Jim Salge Photography Blog

Images of New England captured in dramatic light and atmosphere

Backing up and looking forward…

Mud season is a tough time for the nature photographer. Conditions are varied, ever changing, and rarely ‘classically beautiful.’ Throw in the heavy rain and flooding of the past week, and well, I don’t have much new to share.

These down times are a good time to work on both the past and the future in the photography world. The past…I’m notoriously bad at backing up my work. I just am. I always drop my best RAW files from a shoot onto an off site server, but the majority of my images sit on two parallel hard drives in my computer, and never often enough I back up onto an off site external. There’s really no excuse for this…and for $59 dollars from newegg, I just got an new external hard drive large enough for my entire collection in case of catastrophe. As part of your spring cleaning regime…I might recommend y’all doing so as well.

As for looking forward…spring arrivals and spring weather has gotten me back into refreshing myself on the ecology and chronology of spring. I’m spending time brushing up on birdsong, pouring through wildflower books, and seeking out new locations to shoot. It’s nice to hear and see some old standbye’s and harbingers too. And though I’m not a bird photographer, it’s still nice heard the familiar calls of the woodcock, the winter wren, and the fox sparrow…and early migratory bird arrivals for the first time this week. Still no red winged black bird though. For those interested in keeping up with bird arrivals in the area, a nice site to follow is the New Hampshire Birding List.

I’m planning trips to a number of locations this spring that hold potential for spectacular landscape scenes. Waterfalls and mountain tops are my spring standbys, but I’m looking to new locations as well. After really enjoying Ponemah Bog last year, one of the places I’m most excited about is the Saco Heath, a large acidic bog in southern Maine. These environments tend to have a lot of unique plant life, including carnivourous plants. But Rhodora, a small flowering shrub with showy pink blossoms, also grows well in the bogs, and I’m hoping it’ll put on a great show in Mid May.

Rhodora at Jackson Falls - Early May 2009

Rhodora at Jackson Falls - Early May 2009

Lastly for this week, with a bit more of mud season to go, I’ll be in research mode for a bit longer.  Spring wildflowers then begin in the first weeks of April.  In the mean time, I’d love to hear from you as to your favorite places to shoot in spring.  If there are any special places in southern and central NH, or southern Maine that I should know about, please let me know…

2 Responses to “Backing up and looking forward…”

  1. Jim thanks for the links to the sites…great information. A fan of your photography!!

  2. admin says:

    Thanks Betty…I appreciate yours as well, and glad you found these links/blog helpful!

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