Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
I liked the disorderly nature of the scene: the chaos of the mess on the beach right next to the lovely river. I love the way a plastic bottle peeps through the tangle of branches.
Taken with an Olympus OM-D EM-10 and Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-42 f3.5-4.6 II
Blue and white boats waiting for Winter to end and Spring to begin.
My late wife was a passionate collector of blue and white pottery and created and administered a Facebook group on this topic. But her love of these colors wasn’t limited to china. We have blue and white pillows, curtains, place mats, dog beds etc. So when I came across these boats at Croton Landing, Croton-on-Hudson, NY I couldn’t help but think of her.
Taken with an Olympus OM-D EM-10 and Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-42 f3.5-4.6 II
The garden was teeming with the birds the other day. I believe they are American Robins.
The American robin (Turdus migratorius) is a migratory songbird of the true thrush genus and Turdidae, the wider thrush family. It is named after the European robin because of its reddish-orange breast, though the two species are not closely related, with the European robin belonging to the Old World flycatcher family. The American robin is widely distributed throughout North America, wintering from southern Canada to central Mexico and along the Pacific Coast. It is the state bird of Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
According to the Partners in Fight database (2019), the American robin is the most abundant bird in North America (370,000,000), ahead of Red-winged blackbirds, introduced European starlings, mourning doves and the not-always-naturally-occurring house finch. It has seven subspecies, but only one of them, the San Lucas robin (T. m. confinis) of Baja California Sur, is particularly distinctive, with pale gray-brown underparts. (Wikipedia)
They’re quite different from the robins where I grew up in the United Kingdom. British robins are much smaller, chunkier and much cuter (see below. Imagine source PublicDomainPictures.net)
The distinctive orange breast of both sexes contributed to the European robin’s original name of “redbreast”, orange as a colour name being unknown in English until the 16th century, by which time the fruit had been introduced. In the 15th century, when it became popular to give human names to familiar species, the bird came to be known as robin redbreast, which was eventually shortened to robin. As a given name, Robin is originally a diminutive of Robert. Other older English names for the bird include ruddock and robinet. In American literature of the late 19th century, this robin was frequently called the English robin. Dutch roodborstje, French rouge-gorge, German Rotkehlchen, Italian pettirosso, Spanish petirrojo and Portuguese pisco-de-peito-ruivo all refer to the distinctively coloured front. (Wikipedia).
Taken with an Olympus OM-D E-M10 and Lumix G Vario 45-150mm f4-5.6
I’ve been taking pictures of this kneeling woman/girl clutching the crosspiece of a stone cross ever since I first came to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (probably about 20 years ago). It’s an interesting grave marker in that it seems to commemorate George W. Dibble and his two wives. On the left side it mentions “Annie Hayt wife of George W. Dibble” and on the front “Susie Hayt wife of Georg W. Dibble”. Interesting that his two wives had the same maiden name. Could they have been sisters? I didn’t check the rear and the right side for inscriptions. Maybe two more wives were recorded there?
Taken with an Olympus OM-D EM-10 and Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-42 f3.5-4.6 II
Even though the snow has now gone the landscape is still largely bland and colorless so I thought I’d post a few more brightly colored pictures taken in Fall 2019.
The first two pictures were taken with a Canon EOS 5D and Canon EF 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 USM and the final two with an Panasonic GF-1 and Lumix G Vario 45-150mm f4-5.6