flowers and shrubs, trees that go from barren winter silhouettes to a riot of oranges, reds and yellows in autumn. I love the spring wildflowers, those ephemeral beauties that bloom in the woods in the dappled sunlight before the trees sprout leaves that completely shade the forest floor. At that point, without hardly any sunlight getting through the tree canopy, the wildflowers go dormant for another whole year. Miss the two weeks or so when the lady-slippers are in bloom and you've got to wait another whole year for your next chance to catch them in pixels or on film.

That's why, if you love photography, and you want good photos, you take your camera with you whenever and wherever you go - winter, spring, summer and fall, snow, rain, sunny days, heavy fog, sunrise, sunset. I can still see in mind's eye, and this is from back in the early 1980s, one of my best photo ops ever. I was driving early one morning down Beech Street in Bridgewater on way to work (this was back in the days when I managed a laboratory over in the Town of Middleborough), when I passed a hay field with a gorgeous rusty, old hay rake sitting out in the middle of the field. (A little aside here: Bev and I love rust. We always have. Give us rust on practically anything, and we want to take a photo of it.)

And sitting on the top of the hay rake seat where the farmer's helper would be were the rake being used, was a black, white and yellow calico cat. He (she) was staring ever so intently down into the hay looking for a field mouse to eat for breakfast. The sun was just coming up and although most of the field was still in shade, the hay rake with that hunter cat sitting atop it were lit by the early morning rays of the sun. It couldn't have been a more perfect photo! Did I have my camera with me? No. Shame on me. Now that photo is just a memory in my mind's eye - but boy, do I still wish I had it on film.

So we're going to include some photos from my backyard trip so you can see what you might find when you just wander around your own lawn. There is one photo that for me, brings back wonderful memories of Bev's and my trip to Bar Harbor. If you've been reading our blogs, you know that we "borrowed" some lupines to bring home from Maine. It was such a joy to see all those lupines in bloom as we traveled throughout Bar Harbor and other places in Maine. For me, for as many trips (and that's a LOT!) as I've made to Maine over the years, I had never seen the lupines in bloom.

As soon as we got back home from Bar Harbor, I put my lupines in one my favorite pitchers and put them out on our deck on the "new" junk table I bought for $6 from this wonderful character of a guy who owns the best junk and secondhand and collectibles and antiques place to browse for everything and anything imaginable. (If Bev gets ambitious and tears herself away long enough from the Celtics game, perhaps she'll post the photo of me sitting on the steps of that wonderful junk shop.) And for about a week after we got home from Maine, which was about how long the lupines lasted, every time I walked out or in our back door, there were the lupines looking ever so beautiful in that pitcher on that old junk table . . . and memories of all those Maine fields and hills covered in lupines would flood my mind. Now of course, the lupines have long expired - but I have my photo of them to always remind me.

Photo ops are everywhere. You just have to see them. And that's why photography is as much about having a good eye as it is about being proficient in how to use your camera. For me, and I think Bev would say it's the same for her, we see photos in our mind's eye long before we take our cameras out and start shooting. So the next time you're out and about in your own yard, or taking a walk around your neighborhood, or even out riding your bicycle, pedaling for a bit of exercise, think of your eyes as your camera - because that's where the really good photos come from first.