A Few Days on Great Pond

After finishing my last test and turning in my final essay, I joined nine friends to make the twenty mile drive due west to Tucker's cabin on Great Pond in the Belgrade Lakes region of Central Maine. We brought nothing but the essentials: ten sleeping bags, four beer balls and two cases of beer, ten pounds of hamburger meat and two pounds of flank steak, three fishing poles, two dozen night crawlers, two avocados, five packs of Bubbilicious Bubble Gum and one pack of original Redman.

For three days we terrorized the cold waters of Great Pond in search of elusive brown trout and male bonding. We woke up early and fell asleep late.

Regardless of how often I organize my tackle box, it inevitably looks like this. I guess tackle box entropy is an essential part of fishing and a necessary hurdle standing between a fishing pole and a golden fried trout.

Four of these Beer Balls lubricated the cold the water of Great Pond and sleeping on the hard floor of Tucker's uninsulated cabin.

We relied on manpower to negotiate the glacial lake, not this fine piece of American outdoors equipment.

LL Bean Old Town Canoe like my Grandpa has. Old Milwaukee Beer like my dad drank at the University of Wisconsin. Night Crawlers like I used on the banks of the Columbia River as a little boy.

Tucker's Blackberry is back in action after five months in Copenhagen studying architecture. I look forward to bopping around Maine next fall with Tucker after my summer in the Big City.

We didn't catch a single fish, but we sure drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of meat, burned a lot of wood and told a lot of stories. I couldn't ask for a better start to my summer. Many thanks to Heather, Tucker's mom, for letting us use the cabin.

Here are some more links,
Fishing on a Monday (Picasa),
Fishing in a Canoe (Vimeo).

H(Y)R Collective Issue 12: Lunch over Ralph

Issue 12 of the H(Y)R Collective is now up. A couple weeks ago I met with Jon Patrick from the Selvedge Yard and chatted with John Fiske and Lee Norwood from Rugby about their personal sense of style and influences while we had lunch and some cookies. JP wrote up our discussion and I took photos for a Focus article in Issue 12 of H(Y)R Collective.

Please head over to the site and check it out. We are really happy with how it turned out. Make sure to look for Lee's comments about the style blogging space. He has some interesting conclusions.

We are already hard at work on our next Focus article about LL Bean bringing back the Norwegian Sweater. Look for it to come out in a month or so.

Here are some more links,
Issue 12 H(Y)R Collective,
Jon Patrick from the Selvedge Yard (ART).

A Family of Red Foxes Near Bath, Maine

"I will be down there in a couple of hours," I told my friend Tucker. "I am going to take back roads. It will probably take me two or three hours with stops," I said as I grabbed my two cameras and my Filson Jacket and headed towards the car. After fueling up Nick's 1994 BMW 525I with 87 octane unleaded, I headed south towards Cape Elizabeth with four unassigned hours to negotiate the old BMW for miles. I expected to see barns, Mainards, or perhaps the occasional abandoned boat but I never expected to see a family of red foxes near Bath, Maine.

Twenty five miles north of Bath, the Maine woods started closing in on the two-lane highway and cell phone reception dropped. Just as I started thinking about turning around and heading west towards 295, the woods opened up, exposing a small field with two bulls standing on a small knoll. I slowed down to look at the bulls and spotted three foxes, a mother and two kits, playing with flowers.
Seeing these foxes made me realize that I soon will live far from foxes and picturesque rural farms like this. After I graduate in almost exactly a year, I will most likely move to a large city and start working a lot. Lee Norwood recently told me a story about how the year he started working for Ralph Lauren, he bought a top of the line backpacking stove and has yet to use it. He has worked at RL for twenty years.

After chasing the kits into the woods for the third time, I hopped back in Nick's BMW and headed south grinning ear to ear. Within three minutes I saw a weasel and turkey. Maybe I will be able to balance my professional career with doing other things I love.

Here are some more links,
Red Fox (Wikipedia),
A Family of Foxes (Picasa).

Polaroid SX-70

I represent the first generation of photographers who grew up never knowing the dark room or the schlep of buying roll after roll of film. Instead, I grew up frustrated by buyer's remorse, and Moore's law impact on the constant progress in digital photography capacity and quality. Despite the decades of advances in CCD (the device that captures light and record the image) technology, digital photography still struggles to capture some of the magic of film photography, especially the colors of a simple Polaroid.

Last weekend I found a Polaroid SX-70 at my local Goodwill, on the same shelf where I found the switchable panorama plastic camera, for $5. Unfortunately, Polaroid discontinued the SX-70 film five years ago and Ebay is the only place to find film. The high cost of film, $2 to $3 per exposure, delegates SX-70 photography to a cult-like following.

The SX-70 was the first auto focusing Single Lens Reflex camera in wide-scale production. Today cameras rely on color contrasts and the sharpness of lines to quickly focus. These Polaroid SLR's used sonar, identified by the circular gold plate with a mesh cover, to judge the distance from the subject and adjust the lens in the same way that submarines use sonar to aim torpedoes and navigate shallow waters.

The chrome plated steel and leather body breaks down to a 12" by 5" by 1.5" block, roughly the size and weight of a photo book. Its a pretty slick little set up. Here is a video from the 70's showcasing the original SX-70's features. (Please not that this is not the auto focus version as described in this post.)

I have developed my creative photographic process on the assumption that each exposure costs nothing, I will never shoot film because I can't conceptualize spending a few dollars per exposure to get a photo. For example, after about 30 tries, I finally got this right. With an SX-70 I would have spent anywhere from $60-$100. With my Canon G9, it was just a fraction of the price I paid for the camera and memory card.

My inability to shoot Polaroids makes them all the more interesting and desirable. Here are some Polaroids taken by my friends with cameras similar to the SX-70:

Mikael Kennedy

Spencer Philips

The SX-70 was in my possession for a turbulent couple of hours as I toyed with the idea of trying my hand with Polaroids. In the end, I sold the camera to my friend Spencer and decided to stick to my guns.

Here are some more links,
Passport To Trespass,
Jimmy Fontaine,
Spencer Philips,
Porter Polaroid Project.