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Photographing a Stone Wall Before Winter Closes In
I have spent nineteen years as an arborist, most of it photographing what storms and root systems do to the built things around them, and one week each October I walk the same fieldstone retaining wall on a property outside Appleton, Wisconsin, and shoot it corner to corner. The wall holds a terrace above a driveway that slopes toward the Fox River bottom, and every winter the freeze-thaw cycle works on it a little more. If I do not document it in late fall, the first heavy snow covers the joints and the argument about what changed has to wait until April. Why the window is narrow In the upper…
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Backyard Bird Photography: Working a Feeder Setup
Every October I reset the feeder pole behind my sister’s house in Southeast Michigan, and every October I relearn that the birds are the easy part. Last year a downy woodpecker worked the suet cage at eight in the morning with the sun still low behind a white pine, and I shot forty frames of the back of its head because the perch pointed away from the only clean light in the yard. The woodpecker came back for three weeks. My photographs came back the same forty frames every morning until I moved two things.…
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Photographing a Renovated Kitchen With Only One Window
Last March I photographed a galley kitchen in a pre-war apartment in Queens where the only window was a single double-hung at the far end, maybe thirty inches wide, looking onto a brick shaft. The remodel was finished, the cabinets were a warm white, and the whole room had been designed around the fact that it would never get real daylight. Every frame had to answer one question: does this read as bright and even, or as a cave with one glowing panel at the end of it? Decide what the window is for With one window you have two jobs and you can only do one at a time.…
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Shooting a Wetland Refuge Without Disturbing What Lives There
The first spring I photographed the marsh at Indiana Dunes I made a beginner’s mistake that still embarrasses me. I wanted a low angle of the water and the reeds, so I stepped off the boardwalk and sank to my knees in the mud at the edge of a nesting pool. Nothing dramatic happened. But I had left a trail of broken stems and churned muck through exactly the cover that a pair of mallards was using, and I spent the rest of the morning watching the hen circle rather than settle. Since then I have worked wetlands for a land trust’s restoration records, and the rule I follow is…
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Roof Documentation From a Ladder, a Pole, and a Drone
I was standing at the end of a driveway in Lake Oswego last November, rain running off the hood of my jacket, looking up at a two-story house hemmed in by four Douglas firs. The owner wanted the roof documented before the moss came back in spring. I had a ladder on the truck, a 12-foot extension pole in the bed, and a Part 107 drone in the back seat, and over the next hour I put all three on the same roof. Each one showed me something the other two could not, and that is the whole reason the truck carries three tools for one job. What a ladder…
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Photographing a Stone Path So It Looks Like Stone
Before I photographed landscapes I built them. Nine years of landscape gardening in northern Illinois taught me what a limestone path looks like the evening you set the last stone, still damp from the hose, with the darker joint lines reading clean against pale faces. It took me another year with a camera to understand why almost nobody gets that look back in a photograph. The path is right there in front of them, and the picture comes back gray, flat, and somehow plastic — the exact opposite of the material they chose it for. Why stone turns to gray mush on camera Stone has almost no color of its…
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Shooting Stair Railings and Built-Ins in a Narrow Townhouse
The first townhouse stair I shot in Brooklyn was thirteen feet wide at the street and about nine feet of clear space on the stair itself, and I brought a 16mm because I assumed a narrow house needed a wide lens. What that lens did was bow the newel post into a curve and make a fine railing look like a funhouse. The right answer in a narrow house is a longer lens and a wall to work from, or a two-frame stitch, and I have shot stairs and built-ins in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens that way ever since. The house is narrow. The photograph does not have to…
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Photographing a Perennial Border Through All Four Seasons
A perennial border is a slow argument between the gardener and the calendar, and the only honest way to photograph that argument is to stay in one place and let it run. Four years ago I set a small brass marker in the turf at the end of the same twenty-four-foot border in southern Minnesota and resolved to shoot it from that spot once a month for a year. It took me three seasons to keep the promise. The first year I chased the best blooms and ended up with a folder of unrelated flowers; the second year I understood that the point is not the flowers at all but…
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Photographing a Driveway Pour Before the Finish Disappears
At 5:40 in the morning in July the truck was already backing down the drive and the thermometer on the porch read 84°F. The owner had asked for photographs of the pour and said “whenever is convenient,” which for concrete in Austin means now. The finish has a working window measured in minutes, and once the trowel stops, the surface you were hired to record is gone. I shot this one from the first chute load at 6:10 through the last control joint the next morning, and the frames the owner actually cared about were the ones nobody thinks to take: the base before the concrete, the edge where the…
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What the Light Does at a Woodland Edge in Late Afternoon
I have photographed the same eighty-acre oak woods in central Ohio for eleven years, and it has no one best hour. It has a good minute, and that minute moves. The edge — the seam where the woods meets the old field — is where I spend most late afternoons, because it is the only place I can stand in one kind of light and look into another. The interior of the wood is already dark by four in October; the field beside it is still bright. Everything that happens in the last hour happens in that strip of transition, and it happens fast. An edge is two light environments…