Searchin’ for Sasquatch

The sun was trying its’ hardest to break through the clouds as Frank and I hit the road. Only two stars had been visible through the clouds as I gotten into my car, sadly the cover increased as the morning progressed. The sun made a brief appearance just after sunrise but for the rest of our trip, we only saw occasional evidence of it, a sunlit hilltop or the tips of the trees lit up. The morning was grey.

    The trip was to find some geocaches, some photos and who knows whatever else might cross our path. We were up for anything. We headed north on rt.28 and started out in the town of Slate Lick. This village got its name supposedly because deer used come to lick salt off of the rocks in the area. Founded in the late 1700’s, the first church in Armstrong County was started here.

    From there we went cross country, leaving the highway behind and using only the small two lane country roads. Occasionally these roads became gravel. We didn’t see many cars passing us.

    There were cattle in the fields and deer crossing the roads. We saw a Ringed Neck Pheasant at one of the caches! We passed more than a few abandoned houses, barns and farms during the drive.

    Just after leaving a cache situated alongside Buffalo Creek, we came across this pile of stones. I’m guessing it might have been a fireplace and chimney to an old house, but the underbrush was too thick to get close to them. There seemed to be a pile of rubble below all the jagger bushes. We didn't go in, we were content to look at them from the outside of the patch.

    We encountered more abandoned houses when we reached Yellow Dog. The Geocaching web page about the cache we were looking for, says that the village was built between the late 1910's and early 1920’s. It was built by Pittsburgh Limestone Mining Company for its workers, they could live there as long as they didn’t unionize. The last residents left in 2011, leaving it a ghost town. The town has been vandalized over the years and someone has bought it in hopes of restoring it and using it as a learning area. It has been a while since it was purchased. (2014) Now people can visit it for a fee. We snapped a few shots from the outskirts and then continued on.

    We visited the ghost town of West Winfield. All that remains are a few cement stairs that once sat alongside the road. The houses on this 1941 map are gone, all that remains is the stack of the old iron furnace.

    We walked through what used to be a rail yard to visit the remains of the furnace. It was built in 1847 and worked until 1864, a mere 17 years. It produced about 40 tons of iron a week during that period. The iron was carried by wagon to Freeport where it was put on boats for the trip to Pittsburgh.

    A town grew up around the furnace and then disappeared; a railroad was built beside it which also disappeared. All that is left in West Winfield is a cement company and this old stack of rocks. It is kind of sad!

    From there we did one more cache before heading back towards home. The sun was still trying to break through the clouds, maybe later in the day… We found all of the caches we had searched for, all eight of them. Frank found one more making his total nine. We also got some nice pictures while we were out.

    At one of the caches, we run across Sasquatch and made friends with him. (Not to be confused with a Yeti which resides in Asia) It turned out he was rather friendly, at least to us. So now we know, he does roam the hills of Pennsylvania! So beware, especially since we are only a month away from Halloween!

P.S. thanks to Frank for the shot of the furnace!

Lost in the Fog on a Tuesday Morning

 

Waking up early, I went and looked out the front door and saw fog hiding everything. After getting dressed and a quick cup of coffee, I loaded my camera gear in the car and went out for a ride. Just to see what I could find.

    In some places I could hardly see the road because of the fog and then there were spots where there was nothing at all. I headed downhill towards Etna. These are a couple of the shots I took.

Crossing the railroad tracks on Bridge Street, most of the fog was above me but it still added a nice touch to the scenery.

Underneath the bridges carrying rt.28 over Sharpsburg.

E&H Auto Body on Main Street. This scene called for color!

Back to B&W at the Fox Chapel Golf Club.

St. Mary’s Cemetery on Sharps Hill

The sky was starting to lighten up and some pastel colors were starting to appear as I left Sharps Hill, so I went back to color again.

    The fog had started to burn off on most of my drive home but when I arrived back in the neighborhood, it seemed even thicker than when I left. Breakfast and coffee lured me back into the house. It was a nice morning drive. An hour and a half wandering around in the dark and the fog, a great way to start the morning!

Let It Rain, Let It Rain, Let It Rain

 

The rain is falling heavily, creating patterns in the pools on the sidewalks. The grass has a fresh green look to it. Sitting inside the quiet cocoon of the library, I’m warm, dry and comfortable. A pile of “new” books sits in front of me.

    It’s Monday morning, the day of the Queens funeral. Up early to watch the solemn ceremony and then off to a doctor’s office for a routine check-up, the hours without sleep haven’t caught up with me yet. The rain had commenced right as I had arrived at the doctor’s office, of course! There are still damp spots on my pants.

    A short distance away is one of my favorite spots, The Cooper-Siegel Community Library. The lot is filled this morning but inside, other than a few laughs and giggles from the children’s room, all is quiet, as it always is. An empty table beside a window provided a home base for my visit.

    Though I check out the books on display as I come in, the used bookshelf is still my first stop. This library always has a splendid selection of books for sale, the majority of them for under a dollar.

    Carefully perusing the volumes, I select a few and start a pile on the librarian’s desk. A book of memoirs, The River Quickens, signed by its author starts the pile. This is soon followed by a barely read library book about Victorian England’s fight against filth titled, Dirty Old London. I’ll probably be the 3^rd or 4^th person to read it…if not the first!

    A hardback Readers Digest edition of Lost Horizon was added, replacing the paperback edition I had just picked up moments earlier. Fifty cents as compared to twenty-five, I can handle that. Once it is read, it will be re-donated back to the library to allow someone else to purchase it.

    An old book (1922) on the Elements of Plane Trigonometry joined the pile simply because it looked nice and it was in good shape. Not bad for a quarter. Lastly, my most expensive purchase, (75 cents) was a new, unread copy of The Writing of the Gods. A hardback, published last year, telling about the de-coding of the Rosetta stone.

    I purchased my books, adding a small amount to the library’s coffers and returned to my table. The rain was still falling; I’ll stay here, inside and dry until it lets up a bit. There is a cup of coffee sitting in the cup holder in the car, I can hear it calling to me! But until the rain slows down, I’ll be content to read a bit longer. I’m always happy here.

Looking at the World through a Viewfinder

 All too often, when taking a picture, I fail to put enough thought into it. The camera swings up, I do a quick composition and snap the shot, hoping that it will come out in the end. Many times, I don’t even hope, I know once the shutter has been clicked, it was a wasted shot. Something wasn’t right, it was doomed from the get-go.

    There are two types of photography broadly speaking, random and planned. For the most part, the vast majority of the shots I take are random. (I am not bragging about this!) Things I see which interest me, something which might be nice and things that I hope will be nice, I aim and shoot. 

    Pre-visualization is to imagine what you want your finished photo to look like. Imagining ahead of time, which areas will be dark, where the light will fall and where the general interest of the picture will lie. That and how all the various things will come together to make your picture what you want it to be. It is a skill that requires practice, thought and some time.

    We have all taken a shot of something that we imagine will be a FANTASTIC shot. When we finally look at it, it is overexposed, the subject may be blurred or maybe they blinked, the shot is nothing like what we had hoped for. Nothing like we had pre-visualized. I know I’ve taken thousands of them, (again, not bragging) they are the pictures that no one will ever see.  

Too slow, blurred

    All too often I find that I don’t take the time to ensure that the shot will be what I want it to be. Sometimes it is just a chance encounter and if I don’t shoot, I might miss a good shot. Whether it is because I’m doing something else, on my way to another spot or I’m just not that excited about the picture, I just snap and run. These are typical random shots. I take the shot and hope it’s good. It usually isn’t!

    Often, some of these “wasted” shots strike something in my brain and I think I can do better. I start to imagine how I can improve on that shot. Perhaps by coming at a different time of the day when the light is different or maybe shooting in black and white rather than color. Possibly by changing my ISO I will be able to change my depth of field or the speed of my shutter. I start to pre-visualize what I want and start thinking about how I can bring it all together.

    Just by doing this doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good picture. It may take a few times to get that final shot. Each time I try, I learn something and by trying again, it brings me that much closer to achieving the shot I desire.

    Many a time I’ve gone out chasing that picture in my head only to be foiled by weather, clouds, rain or over whelming sunshine. I love taking foggy pictures but many a time I have slept through the fog or else, the fog promised by the weather forecasters fails to appear. I just keep on trying, I keep that image in my head, and someday it will come out!

Too dim, too slow, blurred

    Playing around with film adds another set of hurdles for the photographer to overcome. You are set in what type of film you have in the camera. Color or black and white or slides, it’s one or the other, once it’s in the camera, you can’t change it. The speed of your film is set. Should the light be low, you can’t just up the ISO like you can on a digital camera. You can open up your aperture, slow down your exposure or just skip the shot.

    I think you’d agree that with film, you tend to analyze the shot a bit more than with a DSLR. There are only so many shots on the roll of film in your camera. With the digital cameras you can take thousands of shots, if not more and still have room on your memory to continue shooting. 35mm film usually comes in 24 and 36 exposures and my medium format camera will only get 15 shots on a roll. I take extra care not to waste them! (I find it all too easy to take that extra shot, hoping to capture what I didn’t in the first. It almost always is a wasted exposure.)

These shots were taken on two different days, approximately a month apart. Both were shot in the early morning on a rainy day. The first one was shot with 100 film and came out much too dark. The second one was shot with a DSLR. The ISO was increased, the exposure was corrected, the composition changed just a bit and the camera put on a tripod, resulting in a much better shot.

    I find it important to not look at these bad shots as failures, they are lessons and hopefully by analyzing them, I can figure out what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Every shot I take is a lesson, both the good and the bad, learning is possible through all of them. These lessons are filed away in my brain, some to be used and improved upon almost immediately and some to be sadly forgotten until a similar failure appears.

    Taking the same shot over and over, during different times of the day, under different lighting conditions, rain, clouds and sun, color and black and white, is a wonderful learning experience. Even after getting that “perfect” shot, I go back and keep shooting it. Each time I click the shutter, I am getting another lesson and perhaps, I might even end up with a better shot.

    The most important thing in photography to me is that it’s an enjoyable hobby. I enjoy taking pictures! Now if someone else enjoys the shots I take, that just makes it better! It's a win-win!

The Kindness of Others

 I have a couple geocaches hidden with-in a few miles of my house. Recently, I was driving down rt.8 and passed the location of one of them. There was a tractor cutting the grass and weeds near where the cache was located. Fearing the worst, I came back an hour or two later only to find the fallen tree that the cache was hidden under, was gone.

    I looked around and saw nothing. The hide was about 10 feet away from the normally mowed grass. The log stretched out to where the grass was cut. I looked under the debris the mower had left behind, the broken and cut sticks and leaves and also looked over the edge of the hillside behind the cache site. There was no sign of the container or any of the items inside it. I saw the log over the hillside and worked my way down to it and nothing was there either.

    These hides are only a game and when one disappears, it’s no big deal. Still, I was a bit saddened. I went home and temporarily disabled the cache.

    A day or two later, I received an e-mail from Geocaching.com saying that someone had my cache and to contact them to get it back. Soon I had the container and its contents in hand.

    The man driving the tractor saw the container when the blades hit it. The mower had cracked the container. Seeing that it was part of the game of geocaching, he contacted the web site and they contacted me. He works for the township and has taken his kids out geocaching a couple times. He could have just left it or thrown it away but being a good human being, he took that extra step and got the container back to me.

    It has since been re-hidden, in the same spot only under some rocks now instead of a log. Thanks to the kindness of Tom, the cache is back in business and ready to be found again. We can all use a little kindness, do your part in passing it around! Pay it forward, I know I will!

     Cache on!