Yesterday was the "official" launch of my new website, WizenedEye.com. The issue of the music is still unresolved, but of course there is the "Sound: Off" button to kill it when the visitor becomes REALLY annoyed by the endless repetition.

It is no surprise to either me or Mr. Wizard that we just had a conversation on Flash programming. Yes, I am interested in learning it. So many things to this photography business: building and maintaining websites, establishing and maintaining good gallery relations, participating in shows and sales, submitting photos to juried exhibitions, managing many thousands of image files - and of course actually taking photos.

Bye-Bye-Bloggie...

As I repeated the words, "I wish there were more hours in the day" another time (it's been my mantra for over a week), I finally realized that I need to take a break from blogging. Yeah, I know... What about that sneaky septic tank? How did she build those stone walls? If she was sterile, then where in heck did her son come from? For now (if it really matters to anyone), the answers to those questions will have to wait. There are still untold stories: Dwight the Musher, for instance. And I hope there will be many photos to take and share.

Well there it is right there: the photos... My new/old career was taking off, but then came the back injury. I've lost three months and a lot of momentum, and that's the real reason I must take a break. This week and last I have spent most of my waking hours on the computer. Technology is tyranical, and anyone who shoots a lot of serious digital images knows how much time it takes to save, edit, organize and store them. For the most part, it's something I enjoy doing, but it does take time.

There are so many things I've needed to learn about. The latest realization is that I must register copyrights for any photo I really care about, and my website needs a complete overhaul. On the creative side, there are all the techniques I learned during the workshop last fall. I need to practice them until they're ingrained and rote. Marketing is another challenge that's a lot less fun than being creative or artistic.

On Friday, I received the prints that had taken me more than a week to order. (There's no question that I am organizationally challenged). I've been matting all weekend - or at least when Grandson wasn't here.

I love blogging, and I'm sure I won't stay away very long. I'll also miss you and miss following what's going on in your lives and the stories you tell.
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I'll be back, and in the meantime, be well, laugh often and love true ~

Wiz
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We interrupt regular
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programming of this blog to
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bring you breaking news:

North Country wizened wizard and
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photographer Judy Andrus Toporcer
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has received word that she is a 1st place
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winner in the 2007 Upper Canada
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Village annual photography contest.
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Notification came yesterday in an
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email:
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Congratulations Judy!

I am writing to inform you that your photograph, "Flower Among Flowers" was chosen for first prize in the "Pure History" category of our 2007 Photo Contest.

Winners [beginning with Ms. Andrus Toporcer's photo] are posted here.

(What I didn't realize until after your photo was selected and posted, is that you were a winner in last year's contest too! Just to let you know, we receive hundreds of entries each year, so you should be quite proud of yourself!)

J. S.
Upper Canada Village Marketing Officer

Contacted at her home in the forest Ms.
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Andrus Toporcer
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commented, "Yeeeeeeeee-hah!!!!!!!"
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and did the Snoopy-dance while
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exclaiming her excitement and babbling
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something about 40 years,
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careers/loves interrupted, and actually
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BEING a photographer.

And now we return you to the blog piece in progress...

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There are Places I Remember...

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jill forgot her birth control
And now they have a daughter

I came from the Adirondacks. My parents had decided against having children because - in 1942 - they were convinced that there was not a bright enough future for children on this planet. That plan was undone when the two of them took a vacation in the late summer of 1944 at a rustic resort called "The Mohawk" on Fourth Lake, and my mother forgot to pack her birth control. Maybe my humble beginnings in that place of wildness and natural beauty explain in part why I ended up living where I do.

The Adirondack "Park," as it is rightly or wrongly named, remained a special place for this family my parents created (which later included the addition of three foster daughters). Our summer vacations were spent there in tents, around campfires and in canoes or on trails; our winters always included ski trips to Old Forge or Whiteface Mountain.

To me, the Adirondacks represented heaven, and so when all that eventually remained of my parents was a pair of ash-filled plastic bags, our favorite camping place was the natural choice for freeing those remains. In August of 1999, close family and two dear life-long friends gathered at Brown's Tract Ponds.

The chosen morning dawned wet. My father always claimed there were only two kinds of Adirondack weather, "dazzling uncertainty, and drizzling certainty," and his description held true as the gray downpour abruptly gave way to beautiful sunshine in mid-afternoon. The canoe served as a water taxi for our small band of eight, our elderly friends making the trip with both arthritic difficulty and characteristic grace. Once assembled, in a very unplanned sort of ceremony, we scattered those gray remains from the rocks on the small island's south shore where we had picnicked and swam so many times over the years. It all seemed very right.

Our mission accomplished, the first of the return trips was begun. Bekir and Sallie were helped into the canoe and Husband and I started paddling toward the mainland. Spontaneously, Bekir began yodeling my father's favorite, the pure beauty of his alpine tribute soaring across the still lake and echoing back to us. It was the perfect salute, and I am certain that every person within earshot stood still to listen.

Eight years have passed, and I haven't been back there. I always thought I'd return, but lack of time and too many responsibilities - or maybe just a failure to properly prioritize my life - had combined to stall my return until two weeks ago when a week-long photography workshop at Big Moose Lake just a few miles from Brown's Tract put the opportunity squarely in my sights. On October 6th, the 17th anniversary of the date of my father's death, I returned to the shore of Brown's Tract.

It was fall and the campers were gone. I expected to be completely alone, but to my surprise, there was a lone photographer beside the lake's outlet where I planned to launch. I'm pretty uninhibited and friendly with strangers, and those you meet in the solitude of the woods are usually kindred spirits, so we struck up a conversation. The emotions of that day probably greased my tongue even more than usual as I explained my reasons for being there. "I'm going to mess up your lake," I told him. It was still and all-reflecting, and I knew my paddling would disturb any reflection shots he was attempting to take. His reply was an enthusiastic, "Oh, no, your blue kayak will be great on the water!" We exchanged blog addresses, wished each other well, I put the kayak into the lake and began the final leg of my trip to pay respects to Bill Toporcer and Evelyn Andrus, my parents.


Photograph by Russ Devan. I hope you'll visit his website and his blog.

My parents gave me the gift of life and the self-assurance that has helped me to make the best of my time here, and it seems that even years after their deaths they continue to give to me, for on that Saturday two weeks ago they introduced me to a new friend and a very talented photographer.

Thank you, Russ, for this photograph that I will always cherish. And thank you, dear readers, for taking the time to travel back with me to this special place.

Streaming (CLICK ON A PHOTO TO ENLARGE IT)

Here is a photograph of a Tug Hill Plateau stream. There has been a drought this fall, and the creeks are shallow. Rocks that would normally be well under water are now catching and collecting the leaves that float downstream, stacking them together like so many playing cards.

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Below is a river flowing well below usual fall levels, exposing vast expanses of its rock bed. I decided to play with grayscale on this one - not something learned or encouraged by the photo workshop, but rather, something I just had some fun doing.

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Remember, these pictures were part of a learning experience, and as such, they represent steps in the right direction...

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I miss my camera.

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The Tale of the .

............Photography Workshop...


..................(or, Why I am Up in This Tree)


I spent the first week of October at a digital photography workshop near Eagle Bay, NY in the Adirondack Mountains. It was taught by an R.I.T. photo prof. and his photographer wife, two great and greatly talented people. It was a wonderful opportunity.
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.....................Covewood Main Lodge
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As the teacher explained, the average digital camera has been configured to take pictures of smilin’ white folks at a picnic. It’s turned on and shot in the camera’s pre-set JPEG mode, auto-exposed and auto-focused by a tiny Japanese man (let's call him "Yoshihiko") who lives inside the camera. If you ask him to, the Yoshihiko in many cameras will take weather conditions into consideration: choose “sunshine” or “cloudy” or “incandescent lightbulb” (most often seen as tiny representative icons). He will - if asked - acknowledge the camera operator’s directive to shoot an “action shot” or in “macro (closeup) mode” – although the average digital camera user doesn’t want to be bothered with such variables and generally lets Yoshihiko just do his thing on full AUTO. Ditto the use of AutoFocus. Connect a wire between camera and computer, and the resultant image can then be attached to an email and sent to Cousin Minnie who didn’t make it to the picnic so she can laugh at everyone in the photo. All of this works and makes many, many people happy.
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...................Part of Covewood's Dock on Big Moose Lake
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I know some basics about photography, i.e. the fundamentals of exposure (Northern, ass, celluloid and image sensor). I understand the focal length/depth of field relationship. Many people have told me I have “a good eye.” There was a time some years ago when I knew how to choose my film camera’s exposure settings by looking at the available light in any given situation. (If you have a couple of minutes to waste, you can read about how I came to photography here.)

I confess that although I often manually focus, and I do usually control the shutter speed, I just as often let Yoshihiko do his thing. He is a pretty smart guy, after all. I use a tripod on occasion, almost always for indoor shots that require a long exposure because of low light levels. I have a “nice” tripod bought at the “nice” mall camera store, but not a particularly clever one capable of getting close to the ground.

Last week, all of this was about to change…
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I arrived at the workshop, and the first thing I learned was that my “nice” tripod should probably go to the scrap-pile. I was loaned an older good one that had twice the weight and flexibility of my own. On the first day (when we were just turned loose to take shots around the beautiful old Adirondack great camp), I decided to do my usual thing sans tripod on the excuse that it would be my benchmark: the “old” way of doing things, to be compared to what I would be doing by week’s end. (Everyone else headed out with cameras mounted securely to their three-legged devices).

On Tuesday morning, armed with loaned Bogen tripod, I set out with ten others for a creek some miles away. We got there by car, then began walking up the creek, along the creek, and IN the creek. (Remember, I was using Husband’s camera because my own had gotten doused by a small container of soapy water and drowned Japanese beetles and was at Pentax Repair). The place was pretty: rocky with small waterfalls and the beautiful reds, yellows, greens and oranges of Adirondack autumn. Of course, the rocks were also slippery and the embankments steep, so I was clinging to camera and tripod with more than the normal paranoia. Yoshihiko stayed back at the lodge.

The previous evening, we had been lectured on using histograms to judge proper exposure (new to me; I had heard of histograms but had no knowledge of the why and how), and we were expected to manually focus and expose (full manual exposure being another thing I had not done previously with my digital camera). The Pentax manual packed in my bag turned out to be the camera software manual, not the actual camera instructions, adding another straw to the camel's back.
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Before shooting, and as the light conditions changed, we needed to “custom white balance” our cameras with a white card instead of choosing “shade” or “cloudy” automatic settings (another procedure I knew the value of but not the mechanics…). To sum up, the game was to climb around the creek looking for a good subject, set up and level the tripod in the desired location (balancing its legs on slippery rocks, in water and mud), figure out all the camera settings, check white balance, be sure you were focused, fire the shutter, then check to see that the histogram was appropriately placed. My brain was on overload, and being the owner of ONE drowned Pentax, I was really nervous watching water flow between my feet.
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........................... Tuesday's Best Shot
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The other half of my workshop time – because for me, it did take almost half of my time and energy during the week – was computer technology. A new-to-me notebook computer, never-used camera software, a key drive that refused to save my files, a network configuration that wouldn’t accept the lodge’s wireless network when I tried to download a photo file converter (somehow the notebook wanted to talk to my office…), the unfamiliar organizing part of Adobe Photoshop Elements, and a program for converting RAW files to DNGs all fought me tooth and nail. It was embarrassing and totally stressful to be so mind-boggled by these things, and I had to use them. My teachers were incredibly patient as we spent the evening hours struggling with this stuff.

By Wednesday I was taking some decent photos. I spent an hour in one part of another leaf-strewn stream, and I am fairly pleased with the pictures. Technically I was making some progress, and although I was still nervously hanging onto the camera and tripod for fear of another water disaster, I was handling the custom white balancing, manually setting exposures and checking histograms, and generally enjoying myself.

On Thursday we traveled up Big Moose Lake by boat and then hiked and photographed everything Nature had to offer along the trail to Russian Lake. By late afternoon I reached the lean-to at the trail’s end, and then took some shots across and into the lake. I was about finished, and stood camera and tripod near the shore, watching another photographer work on a shot of some pine needles floating on the water. A fly landed on her subject, and I suggested that I go find a branch to chase it so she could take her shot. I turned my back on the camera for less than a minute… and during that minute, the one minute of the entire week that I was not carefully clinging to either camera or tripod, the leg of the tripod facing the water telescoped slowly into itself… and with a splash, my husband’s camera fell to it’s watery grave.

On Friday, I drove the soggy camera to Old Forge and FedEx-ed it to Pentax Repair before joining the others for lunch and a shoot of Ferd’s Bog. I was an observer.

On Saturday, the workshop over, I drove to Brown’s Tract Pond where we had scattered my parents’ ashes eight years ago. There were no campers or boaters anywhere near the lake; only a lone photographer (not from the workshop) stood on the shore where I had planned to launch my kayak.
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I paddled to the island and climbed onto the flat rocks on its southern shore. For an hour I was alone with my memories. I sang "Scarlet Ribbons" for my father and then "Feels Like Home to Me" for my mother, and gradually the ache of loss - loss of camera, loss of childhood times, loss of beloved parents, loss of control, loss of sanity - lessened; lessened but was not ready to leave me.
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Back in the kayak, I circled the island. An otter slipped silently from the rocks on the far side and disappeared into the water. A breeze was picking up and gray clouds were now blowing across the sky. Returning to the deserted shore, I put the kayak on the car and turned back onto the dirt road past the now closed State campground where I stopped to briefly visit our family's favorite campsite; then went on to Raquette Lake where I paused to pay my respects to the faded old general store where generations of campers and canoers have gotten their supplies. It was the last weekend of the "summer" season.
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I drove the remaining two and a half hours north in silence.
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At home, my husband greeted me warmly. The house was clean and he was preparing a wonderful dinner featuring quinoa-stuffed squash. I opened the notebook and began a slideshow of the week's photos, pouring out stories as he poured a fine bottle of shiraz.
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After dinner the slideshow resumed... to the point of a photo taken at 4:38 PM on Thursday,
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............................Just Before the Dive
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and I said, "At that point, during the one instant of the entire week when I wasn't clinging worriedly to either the tripod or the camera strap, one leg of the tripod telescoped in, and your camera fell in the lake."
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It is quiet and peaceful up here in the tree. I am watching the leaves change color and fall, and I am contemplating Fate.
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