My first drawing on my new iPad.

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Zermatt_Pano, originally uploaded by Modern Day Thoreau.

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I decided to put together a collection of identity designs from vineyards throughout New England. This will be a 6 part series that includes NY state as well,  so be sure to say tuned and subscribe to my RSS feed so you know when they each are posted. Also feel free to add a link to one not included that you know of  in the comments.

Massachusetts & RI

Links:

Turtle Creek Winery | Pioneer Valley Vineyard | Newport Vineyards | Sakonnet Vineyards | Nashoba Winery | Les Trois Emme | Alfalfafa Farm Winery | Coastal Vineyards | Running Brook Vineyard | Nantucket Vineyard | Neponset Winery | Chester Hill Winery | Hardwick Winery

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This is a pic from Duval Street in Key West.  The sunset was resting perfectly between the buildings on either side with beautiful purple and blue tones.

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I was recently rereading Thoreau’s ‘Walden’, and i was struck by a passage that is hard to completely understand unless you’ve worked a job, a real adult job I mean, in which you were left with something missing, that is to say a void of some kind, So below is a quote from the first chapter of Walden that I believe summarizes this feeling:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before

Of Life and Love

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I recently decided it was time for a tripod upgrade, mostly out of necessity since I purchased a Nodal Ninja pano head, but I didn’t want to break the bank to terribly much.  After much research on Amazon and Adorama, I settled on the Manfrotto 190XB.  This is an aluminum legged tripod that provides excellent height range for shots that require either very low angle (a few inches) or very high angle (60 inches).  As a photographer who thrives on frugality, I like to get the biggest bang for the buck and I believe that this tripod does the trick.

The 190XB, while moderately heavy compared to some tripods, is still very portable and fits nicely in the tripod slot of my camera bag for a quick and easy setup.  My biggest issue  with the tripod is that the level bubble can be hard to balance, but with a tripod head that has it’s own balancing, it would not be a problem.  So until I get another tripod head, I’ll have to make do.

One of the biggest strengths of the 190XB is the ability to get very low to the ground by flipping the center shaft around and placing the camera upside down.  This allows for the camera to sit about 1.5″ off the ground (depending on your camera of course) for excellent macro shots of flowers or bugs or just an unique angle on a familiar subject.

One of the great things about this tripod is its versatility.  It can shoot low, it can shoot high, and everywhere in between.  I think you’d be hard pressed to find something that was this inexpensive and provided such a range of configurations.

Thoreau Rating (out of 5 total boots):

• Looses point for weight
  

Below are some photos of the different angles and positions the tripod has, Enjoy!

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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost.  That is where they should be.  Now put foundations under them.

-Henry David Thoreau

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Well I just finished a redesign of ModernDayThoreau that I feel makes the site more approachable and easy to use.  Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Also here is the photo of the week(although not every week as you can tell) for the second week in March

In northern New York at the military barracks, this abandoned building stood out…If you view the original size you can see a disturbing message above the door.

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So i decided that the next lens in my arsenal would be a fisheye lens for those unique situations that call for such a wide angle, 180° to be precise.  After looking around I decided to try the Pro-Optic 8mm Fisheye since I didn’t want to spend $1000 on the Sigma 8mm Fisheye if I found It wasn’t a type of photography I used to much.  Several of the other Pro-Optic lens’ have gotten pretty decent reviews, but I was hard pressed to find any for this lens.  I decided to take the plunge and this is what i’ve found.

The Pro-Optic 8mm comes as is, in a small box with the lens cap and a soft chammy pouch for storage.  The lens is fully manual, meaning you have to set the Aperature and and focus yourself, which provides a great chance to hone those photography 101 skills that may have lacked from the digital age.  The f-stop numbers go from 3.5 through 22 so there is no guess work as the which stop your at and the focus is about 1ft at its lowest to infinity.  One down side to a fully manual lens, is that it send no data to the camera so its a little more tricky to calculate over/under exposure with a given light source, but if you have a light meter that won’t be a problem anyways.

The lens lacks a dot on  it that would line up with the dot on the camera, so a little fidgiting was need, but I put a whiteout mark on the corner so I would only have to find it once.  Having tested out the sigma 8mm I found that the Pro-Optic, which not as sharp, avoided any vineyetting on the picture leading to less post processing (always a plus).  The lens has a really good depth and takes some very unique pictures, especially when within 3ft of the subject.

One of the downsides of the Pro-Optic 8mm is that it doesn’t allow for automatic bracketing, so for those pano’s your gonna need to do a little more calculations in your head (or on paper preferably).   Another minus for the lens, is that its night shots are not as crisp as its day shots.

Overall I found that for general shooting this lens is plenty sharp and will accomplish your goal, be it pano’s or 360 shots, effectively while at the same time allowing you to grow as a photographer by having to do more manual calculations.  Check out some photos below from my testing.

UPDATE 3-30-2010:  So since this is by far the most popular post on my site, I thought I’d provide an update on the lens and how much I like it.  I’ve been using this for about 6 weeks now and I must say that I haven’t changed my mind at all.  The lens is still very sharp, and after a few weeks of use, you get very quick with the manual settings.

You can view more shots taken with this lens on my Fisheye Flickr Gallery

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Taken on the Ponkapaug Trail hike, this little tree was all alone in the field.  Click the image to see the full size.

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