Category Archives: Photography

Fall Foliage Trip

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I took a three day trip back to the White Mountains last week to see the fall foliage. Up until now, I’ve always done the trip on the motorcycle, but I’ve been dealing with really bad heartburn and felt that my motorcycle’s riding position would just exacerbate it, so I decided to just drive up. I was also mildly curious to see whether the trip would be as enjoyable in the car as on the bike.

I’d hoped to book another trip on the Conway Scenic Railway, but they didn’t have any trips available. I was able to book a ride on the Mount Washington Cog Railway — and this time, I knew which side of the train was the good one. In fact, I was able to get a seat in the front row looking out for the trip up.

In terms of foliage, the timing was absolutely perfect; I was in the middle of peak foliage. Unfortunately I was dodging the clouds all three days — sometimes it was completely overcast, muting the colors of the foliage, other times there was partial sun, and other times, the sun was out, bringing out the full brilliance of the yellows, oranges and reds of the leaves.

I spent most of Wednesday getting up there. I like to get off I-93 and onto Route 3 somewhere around Plymouth; the road is scenic, but not overcrowded and you can make decent time while still enjoying the scenery. I followed 3 to Route 112, the Kancamancus Highway.

I’ve never seen the Kanc this crowded. I went up on a Wednesday to avoid the weekend traffic, but apparently everyone else had the same idea. All the scenic overlooks were overflowing with parked cars. Then I reached Bear Notch Road, figuring it would be less crowded, and that I would be able to head directly to Bartlett and check into Attitash before dealing with North Conway traffic for dinner.

Fortunately, at the same time I pulled onto Bear Notch Road, the clouds started to part. I stopped in a couple of places for pictures.

Mountains and clouds, and nearer foliage.
Distant mountains seen from Bear Notch Road

Thursday, I had my trip to the top of Mount Washington on the Cog Railway. Dating back to the nineteenth century, for the longest time, service was run using steam locomotives with tilted boilers, but nowadays, most of the service is run with biodiesel locomotives, with steam runs relegated to special trips to Waumbek Station partway up the mountain.

Rock outcropping and foliage
Rock outcropping seen from Crawford Notch on the way to the Cog

Unlike normal train tracks, the Cog has a central “rack” between the running rail, that a cog on the bottom of the locomotive engages with. This enables the train to climb the steep inclines.

This day, because it was peak foliage season, they were running trips in sets of threes. There were three consists of a single passenger car, each pushed by a biodiesel locomotive; between the biodiesel trip, steam locomotive Waumbek ran a special trip part way up the mountain.

I was in the third train of our triplet for the trip up. After August’s trip, I knew the left side was better, and was lucky enough to get a window seat in the very first row. This meant I could see out the front and watch the trains ahead of us climbing.

Cog train comes down the mountainCog locomotive and carriagePreceding train leaves the base stationClimbing through the forest zone

At the base station, it was warm, in the high sixties, with fall foliage all around, as we climbed, we rose into an evergreen zone, and from there into an alpine tundra zone, where only small very hardy plants grew. When we reached the top, we were in the clouds (which felt like fog), the wind was howling, and it was freezing.

The incline is so steep — just over 37° — that it plays tricks on your perception. There is a small shack at the halfway point, that looks tilted crazily — but is actually built level.

We got to the summit at around 12:40, and had an hour to spend there, being admonished emphatically not lose sight of the visitor center and to be sure not to miss our train for the trip back. During that hour, I had a look at the observatory museum, the Tip Top house, the actual summit, and experienced heavy clouds, howling winds, about two minutes of clarity when the clouds parted and you could see to Vermont and Canada, snow, about 30 seconds of rainbow, and then heavy fog again, before the next set of trains arrived to take us back to the base.

Brief view from the topTip Top HouseA dusting of snow30 seconds of rainbow

The trip to the base station was a bit faster than the trip up. Once we were out of the alpine zone, we were back in the sun, and could see some foliage.

Foliage on the way downWater tank and foliage at the base stationSteam locomotive Waumbek

We arrived back at the base station around 3. I took a quick run down to Crawford Notch hoping to see the Mountaineer pulling into the station. The conductor on the trip down had mentioned that Littleton to the north was a cool place to visit, so I drove up there and took a quick walk along its Main Street. On the way back, I was treated to another rainbow, and then a spectacular view of the Mount Washington Hotel with dramatic clouds wreathing the Presidential Range.

Mountainside at Crawford NotchRainbowMount Washington Hotel with clouds behind

Friday, after checking out, I decided to head west to Franconia Notch, after having breakfast at Polly’s Pancake Parlor. I stopped at Echo Lake, and then Pilgrim Lake, where once you could see the Old Man of the Mountains. The Old Man is gone, but they’ve set up a sculpture; you can sight along some poles and see how it once looked. This morning was mostly cloudy with scattered holes in the clouds that would spotlight the mountains briefly.

Willy's Mountain, seen from Route 302Mountain seen from Echo LakeMountains, clouds, and pedal boatsMountains seen from Echo Lake

After Franconia, I headed south, staying on Route 3 most of the way. I stopped for a while in Meredith — I’d frequently passed by Meredith Bay before, but hadn’t stopped. The clouds against the deep blue sky were gorgeous.

Clouds and dock at Meredith Bay

Then, after a visit with my brother, it was time to head home, shaking my head at all the traffic heading north for the weekend.

Quechee Balloon Festival 2026

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I decided once again to brave the weather gods and book a flight at the Quechee Balloon Festival in Quechee Vermont. I’ve been coming to the balloon festival off and on since 2012, and decided to change it up a little. This year, I decided to forego Friday, come up Saturday for the evening flights and Glow, and booked my flight for Sunday morning. This turned out to be fortunate; I heard Friday and Saturday morning flights were cancelled due to rain.

Saturday Night

I arrived in the area around 4 on Saturday, checked into my hotel room, and headed over to the festival. I did the rounds of the craft fair booths, and looked at the stiff breeze blowing through the tents, and figured, “They’re not going to be able to take off this evening.” But I decided to stick around, and they were patient, and at the last practical moment, it seemed, they were able to get a bunch of the balloons off the ground. Darrack Daoust, who I flew with last year, was the last pilot to leave the ground, just before 8.

Blue balloon with Essex hotel logoBalloon fillingBalloon in the air.Balloon with rainbow vertical stripes

The Glow

Shortly after the departing balloons cleared the field, five more balloons started setting up for The Glow. This is where a line of balloons are inflated on the field after dusk. The balloons stay on the ground while the pilots fire their burners to illuminate their balloons, often in time to music. It’s very pretty.

Crew member holds balloon open while pilot blasts burnersThe GlowNear balloon illuminated

Sunday Morning

When I looked out the hotel room window just before 5 AM, I could see heavy fog. I figured this was a good sign — I’d been worried about too much wind, and fog doesn’t stick around if it’s windy, and I figured it would burn off. So I headed over to the Festival grounds in an optimistic frame of mind.

I checked in, and found my pilot would be Bruce Byberg flying the RE/MAX balloon. Bruce has been involved with balloons since 1989, and is the chief pilot for RE/MAX New England.

When I went down to the field, they were just sending up a small test balloon– the same kind of helium filled balloon you’d get at a store — to see what conditions were like. The balloon went straight up — next to no wind — but the visibility was iffy. Finally the BalloonMeister gave the OK, and the pilots started to inflate their balloons. After a little while, the balloon was upright and hot, and it was time to take off.

Heavy fogBalloon basket, burners, attached to the envelope.Balloon spread out on the groundInside the balloon as it inflates

This flight was very different from my previous four. Those were all in sunny weather; this flight was overcast, and the hills were still wreathed in lines of fog. More significant was the lack of wind. Balloons can’t fly in heavy weather, but generally, there is a light breeze that will take you heavens-knows-where. Many of the pilots have a sense of where the winds are blowing at various altitudes, and are able to use height to control where they are headed.

For this flight, the lack of wind meant that all the balloons stayed in the general vicinity of the Festival grounds. It must have been great for the spectators since the balloons stayed in sight much longer.

For me, the most enchanting part was all the fog banks, Even though the fog had burned off some, there were still lines of it draped over the hillside. There’s just something fascinating about fog seen from above.

Balloon and fog behind usClouds and fog banks wreathing the hillsBalloons behind us getting ready to lift offBalloons preparing to take off

With the still air, we didn’t cover much distance. Bruce was kind enough to send me our track and some statistics: we drifted southerly towards the Simon Pearce factory, then back north towards the festival grounds – I actually saw my car — then westerly along the river ad golf course, before Bruce took us higher, and we started drifting east. We finally ended up at the nearby Ottoquechee School.

We were in the air for three quarters of an hour overall, with a maximum altitude of 1382.94 feet. As we headed in to the landing, we passed over a father with his young daughters, and they followed us to the school parking lot where we landed. Bruce and his crew let the girls into the balloon, and took them up about six feet or so, before letting them help get the air out of the envelope and pack it up.

Bruce gives some children and their father a taste of ballooning.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2025

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Unlike last year, I didn’t have a pre-conceived idea of what this year’s Christmas Card would be. I generally start scanning my photo library around Thanksgiving, but the cupboard was coming up bare. I started to think maybe I’d go into Boston over the weekend after Thanksgiving to see if I could take a picture of lights that spoke to me.

And then I went to Polillio’s in Stoughton to pick up a wreath and kissing ball for the front door and steps. They’re a garden center that I used to use a lot before I moved to the condo, and they always have a lot of Christmas decorations on display around this time of year, so I had my eyes out for something I could photograph.

And then I saw it — a ceramic figurine of a teddy bear in a Santa hat holding a Christmas tree. It was cute, and I figured “A picture of a teddy bear from Ted… why not?” So I picked it up, and set up the table top studio.

The “studio” was a Christmas present from my mother from about a decade ago. It’s a small lightbox about 16 inches cubed, with a pair of lights. It came with white, red, blue and black backgrounds that attach to the back of the lightbox with velcro. I first used it for my 2016 card of the snowglobe. It almost didn’t make the move here, because I’d broken one of the lamps while shooting my 2021 gingerbread house card and hadn’t been able to find an exact replacement bulb. I was originally going to toss it when we cleaned out the old house, but in the end, I brought it over, and I decided to replace the broken halogen bulb and its remaining twin with an LED bulb that turned out to be both brighter and less hot. It was rated as a 5000°K bulb, and the color temperature turned out to be pretty reasonable, and easily adjusted in Photos.

I set the studio up in the dining area, and put the teddy bear in it. I decided to try shots with the white, red, and black backgrounds. For the first set of pictures, I tried all three of my lenses. I knew I wanted to shoot it from the bear’s eye level, and originally envisioned it as a full length picture with open space all around it, and some extra space above for the text. I shot 28 variations, against white, red, then black, and then transferred the results to the computer for a look.

Table top studio with figurine, lights, and camera
Re-creation of studio set-up

I frankly wasn’t thrilled with any of them. The composition was a little too on the nose. I did decide that I liked the red background, and since I knew I’d just picked up ink, I could afford to print a picture with a lot of red. On the other hand, I didn’t care for the composition of any of the red pictures.

Bear with white backgroundBear with red backgroundTighter shot of bear against black background

The very last picture I shot, though, had possibilities. I was shooting against the black background, and since I knew I probably wasn’t going to use it, I was a little freer with the composition. I came in tighter, and framed him mid torso up. I didn’t care for the background, but I did like the composition. So I decided to shoot another batch.

Since I had a better idea of how I was going to frame them, I switched to my 105mm macro lens. It’s a fixed focus lens, and is sharpest lens I have. I found for this second session that placement of the lights made a difference — the bear is lightly covered in glitter, and the position of the lights controlled how they would catch the light, as well as the play of the highlights and shadows on the bear itself. I shot 11 variations, and they were better, but still a little flat. Also, in several of the pictures, the glitter next to the bear’s left eye was catching the light strangely. I realized the bear was turned so that the side with the Christmas tree was turned slightly away, and that it should be turned so that the tree side was slightly closer, almost as if he were presenting the tree to the viewer. So I shot one more batch, and this time, I got what I was looking for.

Almost thereFinal picture - medium shot of teddy bear carrying a Christmas tree

I’d done the kind of normal corrections I do for any photo. All my Christmas card photos up to this point had required some sort of Photoshop (or equivalent) work, but when I brought this one into Photoshop, I looked at it and said, “Nope. It’s fine”. This was the first time; all the work was done in-camera, in the framing and lighting.

Next, it was time to manufacture the cards. I duplicated last year’s card files, which had both the inside and outside in them, and replaced the images with the new ones. For the flyleaf, I chose one of the pictures from the balloon flight and another from the train trip in the White Mountains in October. Early versions of the card also had a picture of fall foliage on the Charles River and sunrise at Nantasket, but they made it seem a little crowded, so I dropped them.

Balloons over a pondView of Crawford Notch from The MountaineerSunrise at NantasketFall foliage on the Charles River

I had a shock when it came to print them. Last year I’d been able to successfully print the cards two-sided, which was great since I didn’t need to run the cards through the printer twice, and worry about getting the orientation of the outside and inside correct. This year, for some reason, it kept jamming on me when I tried printing two-sided. Worse, the computer kept forgetting settings between runs. It kept resetting back to two-sided printing, or would revert to normal quality. And since I’d laid it out with a two sided layout, I had to make sure I was correctly selecting the proper pages. The final insult came when I ran a head cleaning cycle on it; cards often print a little bandy, but they were much improved after head cleaning, but unfortunately, but that point, I’d already done most of the cards.

Merry Christmas - Picture of a ceramic teddy bear holding a Christmas Tree
Final card

Merry Christmas, everyone

Sunrise at Nantasket

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Yesterday was the last day of Daylight Savings Time for 2025. By the time DST ends, I’m generally happy to see it go. Sunset is early enough that you’re not gaining all that much by extending it an hour, and sunrises have become late enough that you’re getting up in the dark.

This late sunrise does make it easier to be up and about for it, and so, for the past few years, I’ve tried to view it from the ocean. Generally, I don’t bother setting an alarm; if I oversleep, I figure I needed to. But the intention is usually enough to get me up. The past few years I’ve done it from Castle Island; this year, I was a little more confident I could get down to Nantasket in time.

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Fall Foliage in the White Mountains

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Following the summer’s trip to the White Mountains on the motorcycle, I decided I wanted go back up for the fall foliage. I’ve done this a couple of times; last time I did this, in 2017, I did it over a weekend. I’ve also done it over the Columbus Day weekend. The trouble with doing it on the weekend, of course, is that when everyone else does it, so this year, I decided to take the first three days of October — Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off from work, and head up. It turned out to be a good move. There were a lot of other people around up there, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

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Making of a Christmas Card: The Early Cards

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I’ve been making my own Christmas cards since 1997, but my 2013 card was the first card I documented here on the blog, and it started an annual tradition I’ve kept up each year since.

There were a couple of reasons I started posting with that card. First, the blog was relatively new at that point. More importantly, that card was a particularly difficult one; I still remember the feeling of being completely stumped for days regarding the subject matter, and the difficulties I had trying to execute the idea once I came up with it, and how ultimately, it came out much better than I hoped for. So I posted about it, patterning the title based on Theodore White’s The Making of the President 19xx series. And I’ve been writing about each card since.

That card had 14 predecessors, though, and I thought it might be fun to look back at them and describe how they came about.

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Making of a Christmas Card, 2024

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Unlike some years, there was never any doubt as to what this year’s Christmas card would be. I took the basic image last Christmas Eve.

Last Christmas was a pretty dismal one. Mum had died just a couple of weeks before, and to make matters worse, her funeral was a super spreader event. Everyone was sick with either COVID or a bad cold; I was in the latter category. While I tested negative, I felt pretty miserable for the several days before Christmas, and had to cancel the plans I’d made with my sister for Christmas Eve.

By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, I was feeling slightly better, and didn’t feel like just sitting around the house feeling miserable for myself, so I decided to drive down to Nantasket to see the ocean, and hopefully, some pretty Christmas lights. I drove all the way to the end of the spit, took a few pictures of a Christmas tree decorated with lobster buoys, then turned around. By this point it was late dusk. As I approached the beach again, I saw a gazebo decorated with white lights. I pulled over, and took a bunch of pictures from a bunch of angles. I knew almost immediately that would make a good card.

Gazebo with lights on it -side viewGazebo with lights on it - wide angle emphasizing framingGazebo wide angle

Since I’ve moved, I decided I wanted the card to also serve as a change of address notification. I bought a wreath for the front door, a kissing ball to hang next to the door, and a small pot of evergreens for the front steps (I’m new here, and I didn’t want to poke the homeowner’s association. From some of the other units I’ve seen here, I could have gone a bit bigger). My first thought was to get a shot of me coming out the door with the decorations around me, so I put the camera on the tripod, and took some pictures using the remote control.

Well, they certainly weren’t winners. I hadn’t realized how grumpy my normal expression was. Expression aside, which was fixable, I realized I was blocking the wreath, and the other elements weren’t reading well either. So I shot another set of pictures with the phone one evening without me in the picture, but the doorway lit up.

When it came to make the card, I decided to go with one of the straight on shots of the gazebo. It’s not as wide angle as some of the others, and the tree inside is more prominent.

Gazebo, from straight on
The chosen image. Straight on, more or less normal perspective.

Because the lights were LEDs, they had a slightly greenish tint which I didn’t care for. So I took it into Photoshop, masked it so that only gazebo itself was selected, and applied a slight color correction to get rid of the green on the gazebo. I wanted the lights to look warm. On the other hand, I wanted the tree green, so I added another color adjustment layer, for just the tree, to make it greener. I wanted the colored lights on the tree to be more colorful, so I added a Vibrance adjustment layer for the lights.

Finally I wanted a little bit of a glow on the lights, so I duplicated the background layer, blurred it, set the duplicate’s opacity to 63%, and applied a layer mask so the blurriness only appeared over the lights.

Final image
Final image with color adjustments and a slight glow on the lights.

I then switched to Pages. I started by duplicating last year’s card, and replaced the cover image with the new one. Choosing the right font took a while. I wanted a serif font with a small caps style. Pages doesn’t support small caps natively, so I had to fudge it by using two sizes of text. Choosing the color was a bit of a process too. I like to use “Christmassy” colors of red, gold or green for the card text, but with the deep blue of the background, gold didn’t feel right, and the red was OK… but after a couple of cards I decided I wanted more contrast between the dark red and the dark blue, and added a one pixel orangey-red stroke around the letters to make the letters stand out more. I then moved to the inside of the card.

I decided to make the “change of address” notification on the left leaf, and the main card greeting on the right. I placed the picture of the front door in the middle of the left page, and added a note with my new address. For the right side, I used my traditional Christmas greeting.

There was one year when I was able to get the printer to print both sides of the card in one operation, but for the past few years I haven’t been able to get it to do so cleanly, and have had to feed each sheet twice, which is always error prone. This year, I happened to remember there was a setting for printing on thicker stock, tried it and was gratified to see that I was able to print both sides of the card without problems.

Final image - Merry Christmas with picture of gazebo
Cover of the final card.

Merry Christmas, everyone.