Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

As I mentioned in the last post, November is a bleak month for outdoor photography, at least in Michigan. The short days, the beginning of the extend periods of clouds and gloom, and the almost non-stop rain really defy the conventional wisdom of what makes for a good shoot.

Now that I no longer shoot full time, I’m constrained by the day job and the business aspects of photography more than ever. You have to take what you can get in terms of days and weather and light and shooting conditions.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. We want life to be a big buffet were we can pick what we want when we want it. But maybe its better just to be given a dealt a card and be challenged as to how to play it.

At least that’s how I chose to see it this morning. As usual the weather forecast was wrong, and the anticipated snow / rain / sleet mix did not arrive. Though the day was gloomy and cold, I figured I would take shots that tried to express the idea of ‘gloomy and cold.’

Complicating matters is that the firearms deer hunting season started on Wednesday, and my favorite haunts, places I visit dozens of times a year in search of solitude, are now crawling with hunters.

So I headed out with no real plan, which is the worse plan of all. To cover all bases I brought a wide variety of gear – the digital SLR, the 35mm camera with half a roll of Delta 100 languishing in the chamber, the Pentax 6x7 medium format setup with 2 frames left on the roll I started last week.

After driving around for a few hours, listening to the news, stopping for coffee and breakfast, I had shot nothing. Not one frame. A big nada for the day.

So – back home. 

A squirrel was sitting on the empty bird feeder, digging for any last morsels he could find. I decided to fill up the feeders – for him and for the house sparrows – and while I was doing that I noticed an interesting composition of leaves in the birdbath near the feeder.

The leaves were rotting and the glare of the water affected the shots – far more than it affected my vision of the scene.. But I took several shots, and worked with the photo in Photoshop later to negate the surface glare (which in the un-processed image all but obscures the detail.)

Maybe we don’t have to stray too far to capture gloom and autumnal shadow.

In the back yard, next to the downright rotten jack-o-lantern I had carved for Hallowe’en, was a small sorbet bowl filled with water. I had put the candle for the jack-o-lantern into the bowel, and had pulled it out and set it aside a few days ago. Maybe November has me reaching for straws – but I liked the scene, and shot away.

Several other back yard shots proved to be pretty uninteresting. But here in the early November evening, I feel that at least I got something. And for today at least, something beats nothing.

Like most photographers, I'm always looking for new venues for exhibiting work.

I recently have had an opportunity to work on a new project, with a new approach towards exhibiting photos. In this case, I've been working with Lin Foulk, who has selected several of my local landscapes photographs to accompany her recitals of Hilary Tann's composition Kilvert’s Hills.

Here's the announcement of the recital:

Lin Foulk, horn
Janine Gaboury-Sly, horn
Deborah Moriarty, piano

Tuesday, November 14, 6 pm, MSU Hart Recital Hall
Saturday, November 18, 8:15 pm, WMU Dalton Recital Hall
*free admission to both performances


Calls for two horns .......................... Verne Reynolds
Lin Foulk, horn
Janine Gaboury-Sly, horn

Etude No. 3 for solo horn .......................... Verne Reynolds
Janine Gaboury-Sly, horn

Seaside Impressions for horn and piano .................... Franz Strauss
Janine Gaboury-Sly, horn
Deborah Moriarty, piano


Intermission

Kilvert’s Hills for solo horn .......................... Hilary Tann
with projected images by Mark Cassino
*premiere performance

Lin Foulk, horn

Time & Space for two horns and piano .......................... Richard Bissill
Lin Foulk, horn
Janine Gaboury-Sly, horn
Deborah Moriarty, piano

This recital features the two regional artists together and as soloists. Lin Foulk will premiere “Kilvert’s Hills” for solo horn by New York-based composer Hilary Tann. Featuring projections of landscape photography by local photographer Mark Cassino, the virtuosic work is both majestic and spiritual and highlights the lyrical sound of the horn.

Lin Foulk is Assistant Professor of Horn at Western Michigan University, where she teaches horn, coaches chamber ensembles, and is a member of the Western Brass Quintet. She has performed and presented lectures throughout the United States and in Spain, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Canada and has frequently performed with the Milwaukee, Madison, Kalamazoo, and Battle Creek Symphony Orchestras. Dr. Foulk received degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Janine Gaboury-Sly is Associate Professor of Horn at the Michigan State University School of Music. She received both a master of music degree and a performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Verne Reynolds. Gaboury-Sly is an active solo, chamber and orchestral performer. She has given recitals nationally and internationally, and has been an invited performer and clinician at numerous regional and international workshops and symposia. She is a member of the Beaumont Brass Quintet, a faculty ensemble at MSU, and principal horn of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra.

T.S. Elliot may have thought that April is the cruelest month, but my vote goes to November. The days are short and dark, and each one is shorter and darker than the one before. The trees have lost their leaves – except perhaps for a few lingering glimmers of fall color. Here in Michigan wind, rain, and later wet snow are the norm.

This can be a time of year when there are slim pickings for outdoor photography.

Once the snow falls, things will be better. Early spring is a lot like late fall, except that the progression of the days in much more positive. Each day brings a chance to find more. The challenge of finding the first green shoots, the first wildflower, the first dragonfly is much more uplifting than counting off the last time these things were seen…

But still, you have to get up and do something…

Last week I went to the beach at South Haven. As usual, the weather was variable and the forecast was wrong – which in this case was not a bad thing. Instead of cold rain and a gale rolling in, the morning started with mild temperatures and still breezes. 

There wasn’t much happening on the beach. Once the pier and lighthouse were interesting to shoot. But nowadays I look at it and feel that all of my shots have been taken. But the beach itself always holds out some opportunities – a resin chair with a 40 oz beer bottle, some buried metal pilings.

After wandering the beach for a while I visited the Northpoint Conservation area, where I saw the difference that a week can make. The shots I took the week before caught the last of the fall leaves on the trees. Now virtually all of the leaves were on the ground, and those that had been bright yellow just a week before are just a shade of brown – like everything else this time of year.

Well, you have to march through the dark to get back to the light. I shot my second to the last roll of Konica Impressa ISO 50 film at Northpoint – well, shot about half of it. It really was pretty bare.

I was through shooting by 10:30, and by noon the weather had tipped and dark clouds were rolling in. Ah – November in Michigan…

A few more photos:

Last weekend I went to the Northpoint Conservation district in hopes of getting some last autumn landscape shots. Northpoint is a somewhat unique area, consisting of steep rolling hills that rise up along the land-ward side of a high sand dune. At the tope of the dune it’s 60 feet or so down to the beach and Lake Michigan. It’s a fairly small area directly adjacent to the Van Buren State park.

Aside from the rolling hills and the vistas of forest that you can see from the ridgelines, there are the increasingly looting ruins of an old house that was never fully constructed. The ruins consist of several large concrete slabs. A few years ago some of the slabs had elaborate figures embedded in them, but those have been largely removed, and now all that remains are the plain slabs, strewn around the area along the top of the dunes, where the house was to be built.

In the late autumn the wind is always howling off the lake, but because the land is nestled behind the high dunes it’s usually quite still. The wind hits the tops of the tallest trees, making an eerie faint howling sound.

The most successful shot of the day was a small, broken, and windswept tree sitting at the top of the dune. The wind was blowing relentlessly, and the long sand grass was rolling and waving, almost as fluid as the water in the lake below. I wanted to capture the sense of motion, so I stopped the lens fully down, added a polarizer to serve as a 2 stop neutral density filter, and pushed the exposure up a stop, to get as long an exposure as possible. This let the sweeping grass and wind tossed tree branches pick up as much motion blur as possible.

I wound up converting the image to black and white, and hitting it with a sharpening filter to maximize the film grain. The motion blur is not as apparent in the small web size image, but is much more noticeable in a larger print.