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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Have a Seat Beside the Housatonic

I Dreamt of the Housatonic (West Cornwall Covered Bridge, Cornwall, Connecticut)
“I Dreamt of the Housatonic”
West Cornwall Covered Bridge over the Housatonic River, Cornwall, Connecticut
© 2018 J. G. Coleman

When I’m out shooting in the field, I don’t always know for certain how well a given image is going to “work” once I get it back home and start developing it and reflecting upon how well it does or doesn’t fulfill my creative vision. There are times when I find myself in beautiful environments which simply prove too difficult to commit to a two-dimensional composition in a way that’s faithful to my creative expectations. After all, there are all sorts of sensory experiences that contribute to our experience in the outdoors: birds chirping, changing light, clouds drifting overhead, the sound of breeze rushing through the forest canopy, maybe a brisk autumn chill in the early morning or the impressive quietude during a snowfall. Now, there are techniques that can be leveraged to suggest some these qualities in a purely visual, flat image, but there’s no way to truly reproduce them. And sometimes, when those supporting elements are lost, the visual impression that remains just doesn’t quite convey what I’d hoped it would.

But then again, there are also some outings during which everything comes together beautifully and I know the moment I release the shutter that the imagery I’m producing resonates decisively with my creative vision. “I Dreamt of the Housatonic”, my latest release which I produced last autumn, was created under just those sort of circumstances. When I came by this weathered bench overlooking the Housatonic River and West Cornwall Covered Bridge with soft morning light imparting a gentle glow, it immediately struck me as a golden opportunity.

Having meditated over what drew me so strongly to the scene, it’s tough to pin down any one facet. The image, to me, has a timeless feel that is largely removed from immediate associations with modern life. No cars, no houses with satellite dishes, no joggers in Under Armor, no power lines lazily draped across the river. Putting aside the fact that it’s clearly a modern color photograph, the scene could just as easily have looked almost identical to an observer in 1900 as it did in 2017 (okay, okay… maybe metal road signs weren’t as common back then, but you get my point). And to my sensibilities, that timeless quality also contributes to a somewhat dream-like feel: as if we might find ourselves whisked away in a blissful dream to this quiet bench in the countryside, enjoying the amaranthine solitude of a peaceful, rustic riverscape.

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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Bristol’s Forgotten Ice Pond

Becalming Birge Pond (Hoppers Birge Pond Nature Preserve, Bristol, Connecticut)
“Becalming Birge Pond”
Hoppers Birge Pond Nature Preserve, Bristol, Connecticut

In my piece, “Becalming Birge Pond”, colors streak across a sunset sky over Central Connecticut as the first day of summer comes to a close on the mirror-like waters of Birge Pond.

Centuries-old ponds and waterfalls that once powered streamside mills are quite prevalent in my work, especially because most have long-since been retired from serving industrial purposes and blossomed into places of natural beauty. Birge Pond may have had similar origins and enjoys a similar golden era in its “retirement”, but its final stint of commercial use in the early 1900s was of a sort that has largely been forgotten in modern times. Consider that, prior to electric refrigerators becoming a widespread appliance, cooling food or drink during the warmer months of the year meant storing it in an insulated icebox beside a brick of ice. But if there weren’t refrigerators in homes, and if ice couldn’t be produced using industrial freezers, then how in the world did folks find ice for their iceboxes in the middle of the summer?

Birge Pond was one of many long-standing “ice ponds” across Connecticut which, once naturally frozen in the wintertime, would be harvested of its ice. The large, quarried ice blocks would then be tucked away in spacious barns to be stored and eventually sold throughout the coming year. Proper ventilation and generous packings of hay for insulation were actually so effective that some ice houses, such as the Southern New England Ice House that operated on Birge Pond, could reportedly keep ice for up to a couple years after harvest!

The industry of harvesting and selling ice was so essential and so ubiquitous in those earlier days that it probably seemed as if it’d be around forever. But as innovators worked through various ways to incorporate refrigerants into early designs of “electric iceboxes”, everything began to change. The Southern New England Ice House on Birge Pond was shuttered in 1933 and torn down shortly afterwards. Refrigerators became commonplace by the 1940s and ice harvesting, a widespread and commonplace industry just a few decades earlier, was relegated to the history books.

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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Springtime Snow in New England

An April Welcome (Roaring Brook at Cotton Hollow Preserve, Glastonbury, Connecticut)
“An April Greeting”
Roaring Brook at Cotton Hollow Preserve, Glastonbury, Connecticut

“The birds have a right to complain of misplaced confidence, and so have we, since the blandness of spring the day before deluded us into regarding her intentions as honourable,” wrote Charles Whiting in 1903, lamenting a springtime snow in New England not so different from the one we endured a few days ago here in Connecticut. Indeed, one could scarcely discern this April vista of Roaring Brook from wintry visions of a January blizzard.

But even Whiting had to concede a certain admiration for the waning wiles of winter. “It was really very beautiful snow, and whether dissipating in the sunshine or shining in the moonlight, it was several degrees whiter than the average. Less meteoric dust in it. Spring snow always looks so very young, and it is a blessing to the new grass and young grain,— one of those blessings that brighten as they take their flight.”

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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Nor’easter on the Hollenbeck

Hollenbeck Bend (Hollenbeck River, Canaan, Connecticut)
“Hollenbeck Beck”
Hollenbeck River, Canaan, Connecticut

The Hollenbeck River winds lazily through peaceful woodlands clothed in the heavy snow left by a vicious March Nor’easter.

Historians and linguists have debated the origin of the term “Nor’easter” for decades. All can agree that Nor’easters are storms which usually arise during winter and rake the Eastern seaboard with winds gusting from the northeast. But what can be said about the peculiar spelling of this term?

“Nor’easter” may seem, at face value, to be a phonetic spelling of “Northeaster” as it would be spoken with some New England accent. Indeed, the implication is that this spelling is an authentic product of New England society. But it is the omission of ‘r’ sounds that really characterizes coastal accents of Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island, so that doesn’t quite add up.

Surprisingly, research suggests that this bizarre spelling predates New England altogether, with “noreast” being found in English texts dating back as far as the late 1500s!

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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Serenity on Union Pond

Day's End at Old Union Millpond (Union Pond, Manchester, Connecticut)
“Day’s End at Old Union Millpond”
Union Pond, Manchester, Connecticut

As the sun sinks low on the horizon during a balmy October evening, Union Pond grows hushed and geese drift about upon scintillant reflections.

In his 1830 book, Connecticut Historical Collections, author J. W. Barber said of Manchester that the “first cotton mill … successfully put in operation in Connecticut, was erected within the present limits of this town in 1794, and owned by Messrs. Samuel Pitkin & Co.” By the 1860s, the millworks had been renamed the Union Manufacturing Company and the operation of its machinery demanded an ever greater volume of waterpower. That meant damming the Hockanum River in 1866, creating a millpond that we know today as Union Pond, after the company it once served.

The mill was shuttered by the turn of the century and Union Pond was repurposed in 1901 to feed a hydropower plant nearby. In time, though, even that endeavor grew obsolete with the rise of the modern power grid. What we’re left with today is a Union Pond which has been appointed to a more relaxed post: serving as the centerpiece of a scenic park in what has now become the Union Village Historic District.

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All Things Connecticut Featured New Print Releases The American Northeast

Southford Falls, Autumn Morning

An Eightmile Rhapsody (Southford Falls State Park, Southbury, Connecticut)
“An Eightmile Rhapsody”
Eightmile Brook at Southford Falls State Park, Southbury, Connecticut

Cold shadows and the warmth of dawn coalesce at Southford Falls, where Eightmile Brook leaps from an old mill pond and stages a vigorous charge through the dark gorge below.

Although I produced this image back in late October of 2017, just as autumn colors were reaching their modest peak last year, it wasn’t until yesterday evening that I managed to process all of my work from that shoot. That’s pretty typical of my autumn imagery each year, the bulk of which tends to be processed only after colder weather takes hold. Why such a long turnaround? Well, the colorful stretch of autumn that we all hold dear generally spans just 5 or 6 weeks; it’s gone just as fast as it arrives, so I need to work quickly. That leaves scant time for sitting in front of a computer tweaking development controls.

I generally dedicate my time during autumn almost exclusively to field work right up until “stick season” sets in. Not familiar with “stick season”? It’s basically the second half of autumn -after the trees have lost their leaves but before winter snows have arrived- when the entire landscape looks like a mess of bare sticks reaching into the sky.

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