Concord & Lexington
The April 2025 Duxbury Camera Club field trip was to the towns of Concord and Lexington on the heels of the 250th anniversary of the historic battles. It was a beautiful spring day with maybe a bit too much direct sunlight to be ideal for photography. But I shot anyway. (None will be heard around the world, I’m sure.) An enjoyable day nonetheless. Click through the header photo for more images.
Duxbury Camera Club November Field trip
This month we headed up to the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum near Cleveland Circle and then to the Lars Anderson Auto Museum. Interesting locations and a good day out with the group. Both places were good spots for detail and object study photos. Here are a bunch that I took.
Infrared
Last month I attended a presentation by Silvana Della Camera on infrared photography hosted by the Duxbury Camera Club. I can’t say I had much interest going in. Infrared photography always seemed like a gimmick to me.
But I found the presentation interesting and compelling. So much so that I sent an old Nikon D800 in to LifePixel for conversion to Infrared. I chose the 590nm conversion.
When the camera came back I struggled to get anything useable out of it. Focus was a problem. I knew that normal autofocus wouldn’t work properly because infrared light strikes the sensor differently than visible light. I tried to focus manually using Live View but it was hard to see the image on that dim, old LCD. I missed focus most of the time. Also, some of my favorite lenses were showing hotspots, a common issue with infrared and some lenses.
As I was on the verge of giving up, I dug out some old lenses from the basement and tried them. And this time I tried something new: using autofocus while in Live View. Strangely it worked. When I thought about for half a second it made sense. No mirror.
Now, back in business, I downloaded some IR white balance profiles for Lightroom and took a YouTube crash-course on IR processing and channel swapping. I’m struggling to get anything as good as I’ve seen other photographers produce, but it’s a work-in-progress.
I”m still not convinced that IR photography isn’t a gimmick. But maybe that’s because I haven’t quite figured out how to apply it yet. So I’ll keep at it for a while to see if what happens.
Night Photography
Recently, I took advantage of an opportunity to participate in a Night Photography workshop conducted by Lisa Ryan and organized by the Duxbury Camera Club.
We met in Plymouth Center on a cool spring evening. Lisa led us to the top of Burial Hill where we set up. I usually shoot handheld but a tripod was required for this outing. I had to put my normal impatience aside and plan my shots. It was fun to try something new and I might have even learned a thing or two. Here are a few more photos that I took that night.
DCC 2023 Field Trips
Last spring I joined with fellow members of the Duxbury Camera Club for a field trip to New Bedford. Even after living my entire life in costal Massachusetts I had never visited the famous whaling town. It was a great opportunity to spend time with some of the folks from the club and explore this picturesque city.
The Whaling Museum was a high point of the excursion. The staff were helpful (and patient) with our roving band of camera-carrying club members — and I think everyone got some good shots too.
Speaking of DCC field trips, here are some shots from a fall excursion, this time to Weir River Farm in Hingham.
