Spring Attractions 2025

West Guilford

Spring is progressing and I have been getting out trying to capture the beauty before it disappears.   For me, the season really comes to an end when the fresh, multi-toned green of the early foliage settles into the rather monotonous deep greens of summer. Surely, the bright spring flowers continue to explode, but once the variety of colors in the trees and scrubs begin to fade, I’m ready to move on to summer.

 

Guilford Vermont

Overall, it has been a good spring.  After a prolonged late winter “stick season”, the buds slowly began to pop.  As always, I love the variety of greens that decorate the hills and roadsides.  I call it our second “autumn” season of color and in many ways it is more interesting and longer lasting – with the  added benefit of no leaves to rake after it is all over.

 

Pleasant valley Farm Rockingham Vt

First there is the Flowing Water

Partridge Brook Chesterfield New Hampshire

Chesterfield NH

Of course, early spring isn’t only about the waves of color.  The second major attraction is the flowing water. Even without much melting snowpack the streams and waterfalls have been bursting with this years spring rains.  Waterfall photography is often an early spring gift even before the greens begin to grow.

 

Chesterfield Gorge

This year, I enjoyed a fun early waterfall exploration with a short workshop for a group from the Monadnock Garden Club.  I had planned to visit a number of waterfalls around Chesterfield area over a morning in early May.  I first brought the group to Chesterfield Gorge.  The Gorge has a wonderful variety of dramatic drops and babbling cascades and it turned out that location provided more than enough to keep the folks busy for the entire morning.  The group came with a wide range of experience and equipment, from sophisticated digital SLR’s to iPhones.  I was happy that everyone had a tripod, but some barely qualified for that designation.  There certainly were many opportunities for diplomatic instruction and the brisk flow of the stream provided all we needed to capture lovely images.

Saxon River Falls

Brockway Mills Falls Chester Vt

The waterfall photography has been great all spring and I have been out a number of times to catch the action.  I love it when I discover new waterfalls.  This year, my friend Lucky introduced me to a couple of dramatic falls around the Bellows Falls, Saxon River area in Vermont.  It is exciting that, no matter how long I wander about the roads of my corner of New England, I still can find fresh areas of beauty and wonder.

Partridge Brook Chesterfield NH

There are various ways that shutter speed can render the appearance of flowing water.  Rapid exposures freeze the splash capturing the turbulent energy of the water, but I continue to be enamored with the soft dreamy appearance created by long exposures.  Previously, I have discussed my view of the optimal shutter speed, but it depends on the rate of flow, the distance to the falls as well as your own taste.  My goal is to get a soft look without losing all the detail in the water.  There is no one “perfect” shutter speed, a bit of experimentation is usually required.

Partridge Brook Dam Spofford NH

Nearby, my local falls were all brimming with action.  Partridge Brook, which flows behind my house on its way to the Connecticut River, provided many interesting cascades as it ran through the old mill dam and down alongside the road toward Westmoreland.  The Gulf Road, in the southwest corner of Chesterfield, has a number of falls which are dependent on the fresh run-off, but when the rain is strong, the falls can be dramatic.   

 

Gulf Road Falls Chesterfield

Jelly Mill Falls Dummerston Vt

I also got across to Vermont for one of my favorite falling water spots in Dummerston, where Stickney Brook drops through the Jelly Mill Falls, with a series of lovely cascades to the West River.

 

Spring Green

Roads End Farm Chesterfield NH

As spring progresses, my attention is increasingly drawn to the evolving color of the bursting greenery.  It was great to have an excuse to explore around my familiar locations in both New Hampshire and Vermont.  

 

 

Each day, I found different shades of color as the season progressed.  I could also vary the colors by simply heading north or south, or by changing my altitude. The greens are settling out down here in far southern New Hampshire, but just last week I was able to catch some beautiful hillside greens on a misty afternoon farther north in Charlestown along the Connecticut River.  

 

Twin Peaks Charlestown NH

Every year, I am amazed at how quickly the leaves explode on the trees.  They must know how short a season they have to store energy for the long winter.  It is sad to see the multitude of shades of green settle out, but I do have a pile of images to work through, and I can sit back and enjoy the relaxing shade until the blast of autumn color shakes me from my summer lethargy.

Broad Brook Guilford Vt

 

Jeff Newcomer
www.partridgebrookreflections.com

 

2018 Fall Foliage Workshop

Green River above the Village

Exploring Opportunities 

This last week I have been struggling to work through images from this year’s Fall Foliage Workshop.  The pressure has been relaxed by all the great pictures that my group has already posted to public media.  I have been amazed by the variety and quality of the work. 

Dan Shooting in the Rain 

West Guilford Valley, Vermont

In past years I have recounted a chronological story of the weekend, from our departure early Saturday morning to the reluctant wrap-up around noon on Sunday, but this time I thought I might organize things a bit differently.  Our workshop included a wide range of opportunities, and challenges across the two days and this seems like a good way to share something about the experience. 

Weather: It’s always about the weather

Barn in the Rain, Chesterfield

Saturday morning started over-cast with intermittent showers.  The rain gave me a chance to discuss methods of protecting the gear from the wet, while taking advantage of the special light.  I tried to convince everyone that cloudy conditions were often the best to capture the fully saturated colors of fall foliage, and I was happy to see everyone adapt to the conditions.  

Green River Falls, 16 seconds with ND

We shot on the back roads of Chesterfield New Hampshire and up to the remarkable Roads End horse farm, but much of our day was spent in Vermont.   With many stops, we worked our way to the classic village of Green River in Guilford Vermont.  Within a compact location, Green River provides an arrangement of almost everything which makes an iconic New England village icon; a waterfall, a covered bridge, a white church and more.   Everyone found their own approach.   I had the opportunity to demonstrate the use of a neutral density filter to soften the waterfall and create leaf swirls in the pond below.

Reach Maple, Guilford Vt

As the day progressed, the rain thinned, and we saw some sun, but the clouds were never very far from view.  We had more sun on Sunday which allowed us to appreciate the value of a polarizing filter and the dramatic effect of strong back-lighting.

The Group, Precious Monadnock View

Flowing Water

Broad Brook, Guilford Vt

I am always enthusiastic about shooting flowing water in all its manifestations and the recent rain, provided several opportunities on Saturday.  Brooks and rivers tend to open gaps in the trees allowing light to penetrate, highlighting the color of the foliage and creating contrast with the dark blue water.  We found beautiful views at a couple of locations on Broad Brook, and along the Green River in Guilford Vermont.  Of course, the falls over the wood crib dam in Green River provided many different opportunities to capture the flow at various shutter speed

Sherman's Pasture Jaffrey NH

 

The Human Touch

Shack ion the Woods, Marlborough NH

Our corner of New England is known for its pristine farms and, as always, we found that the autumn colors contrasted nicely with lovely barns, sugar shacks and farming equipment.  The trick was to allow the color to comfortably envelop the human touches.  On Sunday, we completed our tour with a visit to Jaffrey where the streets were lined with hundreds of scarecrows.  The “Scarecrows on the Common” is just part of a family-oriented autumn celebration which included face painting, hayrides and somethings called a “Donut Dash”.

Jaffrey Scarecrows

Animals

There always must be animals.  Horses, sheep, goats, and cows, we found lots of opportunities to capture farm animals.  The remarkable thing is how oblivious these creatures are to the spectacular colors which are all around.  The trick is to get the critters to stop paying attention to the mass of photographers and return to doing “critter” stuff.  It usually just took patience.

Chat Break

Everything Else

Not all the attractions of our workshop fell into neat categories.  It is Autumn and sometimes things where just plain beautiful.   What is not captured in the images is the great fun that we had chatting, often about photography, and sometimes about nothing vaguely related to photography.  Frequently I had to break off the conversations and suggest that we might want to take a few pictures!  

I have more of my own images to process, but much of my time was spent helping the group find great locations and then get the most from their expensive equipment.  From all that I’ve seen so far, the group took LOTS of great pictures!

I am continuing to add pictures to my
2018 Fall Foliage Workshop Gallery

Check it out.

Jeff Newcomer, NEPG

www.partridgebrookreflections.com

White Balance, The Basics of Digital Photography

  
Taking the Light's Temperature
 
Photography always comes back to the light and the color of the light that illuminates our subjects exerts a profound effect on the resulting image. Visible light can vary from the orange of candle flame to the deep blue of the evening sky, but he human eye has a remarkable ability to compensate for this wide spectrum. We can recognize a white card as being white through a broad color range, but our digital cameras lack our cognitive abilities to interpret visual input. Without correction, a white object captured in the yellow light of an incandescent bulb will be recorded with a yellow tint and the blue sky, illuminating someone in the shade of a building will change the face to a cold sickly blue. Digital cameras offer auto white balance settings (AWB) , using various algorithms to compensate for changes in the color of light, but, as is true of most automatic settings, the adjustments often don't produce the best results. This is one of those situations where the computer in your brain can work better that your camera's microprocessor, so its time to get to work.

Your Light Has a Temperature

Specturm of Light
http://www.exposureguide.com/white-balance.htm

Most digital cameras have white balance settings to adjust for a number of the common colors of illumination. These may work better than the Camera's auto white balance, but the balance is fixed and won't change with changing light. Fortunately a glance at the camera's LCD screen can provide quick feedback about the effect of any selection. The common presets include:

 
Sunlight:
Unfiltered sunlight contains the full spectrum of visible light and as a result tends to produce the most accurate white and color reproduction. This is a good setting when shooting outside in full sunlight, but who actually does that?

Cloudy and Shade:
In both of these situations the light tends to be cooler, as the full

Abigail in Full Shade

spectrum is filtered through blue clouds or comes into shaded areas from the even bluer sky. Cloudy and Shade settings compensate by warming the image. The Cloudy setting provides enough warming to balance the cooling effect that occurs when sunlight is scattered and filtered through the overcast. The Shade setting provides a warmer adjustment for times when the subject is illuminated by the more intense bright blue dome of the sky. It is important to be aware that, when shooting in the shade, areas outside of your main subject that are in the bright sunlight may take on an unnatural orange tint.

Tungsten:
Indoor illumination from Tungsten light bulbs has a strong yellow

Tungsten Color Balance

hue and the Tungsten setting is used to cool down the digital image by adding blue. A good way to appreciate this effect is to shoot outside in sunlight with the Tungsten WB setting. This will reinforce the importance of readjusting the white balance when you going from inside to outdoors. Last

Kissing Bridge Tungsten WB

week I used the tungsten setting while shooting inside the Vermont Country Store. When I ventured outside, I forgot to readjust the WB and the first couple images of the "Kissing Bridge" had an intensely blue tint. This blue shift is also seen when windows to the outside are included in my indoor photography. Situations like this, when there is a mosaic of different colored light, can be challenging and is where local adjustments of color balance in Photoshop can be a life-saver.

 
Fluorescent:
Fluorescent lighting has a blue/green shade which is warmed using the Fluorescent setting. The color of fluorescent can vary a good deal and it can take experimentation to find the best WB setting.

Flash WB

Flash:
The light from most flash units tends to most closely approximate sunlight, but can be a bit cool. The flash setting usually tends to slightly warm the image.

 






Custom White Balance:
The fixed white balance adjustments can provide a good approximation of the correct setting for specific lighting, but they are often imperfect. Some cameras allow fine tuning of the color compensation, but the use of Custom White Balance can be the easiest way to nail the precise adjustment. This option is available on many digital cameras.

Incandescent Light
and Tungsten White Balance

Custom White Balance starts with taking a picture of a white or neutral gray card in the same light that is falling on your subject. These cards are available on-line or at your local camera store (remember those?). A clean white piece of paper or anything else which is pure white can serve. I have a card with white on one side and gray on the other. The details vary, but on my Canon 5D II, I display the picture of my white card,

Custom White Balance

which has been exposed in the correct light and positioned in the center of the frame. Then I select "Custom White Balance" from
my camera's menu. I tell the camera to use the current image as the basis for custom white balance and then, any time I select "Custom" for the white balance option, the white balance will return to this setting. Custom white balance is helpful whenever precise control of color is necessary, such as in product photography. Your client will not appreciate getting the color wrong on the Campbell Soup can. 



 


 

Shoot RAW! 
All of this fuss about white balance is especially important if you are shooting in JPEG rather than RAW. Need I say that this is just one more reason that you should shoot in RAW? In-camera white balance settings are of little importance when shooting RAW since all of the color information is preserved in the RAW image. Regardless of the original setting, the white balance can be adjusted in post-processing without any loss of quality. Unfortunately, when shooting in JPEG, white balance is baked into the image file with the loss of a significant amount of color data.






 
 To demonstrate this, I intentionally shot Chesterfield's historic town hall with the white balance incorrectly set to tungsten. I captured the image in both RAW and in the highest quality JPEG and then tried to salvage the images to accurately reflect the overcast lighting. There was no problem readjusting the RAW color balance, but, despite doing everything I could in Lightroom and Photoshop the JPEG image's color remained disappointingly flat and dull. 




As can be seen, post-processing color balance adjustments on JPEG files are difficult and result in a poor quality image. If for some totally unfathomable reason you are still shooting in JPEG, there are two things to remember.

• First, don't.   
• Secondly, if you do, careful adjustment of white balance in the camera is essential. You really won't get a second chance.

So, when shooting RAW is there any reason to set a specific white balance? I generally keep my camera on Auto White Balance. In most situations this works well as a starting point and then I almost always tweak the color in post. In a few situations such as portraiture or product photography strict color accuracy is important, but for most of my work, precise color matching is not necessary or even desirable. When I am shooting in the golden evening light the last thing I want is for whites to appear pure white. If I used custom white balance from a white card, I would loose all the warmth of the scene. Occasionally I will use the cloudy or shade settings to more accurately reflect the warmth of the "Golden Hours", although when shooting in RAW I can make the same adjustment in post. In post processing I am looking for the colors that best reflect the appearance and feel of the moment. 

 


A Fixed White Balance
There are occasional instances when setting a specific fixed white balance can be helpful. Last week I had a great time shooting in the

Country Store Light

Vermont Country Store. The lighting came uniformly from incandescent bulbs and, by setting the camera to Tungsten White Balance, all of the images had a consistent white balance adjustment. The color wasn't precisely what I wanted, it was still a bit yellow for my taste, but, because all of the images started with the same color balance, I was able to batch all of the images together and make a single adjust which worked pretty well for all of them. Because in AWB the white balance changes from image to image, a single adjustment would not have worked as well for all of the images. Shooting in Tungsten WB ended up saving time that would have been spent performing subtle tweaks to many of the images.



Of course Photoshop and Lightroom have powerful tools to adjust

Cloudy WB

white balance in the digital darkroom, but that should be a topic for a future blog. For now it is important to understand how the camera sees color balance differently from our remarkable eyes and how color balance settings help to compensate for this difference. This is the time to settle back with your manual (if you can find it) and learn about how your camera adjusts white balance. Keep your eye on that LCD screen and experiment your brains out. Getting color balance right is especially important when shooting JPEG, but whether recording JPEG or RAW files it all comes down to Getting Color Balance Right in the Digital Camera.

Jeff Newcomer
Partridgebrookreflections.com