Figure 1 – The Old Manse Boat House, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf, 2013.

Two weeks ago I blogged about the flooding at the Minuteman National Historic Park in Concord, Massachusetts.  At the time there was no crossing the river beyond the Daniel Chester French Minute Man statue.  Today I got a late start on a photography jaunt to the Sudbury River marshlands in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  The weather was perfect here(I apologize to friends in the Southwest who are sweltering) and as a result there was no parking at either of the public access points.  As a result, I decided to drive up to Concord and see how much the river had receded.

Things were looking a lot better; so I had some opportunity to continue to test out my new 18-55 mm Canon zoom lens. I took photographs around the Old Manse, where both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived for a time, in the flooded watershed, and in the secret hedge tunnel.  I have started to work on these and thought that I would share a couple of them here.

The first, Figure 1, was taken at water level of the Old Manse’s boat house.  Readers of this blog may recognize that a color photograph of the boat house surrounded with lupine (the Wolf flower) and taken one spring from the bridge is the banner for the Hati and Skoll site.  Here I was experimenting in sepia toned black and white seeing whether I could successfully get the broad dynamic range necessary to render detail from shadow to highlight.  If I had had my tripod, I might even have tried to photograph in high dynamic range (HDR) with multiple exposure.  Here I under exposed by a stop to prevent the middle tones and highlights from bleaching out.

Then after crossing the bridge and contemplating the flood plain, an unusual event occurred.  The river is usually filled with canoes and kayaks.  But for some reason a power boat came through causing an unusual series of intense parallel waves.  As with the ducks, I had little time to react and fortunately was at a reasonably photogenic spot.  The result is Figure 2.  I particularly like the way in which the waves distort the perpendicular shadows of the trees in the lower right.

Figure 2 – Waves on the Concord River Floodplain, (c) DE Wolf 2013.