Jennifer Steen Booher

Northeast Creek, October 11, 2013

Northeast Creek is a tidal estuary flowing through marshes and cranberry bogs out to the bay. It is also called King’s Creek: seems like every natural landmark around here has been renamed at least once (unlike the man-made landmarks whose names often persist for decades after they stop making sense.) That’s Cadillac Mountain in the background, for example, which was known as Green Mountain in the 19th century and before that I think the Wabanaki called it Pemetic.
It’s a beautiful spot for kayaking or canoeing, and this time of year you can pick cranberries. I haven’t been out there for a couple of years, but when the kids were little they got a huge kick out of bouncing on the springy bog turf.
The creek runs right under the main road into Bar Harbor, and this is the view looking upstream from under the bridge.
October is a mighty fine time of year to live in Maine.
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By Jenn | October 20, 2013 | Maine | 2 Comments |

Stained Glass at St. Saviour’s

St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church here in Bar Harbor is famous for its stained glass windows. There are 10 windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and another dozen or so by less-well-known artists. I spent some time there last week taking in the details.
Look how beautifully this artist painted the feathers within each pane of colored glass.
The shading on her face is so delicate!

I love the expressions on the fishes’ faces – the artist gave them human eyes and profiles, which makes them subtly disconcerting.
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By Jenn | October 19, 2013 | Maine, quirky | 1 Comment |

Moose Island, October 12, 2013

I joined the MDI Photo Club a couple of months ago, and it has been such a treat to hang out with other camera-obsessed people. I’ve learned a lot from my fellow members! For example, last weekend we went on a field trip to Moose Island, a privately-owned island just off Seal Cove. (We had permission from the owners, don’t worry!) It was overcast and a little cool, with the kind of grey skies that look empty and white in photos. Weather like that is dreadful for landscape photos, because everything looked washed out, flat, and uniformly grey. Grey sky, grey water, grey stones, even weathered grey shingles.
So I focused on beachcombing and exploring and threw away most of my photos in despair when I got home. A few days later we had our club meeting and I got to see everyone else’s work. Well! Number one lesson I got was that washed-out grey days make for fabulous black and white photography. Number two lesson was that if I want to work in black-and-white I really need to get Nik’s Silver Effects software for black-and-white conversion, as all the photos I liked had been adjusted with it. (Mine above were done in Adobe Elements.) But am I interested in black-and-white? Enough to learn yet another program? Is that how I see the world? Not so sure about that, but it is always good to know how to improve if I decide to pursue it.
I spent a lot of time watching the periwinkles crawl around between barnacles.

There was a surprising amount of beach glass, and some pretty feathers, which may be just the push I need to get my studio put back together so I can do a fresh Beachcombing series photo. I haven’t been able to use my light box since June!

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By Jenn | October 19, 2013 | Maine, photography | 2 Comments |

Dawdling on the Quietside

The Waterfront Gallery is closing for the season so I went down to Bernard to pick up my unsold work. It was a beautiful fall day, warm and sunny, with the leaves just starting to turn … I have to admit, I dawdled. Driving past Pond’s End (the tip of Long Pond in Somesville) the lake was glassy smooth and it would have been silly to just drive past.
So I got out and admired the view. A stranger was there, also looking out over the lake, so I said, “Couldn’t ask for a nicer day.” (A pretty standard comment between strangers around here.) And to my astonishment, he replied, “There could be a few more clouds in the sky. But that’s being picky, I suppose.” Another photographer! Because really, only a photographer feels a beautiful day is improved by clouds. (But it is, because otherwise you have a big blank void in the upper part of your photos.) Wish I’d thought to ask his name, maybe I know his work.
When I finally got to Bernard, I drove around town for a bit. There are two streets, so it didn’t take long. After I picked up my work from the gallery, I figured, why not, so I drove down a street I’ve never taken before. And found someone there is ready for Halloween:

The pirate is wearing a survival suit. Fishermen wear these in the winter so they don’t die of hypothermia if they fall overboard. The skull is wearing the national costume of the United States.

And then since I was practically there anyway I wandered over to Seawall to check out how the tourists are weathering the closure of Acadia National Park. Don’t get me started on the Park closure – it’s already hitting many of my friends hard. Not just the park rangers, but caterers, innkeepers, shop owners. A lot of people are cancelling their trips – if you’re one of them, come anyway, there’s still plenty of awesomeness on the island! For example, the parking lot at Wonderland was barricaded, but lots of people were parked along the roadside at Seawall, admiring the marsh and the rocks and the views. The light was too glaring for good photos, so I went around through Manset and watched crews working in the boatyard there.
 In the end my hour-long trip took three hours, but what a shame it would be to miss all that!
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By Jenn | October 4, 2013 | Maine | 2 Comments |

The Black House (aka Woodlawn Museum)

On Saturday we visited Woodlawn Museum, which everyone I know calls The Black House, a reference to its former owners, the Black family. This is a local habit I find endearing – the tendency to refer to places by long-gone names. You’ll get directions to “turn left at the cheese house” (the cheese house closed about thirty years ago) or “just past Crab Corner” (named for a crab-picking business that closed at least fifteen years ago) and so on. There’s even a “Raggedy Ass Corner” where there was once a tumbledown old house with a yard full of junk (now heavily wooded with no trace of the house.) Polite people call it “R.A. Corner.” I’ve picked up the habit myself, and still refer to our grocery store as “Don’s” even though Don sold it to Hannaford years ago (as does everyone else who pre-dates that sale. It’s one way to tell when people moved to town.)
But back to the Black House… The house was built by one Colonel John Black in the 1820s. The Black family lived there for three generations and left it to the town to be run as a museum in 1929. (And people still call it the Black House when it’s been “Woodlawn” for 80-something years…I wonder if our house will ever be “the old Booher place.”) 
The house is stuffed with the original furniture, china, rugs, knicknacks, and commodes. There’s a lovely curving staircase in the central hall, which was impossible to photograph without a wider angle lens, and some interesting architectural features. There’s also an enormous four-poster bed which we were told is the oldest bed in the U.S. that is still in its original room and has its original hangings, which is impressive, but I just couldn’t get excited about that, because I have asthma and all I can think of when I see bed canopies is the dust mites.
This is not the famous bed, but it did make me think of dust mites.
The last owner, the third generation of Blacks, seems to have been caught up in the Colonial Revival movements of the 1880s and 1920s. I picture him poking through the attics looking for his grandparents’ furniture (which was the genuine article) and polishing the family portraits of Generals Washington and Cobb (Cobb was an ancestor, Washington was a friend of his) before leaving the whole caboodle to the town of Ellsworth.

There are some wonderful portraits. I think that’s General Cobb up above, and it might be Frances Black below, but then again, it might not. Whoever she is, isn’t her lace collar amazing?

 A few last details from the house:
This is called a lithophane. It’s molded ceramic, believe it or not, and the light shining through the thinner parts works kind of like a negative. Learn more here.

I don’t often envy the original occupants of historic houses (have you ever tried to keep warm in a large room heated only by an open fireplace?) except in their pantries. I’m often consumed with jealousy over their storage. The Blacks had three sets of china, and according to the guide, the blue-and-white ware was for breakfast, the Canton ware (seen above) was for luncheon, and the um, other, more-colorful-set-which-did-have-a-fancier-name was for dinner. Three full sets of china and the shelves upon which to store them? Envy. And the other side of the pantry had three shelves of glassware. More envy. Turning green. Must go admire my indoor plumbing and pat my baseboard radiators.
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By Jenn | October 1, 2013 | Maine, quirky | 2 Comments |

The Blue Hill Fair, August 30, 2013

This year for the first time ever, I went to the Blue Hill Fair without children in tow, so I finally got to see all the competitions and demonstrations they think are boring. First thing in the morning were the Four-Ox Distance Pulls – each team of four oxen had 5 minutes to pull a heavy load as many times around the ring as possible. The team that went farthest won. The animals didn’t seem to mind pulling the load, but they weren’t keen on going in a straight line, and one team attempted to head right out the gate. The owners had their hands full shouting orders, pulling on yokes, and poking rumps to get the oxen moving in the right direction. It looked exhausting for them but was very entertaining for the rest of us.

The draft horse competition was similar, except the horses had already mastered the going-in-a-straight-line concept, so it was more impressive than entertaining. They were able to pull even more weight than the oxen were, which surprised me. People always use the phrase, “Strong as an ox,” but it ought to be, “Strong as a draft horse.”
 The draft horses’ hooves are enormous – bigger than my hand.

Another memorable exhibit was a demonstration of goat milking.
 

 The goats seemed very cheerful.

In between competitions, I wandered the midway and took the usual country fair photos.
 I even stumbled across a couple of people painting the scene:

Then I had fried clams, lemonade, and maple-sugar-cotton-candy, and went home stuffed and slightly sunburnt. Can’t wait ’til next year!

P.S. Don’t worry, I took my kids to the fair the next day.

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By Jenn | September 19, 2013 | Maine | 2 Comments |

Apparently Fall Foliage Season starts today

News from the MaineFoliage.com website: “The official start of the fall foliage season begins today in Maine. The 2013 Fall Foliage Report from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry reports that the northernmost part of the state is experiencing subtle color changes of less than 30% with very low leaf drop at less than 10%. However, the state anticipates an outstanding foliage season according to the Maine Forest Service.”

The website posts regular updates to the map, so keep an eye on it if you are planning a trip to Maine. Looks like it’s going to be a good year for leaf-peeping! Peak season is usually the last week of September/first week of October – I’m looking forward to some long hikes with my camera.

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By Jenn | September 13, 2013 | Maine, natural history | No Comments |

Chaos

You may remember reading about our plans to renovate the house and rent it out this summer? We did, and it went really well. We had awesome renters, and the house looked great. I posted photos, everyone oohed and ahhed, and I felt like a design blogger. But of course I’m nothing of the sort, and I’m going to make everybody feel so much better about whatever mess or unfinished projects you have in your own houses. Because we moved back in about a week and a half ago, pulled all the stuff out of the storage room, and now the house looks like this:

The house painters arrived unexpectedly this morning to start on the front porch, so yes, that’s the porch swing dominating the living room
and the family bikes are parked in the kitchen.
Looking at this photo reminded me that the flowers on the dining table are dead and I need to clean them up. In other words, life is totally back to normal!
One reason the living room is such a massive pile of stuff is that my major fall project is turning my own studio into a part-studio/part-bedroom so we’ll have a four-bedroom rental next summer. The photo above is what it looked like before (on a really good day when I had done a lot of cleaning). That’s my still-life lightbox setup, and there were three corner desks like that one. Right now ….
it’s been torn apart to fit a new bed, so it’s as bad as the living room. Almost all of this accumualtion has to go, so
looks like it’s going to be a busy fall!
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By Jenn | September 12, 2013 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments |

Stars over Eagle Lake

On the second night of the Perseid meteor shower, my husband and I went to Eagle Lake in Acadia National Park. I was hoping for some more interesting foregrounds and lots of falling stars. Definitely got more interesting compositions, but didn’t catch a single star. The parking area is a five minute drive from my house and while we stood there letting our eyes adjust, watching layers of stars appear overhead, I thought, “Sixteen years here, and I’m still gobsmacked on a regular basis. There are worse ways to choose a hometown.”

We saw plenty of shooting stars, though, and it was beautiful out there with little lake ripples lapping the shore and the occasional bullfrog making sleepy noises. They sound like very large rubber bands to me. That’s the Milky Way at the far right, looking like smoke behind the spruce trees.

Not one of my photos came out the way I intended them to, but some look pretty cool anyway. I have a lot to learn about star photography (astrophotography for those of us who like ten-dollar words) but I’m an expert at working with serendipity. In fact, this one (taken while trying to master an unfamiliar wide-angle lens in the dark) might be my favorite from the night:

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By Jenn | August 14, 2013 | Maine, natural history | 8 Comments |