Lowell Folk Festival 2014

Sun, Sweat, and Music at the Lowell Folk Festival There are only a few times in life when standing in the sun, sweat dripping from my could be considered fun.  Today was one of those days!  Today is the second day of the Lowell Folk Festival and I got there right when things kicked off.  It’s nice because there is a large section of downtown completely roped off for pedestrians only so it’s easy to get to all the stages. I wanted to take my time and just look for compositions I liked, meandering around looking for things that caught my eye.  There were …

My First Foray Into AstroPhotography

For a while I’ve been wanting to try my hand at astrophotography.  I had a decent wide angle lens for my Canon 60D, the Rokinon 14mm aspherical lens, and my wife gave me the “ok” to relinquish Dad duties for the evening and I jumped. Light pollution is a problem for most people trying to capture the Milky Way so I decided to tackle that problem first.  Knowing we’d found a spot, Jim and I headed for a state park outside of Montpelier VT., which is about 3 hours from where I am 95% of the time. We found a perfect …

The Art of Haiku, Senryū and Photography

The Art of Haiku, Senryū and Photography Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that stresses that the author be frugal and very selective in word choice.  Traditionally western Haiku and Senryū consist of 3 lines of poetry made of syllabic counts of 5, 7, and 5.  Traditional Japanese Haiku requires the use of a Kireji and a Kigo to be considered true to the form.  Kireji is a form of verbalized punctuation and since I don’t speak Japanese googling WAV’s and videos resulted nothing, you’re out of luck for an example here and there is no equivalent in other …