So many things have changed in the past year or so. When work-from-home first started, we were cheery and bright eyed. I started a slack group to encourage people to do some physical activity mid-day, to make up for the lack of commute. We dutifully went to the store as little as possible, cooking new things at home to make our groceries stretch. Saved masks for the health care workers, then bought our own as guidance changed. At some point we slipped from the ‘hopeful for a return to normal’ era to the ‘ambulance' era. Anyone who stayed in NYC will know what I mean. When you paused your conversations for the sirens and everyone looked a bit hollow eyed. With no end in sight, the company I freelance most for cut back. Last-in-first-out meant that our small team was slashed back. Our cheery slack reminder to ‘get some exercise in’ was now blasting to an empty room. My hours got cut, yet still I was one of the lucky ones who wasn’t just crossed off completely. Suddenly I found myself with days off that I had no idea what to do with.

Where we live in Brooklyn is a sort of strange place. We’re close to the trains so it’s a short commute into Manhattan. We can walk easily to either Red Hook or slightly longer to downtown Brooklyn. We’re technically ‘blocks’ away from Prospect Park, but we’re down the hill so it’s not a super fun jaunt. We’re surrounded by warehouses and sanitation trucks, and right by an entrance to the BQE, escaping the city seems mostly feasible at least until you turn the corner and see the bridge traffic. But best of all, at least for the purposes of this write-up, we’re a short bike ride away from Historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Pre-pandemic I knew it as a great place to catch some (free) cherry blossoms without the insane crowds of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. In this new world it was a park without crowds, an open space where you could take your mask off and feel the sun. A place with great views and a surprising amount of solitude. Founded in 1838, there are 478 acres of “hills, valleys, glacial ponds, and paths, throughout which exists one of the largest outdoor collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century statuary and mausoleums.“ With my camera in tow, I started making it a regular wandering location on my new days off.

Through some fortuitous run-ins and connections over Instagram, I’ve found myself with fantastic birding companions who enthusiastically meet at the gate at 7am to see what we can find. Talya and I barely crossed paths in the before-times, but now we tromp through wet grasses and peer up at trees together. Brad meets me with a coffee in hand (always a coffee in hand!) and teaches me about all the trees and the historic stone work. My sister gamely wakes up, west-coast jet-lagged, to search for what ever feathered friends we can find and experiment with new lenses. I love that I can hop on my bike and be at the entrance in so little time my fit-bit doesn’t even track it as exercise. There’s something really magical about showing up at work at 9am having already captured a little green heron hunting at the edge of the water or en egret politely posing. I still don’t know enough about birds, but I’m starting to learn to identify some by their calls and learn the habits of some frequent guests. With the help of my birding companions we’ve chatted up some far more knowledgeable birders and gotten tips on where to find some fun ones. I’ve fangirl-ed over meeting the guy who really got me inspired to get better at capturing these creatures, Evan.

I’m also just having some amazing moments. While searching for the juvenile green herons nesting near Sylvan Water I was surprised by a huge Blue Heron who just… stared me down. I was late to work that morning because on my way out, I was captivated by a little Green Heron hunting among yellow flowers at the edge of the water. I’ve heard frogs make the strangest screeching noises as they leap into the water and watched egrets jostle each other in the air. All the while - I live in a place with 2.6 million people. And that’s just Brooklyn! We’re the second-most densely populated county in the United States (second to Manhattan). Yet still, less than a mile away I can capture incredible birds and learn about trees and take in stunning monuments. Perhaps one day I’ll even catch a glimpse of Rover, the Bald Eagle who has been known to frequent the cemetery.

I may not always capture the shot I want, birds are fast moving and I’m still learning so much about how to photograph them. But when I get home and load up my camera cards, if there’s even one shot that catches the light just right and gets the eyes just crisp enough… the early morning wake up, dew-wet shoes and bug bites are worth it. What a fantastic place to live near. Fall migration is coming up, and I’m excited to learn about the birds that travel through our little patch of earth.

I love being a part of the Gowanus Dredgers. The organization has long advocated for the clean up of the canal. With some irony, the very thing that we’ve been championing is now keeping us off the canal. The EPA and the PRPs have restricted recreational boating past 9th Street, where there is ‘active dredging.’ Now, there are a whole host of reasons that we’re sour about this. We maintain that we can safely canoe around their equipment on nights or weekends when they’re not working. Boaters who haven’t been in conversation with the EPA continue to use the canal, even having the drawbridges raised for their passage. But if we’re on the canal on the wrong side of 9th, we risk fines and putting future conversations in jeopardy. So we adapt. We’ve wheeled the canoes down past 9th for launching and are working on an alternate dock situation. But the fact that we can’t launch from our boathouse means trips on the canal have been few and far between. But when we have been able to get on the water it’s been magical.

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I have the feeling that once we get construction going on our new dock things will move quickly. The site has space to store our canoes and is closer to the bay, so we have more adventures ahead of us. It’s a little more confusing to get to and we’re going to have to have a bit more supervision for our ‘open boating’ programs because it’s closer to open water, but I’m really excited about the potential. As much as I’m looking forward to the cooler weather of fall, I hope the cold stays off a bit so that we get some good paddle time in before winter!

My friend and fellow Dredger Celeste is to blame for this one! Inspired by her telescope adventures I bought one and of course had to also get all sorts of things to attach my camera (and phone) to the thing. But turns out - a low price point telescope is just as frustrating as it is delightful. The main issue is that the attachments add weight to the viewing end so the whole thing is extremely hard to center on what you’re looking for. After many attempts, finally captured miss moon in all her wondrous glory! I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to capture anything smaller or less bright though- the moon was huge and still hard to manage!

After many attempts, I was finally able to get the various attachments I got for my impluse-buy telescope to work!

And finally, a composite shot of the moon rising. Mom ran to get the tripod to get this shot! I usually hate compositing, but couldn’t manage to get the moon and the landscape in one shot. I suppose some people would call this stacking? I hate when I can’t get the shot I want without layering. My dream shot is managed only with lightroom. I’ve been realizing lately that so many of the photographers I follow hop into photoshop to ‘fix’ things. I guess whatever gets you to your end goal, but really… if it’s composited I wish folks would just say so.

When I rented the 100-400mm lens I knew I wanted to test out one of the two teleconverters that works with it. Some more reach without a whole separate lens? Yes please! I couldn’t rent one, but when I decided to just go for it and buy the lens, I added it in to the order. Kind of surreal having a lens set up that costs just as much (or more maybe?) then my camera body, but I guess that’s where I am now. The lens itself performed beautifully when I was taking portrait shots of Alexis, so my hopes were high. I did have to run some images through Topaz, but I’m not sure if that was because of my shaky camera work, bad focus or the converter itself….

Grocery shopping any time around the 4th of July means that there’s a pile of ‘safe’ fireworks set up as impulse buys at the start of check out. I regret nothing! Mom said she could fit all of “Happy Birthday” and Alexis and I didn’t believe it - but she’s basically magic and really great at sparkler writing!

And when you’ve got sparklers around a fire - you might as well make s’mores right? But gelatin in things completely freaks me out, so usual marshmallows are off the table. And vegan marshmallows just don’t behave the same way. But have you ever tried fire-roasted strawberries? And maybe instead of graham crackers - nutter butters? Alexis says we shouldn’t give our secret recipe away but I say the more we get to the strawberry side, the better!

I brought a whole pile of dresses with me, but this little cape got the most use. The day might have been a kind of a fail for the smoke bomb plans we had but I never thought we’d get such fun images with this set of wings. Thanks to my mom Chris Carter for the gift of them!

Mom kept telling us that we needed to go out to the field while it was all cut down. “The colors!” she said, “the colors!” The thing is, though, to me it just looks like our back yard. And it’s flat and boring and never quite as beautiful as I want it to be. How wrong I was! If i have one take away from this whole weekend it’s to just listen to Mom more. I’ve learned so much through all this photography and a huge part is how differently our brains work and how smart it is to listen to someone else with a different eye and just see if you can break out of your own ruts a little bit.

Back in the woods behind my mom’s house there used to be an old boyscout camp. We loved exploring the abandoned lean-tos and it provided us with some delightful backgrounds for various photography and video projects throughout high school. The site was acquired by the county in 2003 and turned into a multi-use park. Strangely, though it’s been open for a few years and it’s SO close to my mom’s, I hadn’t actually been back there since the change. A few months ago, though, Mom and I wandered back there on a walk. Of course, just in case, I threw a dress in my bag. Glad I did! The place was kinda a swamp, but we got some fun photos in a little stream. While walking around we found a great pond, but were sadly stuck on the wrong side of the river. From where we were we could see a concrete structure, but we weren’t sure if it was actually attached to the shore or not. Mom went back later for some location scouting, and when Alexis was in town we returned for some more photography adventures. Turns out the structure was a short wade away from the shore, over some super slippery rocks and mucky mud. Alexis was a good sport, though and after a bit of poking around, made it over to the structure.

I’ve been eying a better zoom lens lately. Chris suggested I rent one and to my surprise, turns out Adorama has a Brooklyn location about a 10 minute walk from our apartment! I picked it up before our glamping adventure and by the end of the weekend was in love. I am now the proud owner of my very own, plus the 1.4x teleconverter that I hadn’t been able to test.

Our rental was in the middle of the Neversink area. When Alexis looked up the the rental she said there was a waterfall nearby. The only one I found when searching for photos nearby was about ankle high. Luckily I was COMPLETELY wrong! Mullet Falls was the perfect waterfall for photography adventures, and the paths around it were delightful.

While slathering sunblock and bug spray on ourselves at the trail head, we chatted with Winston, a friendly fellow with a whole huge herd of dogs. We caught up to him later at the waterfall and the skill he had in wrangling the pack was just amazing!

Taking photos at the waterfall was a blast. Alexis was great at standing still while I got some slower shutter shots and the folks who hiked up were great sports about the whole thing. It might feel awkward to change into a dress and hop around in the water, but the thing I’ve learned so far is that if you’re brave enough to do it, most people get a kick out of it.

A fancy dome and a cross-country visit seemed like a great excuse to finally visit Riverdel and buy waaaay too much vegan cheese. Most of it was quite tasty! The texture was pretty similar across the board, and the ‘cheddar’ tasted kind of like box mac and cheese, but I guess that’s not a bad thing, right? I was a little nervous about keeping it fresh with our cooler situation, but we managed to make it work, and most of it even held up for making a spread a week later at Mom’s in NJ. (The cheese with figs in did NOT last, but I blame that on the hot-cold-hot-cold transitions from shop to subway to fridge to car to cooler to car etc. etc. etc.)

So I guess we’re hipsters - might as well embrace it and do some product shots, right? :-P The hard seltzer shots here were kind of a joke, we felt uber-hipster in our plaid shirts, trucker hats and dome camp site. The legging shots were actually a purposeful product shoot though. I bought them from my good friend Xtina and wanted to get her some feedback and photos that she could use on her site. They are SO comfortable. Seriously, go and buy some from her!

Hipsters on a hike!

Flannel, hard seltzer, trucker hats… all set!

I don’t even really remember why we decided it would be a good idea to rent a glamping dome while Alexis was visiting. When we hit a heat wave before her trip, I was worried we’d end up miserable in a terrible wanna-be yurt. Luckily the weather was beautiful, the hosts super thoughtful and the dome was pretty awesome. True “glamping” leaning more toward camp than glam - the site was an exciting golf cart ride away from the road and very private. The property is surrounded by the ‘multi-use’ area that we had wandered around for photographs earlier and few minutes away from the trailhead of the Neversink trail system. Not a bad location! If we had one complaint is was the composting toilet which was just a little… odd to use. We both decided we prefer the sawdust type of composting toilet over whatever weird electronics this one used.

My main outlet to share images has been through Instagram. I don’t like facebook, I’m terrible at updating my portfolio site and for some reason Flickr just doesn’t strike me the same way it used to. So, a new venture. I figure I’ll share images and some behind-the-scenes context on this site. Finally free of Instagram’s weird cropping! Who knows if I’ll get any views over here, but I’ll experiment with it for a bit and see where it takes me.

As Alexis was a part of what got my whole photography journey re-started, it seems appropriate that my first write-up here is inspired by her recent visit to the East Coast. We’ve both been experimenting with photography more and more lately, and it was wonderful to have a partner in crime to play around with. I picked her up at the airport, after one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve had the mis-fortune to be behind the wheel for (and thus unable to capture). Sister successfully scooped up, we headed off to the lower Catskills. Our Airb’n’b hosts said we could check in as early as we liked, but when we arrived in the area at around 8AM, that felt a little too early so we wandered around for a bit. We found a lake that we intended to return to for some canoe rentals and a road in a ‘multi use area’ full of green fields and high power lines. With yet more time to kill before we could reasonably check in, I threw on a red dress and tried not to twist my ankle running around the rocky road. This seemed like a great place to test out my new 100-400mm lens. As jet-lagged as she was, Alexis was still a good sport in trying to make an unfamiliar set up work for her.

Finally it was time to check in, so off to our home for the next few nights!