To the Rockefeller State Park Preserve and back. Part 1: The Park.

It was a glorious, sunny when I woke up so I decided to get out of the house and take a walk. Unfortunately the good weather didn’t last long. Pretty soon it clouded over and got quite dark and gloomy. The weather forecast even suggested rain. Still I’d decided to go out. I took the dog for a one hour walk around the neighborhood and after a brief rest on returning home I caught a ride to the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. On the way there I decided I would try to walk back to the house so I walked through the park, onto the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, along Route 9 and then up the hill along Scarborough Road back to the house. All told it took me about three hours. So including the walk with the dog I walked for about four hours in all. Above: Bridge over the Pocantico River. Although most of the trees were still bare, a few were starting to show leaves.


Pocantico River. We’ve had quite a lot of rain lately and it was in full flow.


Skunk Cabbage (I think). A low growing plant that grows in wetlands and moist hill slopes of eastern North America. Apparently if you bruise the leaves they present an odor reminiscent of skunks. I can’t confirm this as I’ve never actually tried to bruise one.


A pair of fellow walkers and their dog. I didn’t take Harley because he’d already had his walk and I was carrying a fairly large, heavy camera. It’s hard to control the dog and use such a camera at the same time.


Stone wall.


Mossy stones.


Patterns in stone

Taken with a Canon EOS 5DII and Canon EF20-105mm f3.5-4.5 II USM

A Unexpected Dessert Discovery

I was in Briarcliff Manor village the other day when I noticed that one of my favorite lunchtime haunts had its tables back outside. Today was a very pleasant day: sunny, but not too hot so I decided to pop over and have a bite to eat. I had a Greek salad and afterwards decided to have some dessert. I asked the server what they had for dessert and he mentioned carrot cake, cheese cake, tiramisu etc. But then he also said that there was something else, but he couldn’t quite remember the name. Off he went returning with a dessert menu, which he handed to me. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the mystery item was Sticky Toffee Pudding.
For anyone who doesn’t know what it is: Sticky Toffee Pudding is a classic British dessert made of soft and sweet date cakes soaked in a warm toffee sauce. The cakes are served with whipped cream, ice cream, heavy cream, or custard. As you can see from the picture mine had Vanilla ice cream and whipped cream.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XF 35mm f1.4 R

A Photographic Exercise

During COVID it was not possible to travel as much as I had been doing. I therefore confined myself to walks in the immediate vicinity of my house and started a series of photographs, which with my usual lack of inspiration I decided to call “Around the Neighborhood”. I defined this as meaning anywhere that I could walk back and forth to from my house.

In this case the subject is a single tree in a nearby woodland. I’d already taken a number of pictures of it but on this occasion I decided on the spur of the moment to attempt an exercise that I’d recently read about. This exercise consisted of taking thirty six photographs of a single subject all at once.

Quite easy at first, but after about twenty photographs increasingly more difficult. In fact at that point I almost gave up, but I stuck with it and in the end found it to be quite useful. I’m the kind of person who will walk up to a subject, take a few pictures and then move on. This exercise made me slow down and look more carefully. Indeed, towards the end I was noticing things, which I had already walked past a couple of times and not spotted.

In order to not bore any reader with 36 individual images, I’ve combined them into just two (see below of you’re interested).


Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XF 55-200mm f3.5-4.8 R LM OIS