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Douro River Vineyards

Flamenco Madrid

Susan and I have just returned from a wonderful two weeks in Spain and Portugal. The trip centered on a week-long cruise down the beautiful Douro River. Before embarking on the river, we spent several days in Madrid with excursions to explore the classic city of Toledo and the University town of Salamanca. The Douro is one of the most beautiful rivers I have seen, nestled in lovely steep hills covered with terraced vineyards. The river features a scattering of snug little villages and farms with none of the industrial development seen in abundance on many other European rivers. The Douro drops through a series dramatic locks to the Atlantic in the city of Porto. We finished our trip with several days in Lisbon then flew home, thankfully without any travel complications other than the unavoidable jet lag and mild cases of COVID. All-in-all a great trip blessed with nearly 2000 pictures that I will be working on for the next several months. You can follow my progress on my Spain Portugal Gallery at my website. 

Lights of Porto Portugal

October Glow Guilford Vermont

 We tend to schedule our foreign trips for the fall away from the summer heat and crowds, but I always try to get most of the spectacular New England fall color before we head out. This year’s autumn show was a bit muted, but I still caught some nice color before our trip. Returning after the first week in November, I expected that we would be thoroughly settled into the bland stick season, but I was pleased to discover two flashes of brilliant red among the usual flat tones of dirt and decay. 

Japanese Maple

 As I expected, on arrival home my Maples, Birches, Black Cherries and even the Oaks had lost almost all their leaves, but I was happy to see that my sturdy little Japanese Maple was still showing its lustrous red glow. This tree always hangs on to its foliage a week or two longer than all the surrounding trees and this year it hung on to great me with a welcoming splash of color.

 

Shortly after our return the tree finally surrendered its leaves and I retreated to the studio for my usual November stick season work of editing the pile of autumn foliage and travel images, but then I was treated to one more unexpected splash of color. Earlier this week, it was reported that there was a possibility of a display of the northern lights as far south as our home in southern New Hampshire. Many times, I have been disappointed by these predictions, with my endurance of night-time cold being rewarded only with blank colorless skies. Tuesday night, however, while accompanying Benji on his last lawn visit of the evening, I noticed a brilliant red swarth of color across the western sky. I grabbed my camera and raced to a vantage point on the edge of Spofford Lake, with an unobstructed view to the north. The red blotch was still hanging in the sky to the west, beginning to fade, but still visible to the unaided eye. I quickly set the camera on the tripod, made my best guess at infinity focus, and grabbed a couple of 30 second exposures at f 4.5 and an ISO of 400. Remarkably the red blasted through, although not with the flowing sheets of color that I expected. I later learned that the red color comes from activation of oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere, where they are less perturbed by currents that are more prevalent at lower altitudes. I was thrilled with the images but surprised that I wasn’t seeing much color to the north. Almost as an afterthought I shifted and grabbed one image from the dull sky to the north. Only later, as I examined the images on the computer, did I discover the interesting array of colors in the northern sky.

 

North Across Spofford Lake

It was there that I saw the red bands complemented by sheets of a greenish yellow glow. It turned out that that exposure of “blank” sky was the most interesting. 

 For years, I have hoped to catch a dramatic aura borealis. I was thrilled that we were welcomed back home among the boring November stick season with these two surprising splashes of nature’s color. Now back the studio until the landscape is once again invigorated with a fresh lustrous kiss of snow. www.partridgebrookreflections.com