I was recently looking for an excuse to try out the new digital camera I bought (a Toshiba PDR-M70, if it matters to you). So I decided to take a little trip through the hill towns of western Mass. The weather called for a chance of rain, but I jumped into the Spyder anyway and headed off.
The first place I stopped to take pictures was the summit house on Mount Sugarloaf in Deerfield. Since I was still trying out the camera, I took a lot of really awful pictures, but some of the better ones appear below. (Click on the images to see a larger version.)
| The bridge across the Connecticut River, heading toward Sunderland. This one looks a lot better in higher resolution. | |
| Looking south, down the river. Hm, it's looking a little hazy here. Could it be that it's going to rain? I hope not, I left the top down on the car. | |
| I liked the pattern of this field in Deerfield, so I kept the photo. I think my penchant for geometric figures an patterns will be obvious further on. |
After leaving Sugarloaf, I headed up the highway to Route 2, on my way to Shelburne Falls. As I neared that town, it started to rain, so I was forced to pull over and put the top up. Oh well.
Undaunted, I continued into Shelburne Falls, intent on photographing the Bridge of Flowers and the Glacial Potholes. Still hopeful the rain would turn out to be just a passing sprinkle, I headed toward the Bridge. Needless to say, it started to rain harder, so I went into an artisan's gallery and looked around. And then it started pouring.
OK, who wants to see color photos of a gray, rainy day? I decided to switch the camera to black and white, to see what happened. I was really impressed with the results. These are even better than the color photos, in my opinion.
| I took this one through the window of the gallery. I really like it, not only because of the weird patterns the rain made in the river (which you probably can't see all that well at this size) but because the street lamp makes it look like it was taken decades ago. | |
| This is the same bridge, taken through another window in the shop. I was playing with focus on this one, intentionally making the foreground soft. | |
| Amazingly, I didn't get any strange looks from the other people in the gallery. But I decided to move outside anyway. This is the back porch, and if you look closely you can probably make out the place where water is cascading out of a break in the gutter. This one looks great printed on photo paper. | |
| Here I am trying to be even more artsy. You can't see it very well at this size, but the ripples in the puddle do look interesting on the full size version. | |
| More ripples, this time in a planter filled with water. |
Copyright © 2000 Dan Wilga. Last modified on July 2, 2000. |
