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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Bolstered by rains and recent snowmelts, a frenzied brook (photo at top) races down steep hillsides beneath a leaf-bare canopy. Warmer months lay ahead, but for now, resilient mosses are the only sign of life in this rugged forest.
Small streams, such as this one in the Housatonic Valley with empties into Jackson Cove (photo above), are termed “seasonal brooks” and possess such small watersheds that they nearly run dry between late spring and autumn. Only come late winter and early spring (and possibly after hurricane-level rains) do they snap to life with meltwater and rainfall, swelling to become spirited brooks that eagerly carve their way down from the highlands en route to low-lying river valleys.
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A jacket of snow-dusted ice clings to shallow boulders along the banks of the Housatonic River in Connecticut’s Northwest Hills. Further upstream, against a backdrop of foggy woodlands and steep hills, a long covered bridge faithfully spans the frigid gorge.
At more than 170 feet in length, the West Cornwall Covered Bridge is arguably the most impressive bridge of its type left in Connecticut. Given the cost of maintenance and increasingly heavier loads it was forced to endure since the mid-1800s, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the bridge has survived to the present day.
There were low points along the way, of course. In 1945, a tanker truck broke through the bridge floor and crashed into the river below. A couple decades later in the late 60s, state officials contemplated tearing it down, but were met with vehement opposition from the surrounding community. Instead, it was reinforced with carefully-hidden steel underpinnings, ensuring the bridge would stick around for several more generations to come. The project was a marvelous success, even earning Connecticut an award from the Federal Highway Administration for exemplary historic preservation.
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Bull’s Bridge, one of Connecticut’s few remaining historical covered bridges, is seen in my new piece (above) during a radiant sunrise as it weathers autumn for the 173rd time since it was constructed in the mid-1800s. But long before the current Bull’s Bridge was built –at a time when the trees that would eventually produce its heavy lumber were still just spindly saplings– the colonists of Connecticut had already been raising bridges at this spot on the Housatonic River. The first on record was constructed in the 1760s by the industrious Bull family in order to transport iron to New York from their Connecticut foundry.
I have visited Bull’s Bridge on numerous occasions over the past years, very much taken with the heritage bound up in this place and the striking beauty along this run of the Housatonic River. Of course, I am forever seeking new ways to interpret and express these qualities… striving to craft imagery that encompasses my own impressions of this centuries-old river crossing. “Autumn at Bull’s Crossing” is my latest interpretation, produced this October, and I felt very strongly about this piece from the moment that I visualized the composition and set to framing it up.
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With the recent weather here in Southern New England mercifully cooling, it seems timely to remind everyone to enjoy what’s left of the summer. If there’s a lingering shred of superstition in your bones, you’ll take heed that the Farmer’s Alamanac calls for “copious amounts of snow” during the coming winter with the “coldest outbreak of the season” predicted for late January.
I produced the piece seen here along the wintry banks of the Housatonic during the final week of January earlier this year. The riverscape that morning lent a certain presence to nature’s penchant for paradox; awakening with splendor, yet still so very dormant… at once, both enchanting and foreboding. “Schaghticoke Rising” (above) was my effort at capturing that bewildering contradiction as it unfolded in the minutes before dawn.
For the curious minds out there, the title of this piece hearkens back to the earliest days of Kent when the remnants of declining native tribes across Connecticut took refuge from encroaching Europeans in the rough, wooded hills of the township. Calling themselves the Schaghticoke (usually pronounced Scat-uh-cook), this amalgam of native peoples became one of the largest indigenous nations in Southern New England. They were also granted one of the earliest reservations ever created in the New World, obtaining some 2,500 acres from the Connecticut Colony in 1736.
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During early autumn last year, I had the great pleasure of arriving at Lovers Leap State Park in New Milford, Connecticut on a warm, misty morning well before dawn. My newly-released piece, “Iron Ghost on the Housatonic”, was certainly my favorite from that dream-like riverscape along the Housatonic River.
The Lovers Leap Bridge, which is silhouetted in the faint twilight over the river gorge, has faithfully spanned the Housatonic since its construction back in 1895. Iron bridges such as these hit the market in the late 1800s and they were oftentimes the “high tech” replacements for older wooden covered bridges. Both bridge designs are rather antiquated these days, even if they were celebrated in their respective eras as marvels of engineering.
The 160-acre Lovers Leap State Park certainly drew its name from the bridge… and the bridge, in turn, drew its name from an old legend which suggests that a Native American girl named Lillinonah, overcome with distraught over a lost lover, leapt to her death here in the Housatonic River. One version of the tale suggests that the heart-broken lover jumped from a 1200-foot mountainous promontory in the heart of the park. But an alternate rendition holds that she threw herself from the precipice of the gorge where one of the abutments for the Lovers Leap Bridge would later be constructed.
Before I wrap up this post, though, I wanted to satiate the curiosity of the rare individual out there who will look at the mirror-smooth waters of the Housatonic River in my photograph (at top) and wonder,” How in the world could somebody perish by jumping into such a tame river?”
Fair enough… the Housatonic River doesn’t exactly look dangerous, does it? But to make sense of the story, we must consider the context of the tale. We know for certain that Lillinonah’s father, Chief Waramaug, died an old man around 1735. So, although we don’t know when exactly the Chief fathered Lillinonah, it’s probable that her tragic end took place somewhere between the 1690s and 1730s. Back then, the Housatonic River still ran wild through New Milford and surrounding lands in deep, precipitous gorges, churning with whitewater as it weaved down through the highlands. Snow melts and heavy rains could produce impressive and deadly displays as the river furiously crashed through its woodland gorges and threatened to flood.
It wasn’t until 1955 that a dam was constructed several miles downstream, impounding the Housatonic River all the way back up into New Milford. Suffice it to say, the placid stretch of river that you can see beneath the Lovers Leap Iron Bridge in my piece, “Iron Ghost on the Housatonic”, would’ve been raucous, swift-flowing rapids in the early days when Lillinonah took her fateful plunge.
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That narrow interval during Autumn, when the forests transition to a collage of saturated colors, is always a magical time in the American Northeast. It’s a fleeting crescendo in which we bid farewell to the warmth and past experiences of spring and summer, enjoying one last, vivid hurrah before being plunged into the frigid months that will see us into a new year. Autumn resonates deeply within the collective psyche of New England. But now that winter is upon us, already blanketing the Connecticut landscape in a few successive layers of snow and ice, I’d like to bring us back just a couple months to the warm colors and soothing temperatures of Autumn 2013.
Housatonic River in Connecticut’s Northwest Hills Cornwall & Sharon, Connecticut
In my new piece, Housatonic Reverie (above), we find ourselves peering out over cold rapids on the Housatonic River in Cornwall, Connecticut. As we follow the undulating waters deeper into the landscape, we are surrounded by woodlands still cloaked in the shadows of twilight. But with fresh morning sun being cast from the east through a veil of mist, a gently-sloping hill on the horizon is set ablaze, becoming a glowing beacon of autumn color in a landscape that is still waking up to a chilly October morning.
Housatonic Reverie is just one of several pieces that I managed to produce as this truly glorious morning on the Housatonic Valley unfolded before my eyes. But if there’s one view of a landscape that I almost never capture, it’s a view which includes me! After all, I’m alone for most of my shoots and I’m generally busy behind the camera. But on this particular morning, I was out shooting with long-time friend and photographer, Ryan Dolan. While I was down on the boulder piles beside the river producing Housatonic Reverie, Ryan managed to frame me up in a unique exposure on black and white film (below).
His resulting image, which actually appears to have been taken perhaps five or ten minutes after I shot Housatonic Reverie, possesses a fascinating aesthetic that is a world apart from that of my own piece. What I found especially intriguing about his photograph was the timelessness that it so effortlessly conveys. Although we may know that it’s me on those rocks and that this image was taken only a few months ago, when we explore the world that Ryan has framed up here, we find almost nothing that tethers it to modern times. There’s the sense that this image could just as well have emerged from a century-old chest in some dusty farmhouse attic… that the photographer down there on the Housatonic is some anonymous soul of the 1800s that has long since been swallowed up by time and all but lost to history. There’s surely a vein of potent nostalgia in this emotive image, but this piece barely scratches the surface of Ryan’s work. I encourage you to explore more of his photography at ryandolanart.com.
My next piece brings us just a few miles south to Sharon, Connecticut, where the wide, shallow breadth of the Housatonic River snakes peacefully through a deeply-furrowed valley. At every turn the river is flanked by picturesque wooded hills, each one with a distinctive profile wrought in radiused slopes.
Shadowy blue tones, swirling mist and the leafless crown of an overhanging tree conspire to produce a mournful aesthetic in my piece, Twilight on Housatonic Meadows. The conditions on the Housatonic that morning were touch-and-go from a photographer’s perspective, for while the drifting blankets of fog lent a powerfully ethereal quality to the landscape, they also threatened to blot out key elements of the vista. I managed to take Twilight on Housatonic Meadows during a fleeting minute when the dense atmosphere thinned out just enough to reveal sparse wispy clouds and the contour of a distant hill.
Recently, I released a brand new fine art photography collection titled “Waterfalls of Connecticut“, the culmination of some four years of waterfall photography throughout Connecticut (if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check it out). Included in the collection are a few pieces that I managed to produce over this past Autumn, but which were still so new that they hadn’t even been released on my online galleries until now! I’ve finally rolled them out at JGCOLEMAN.COM and here we’ll explore these new works and take a look at how Fall 2013 produced some great conditions for waterfall photography.
Roaring Brook Autumnlands (at right) exemplifies the vivid color palette that we associate with autumn in New England. In this piece, we follow the waters of Roaring Brook Falls as they careen dozens of feet down a cliffside in the woodlands of Cheshire, Connecticut. At the precipice of the falls, we are treated to a cornucopia of saturated colors, from the glowing shades of orange in the forest canopy to the bold blue sky overhead. In truth, it can be extremely difficult to pull colors this “pure” out of any Autumn scene. The critical element in Roaring Brook Autumnlands —the condition that really brought this shot to life— was the magnificent, early-morning sun, which cast warm light upon the forest at the brink of the falls while leaving the cliff-face below painted in shadow. The contrast between dark, glistening rock and fiery, luminous woodlands really breathes life into this vista and reminds us of just how awe-inspiring our landscapes can be during those fleeting months of autumn.
My next piece, titled Falls Along the Gap (at right), brings us 40 miles east to Franklin, Connecticut, where gentle wisps of Bailey Brook plunge over rocky outcrops layered with a collage of fallen leaves. Connecticut was particularly dry during much of the Autumn season, a condition which can oftentimes leave smaller waterfalls throughout the state nearly dry. In the case of Falls Along the Gap, however, the reduced water volume on Ayer’s Gap Falls was the crucial ingredient which allowed thousands of autumn leaves to accumulate in areas that might otherwise have been scraped bare by swift currents.
Within At the Northgate (below), my new piece from Northgate Falls in Simsbury, Connecticut, fallen leaves have completely blanketed the forest floor, dramatically framing off the reflecting pool at the base of the cascades. This piece captures a different side of the autumn aesthetic: that wistful atmosphere in which the last throws of autumn feel more like a beautiful, bittersweet farewell rather than an eager stride into the coming months of snow and ice.
Here again, the dry months of summer and early autumn had left this branch of Bissell Brook with greatly reduced water volume. Northgate Falls is not a particularly large waterfall to begin with, but it was rendered especially tranquil at this point in late October.
Click on any of the waterfall photographs above to see a larger of version at my online galleries. Or, if you’d like to see other work from a given location, check out my galleries for Roaring Brook Falls Park, Ayer’s Gap Preserve and Northgate Falls.
Wind Gate at the Hudson Highlands Cornwall, New York
Of course, New England isn’t the only place that offers stunning scenery during Autumn. My next piece brings us 20 miles east of the Connecticut state line to a celebrated place in the history of landscape art: New York’s Hudson River Valley.
In my piece, Storm King Mountainscape (above), we peer out over the wide expanse of the Hudson River beneath a dawn sky awash with color. The facing slope of Storm King Mountain, a prominent, dome-shaped peak that abruptly rises more than 1,300 feet over the river below, glows with with molten color as the earliest sunlight of the morning carves blazing gashes into the shadowy bluffs.
Although Storm King Mountain is the star of this new piece, the photograph was actually taken from the opposite side of the river on a rocky promontory of Breakneck Ridge. Breakneck and Storm King are the distinctive sentinels that form the “Wind Gate”, the mountainous northern entrance into the Hudson Highlands region of New York. While it was early Dutch settlers that coined that term (originally “Wey Gat”), it was the painters of the famous Hudson River School that took to channeling the sublime qualities of this place into profound works of fine art. Throughout the 1800s, Storm King Mountain and Breakneck Ridge were featured in exquisite paintings by Thomas Cole, Samuel Colman, Thomas Benjamin Pope, Regis Frances Gignoux, Homer Dodge Martin and Jasper Cropsey, to name only a few.
I’d like to leave you with a piece that portrays barely a foot of the forest floor from edge to edge, but which manages to say just as much about autumn as the vast panorama from Breakneck Ridge or the wide vistas of the Housatonic.
Produced barely ten minutes from my home in Wolcott, Connecticut, my piece Sugar Maple Castaway is a simple, but potent, expression of the beauty of autumn. Da Vinci once wrote that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and when we draw our attention to just a single lonely leaf beaming with color upon the forest floor… well, there’s no doubt that the old master was on to something.
