"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Gothic Revival Architecture: Church and Two Steeples

St. John’s Catholic Church, in Keeseville, New York, was erected in 1903 on the site of a relocated 1850s Baptist church. The Catholic church is an example of early twentieth century gothic revival architecture, emulating in its steeple design in particular “reach to the sky” elements that are typical of gothic churches, but also incorporating arches, stained glass, and stonework found in gothic and gothic revival styles.

The two steeples are 125 feet high, making the church an impressive building for such a small town and reflecting the growing wealth of French-Canadian residents who settled in the area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Situated as it is on a large, open plot of land, the variable colors in the churches stonework, stained glass, and copper roof look especially rich and inviting on a bright sunny day. You may notice in the photos that louvers are missing from the left steeple, but those are planned for reconstruction as the church undergoes restoration.

The last image in the gallery was previously feature here: Wordless Wednesday: Line, Circle, Arch.

Select the first photo below to view larger images in a slideshow; thanks for looking!

Summer, Fall, Winter: Three Galleries

Since rebooting Flickr last year with a couple thousand reprocessed and new photos, I keep a small portion of one eyeball cued into what gets viewed, liked, and commented on. It’s always fun to see what people are interested in, partly because I like to puzzle about different preferences, how people see the photos, what they like, and how that varies from my own perspective. There’s a certain randomness to it of course — as there is with just about everything we do on social sites, including blogs — yet in that randomness there can certainly be some found-surprises.

The three galleries below show the twenty most liked photos, which — as I assembled them for this post — realized could be organized into three seasons: summer, fall, and winter, a little sample of my photography covering three quarters of a yearly progression. New photos of spring buds are just a few weeks away, at which time this top twenty will likely drop off the Flickr stats page, so I thought I would capture the current crop and share them here.

Many of the photos in these galleries have appeared on this site before, but some have not. If you would like to see the full Flickr albums the photos came from, here are the links.

Georgia: Grant Park Atlanta Fall Color
New York: Ausable Chasm
New York: Northern Landscapes
New York: Whiteface Mountain Region
New York: Winter Scenes

Thanks for reading and taking a look!





Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 3 of 3)

From the essay “House-Warming” in Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau:

“The snow had already covered the ground … and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me….”

“At length the winter set in in good earnest … and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then.”

The gallery below contains the last of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The previous sets in this series are here:

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3)

Enjoy the photos!

Bye for now……………….. ๐Ÿ™‚

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 2 of 3)

From The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones by Alfred Watkins:

“The winter, with its light of low elevation, and with an absence of leaves, is by far the best season, and the lovely December day โ€ฆ gave an opportunity long hoped for.”

“[The] absence of leaves on trees, winter is by far the best time of year for a certain type of explorationโ€ฆ.  Sun shining on one side and very low down is an ideal condition.”

The gallery below contains the second of three sets of photos I took in the days following a snowstorm in northern New York.

The first set in this series is here: Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3).

The irresistible Ford truck partly buried in the snow made an earlier appearance on this site, in a different season, here: Before and After: Swamp Things.

Thanks for taking a look!

Winter Scenes: After the Storm (Set 1 of 3)

From the short story “The Long Rain” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury:

“The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank menโ€™s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”

Part of Bradbury’s themed collection The Illustrated Man, this short story was subsequently adapted and included in the 1969 film by the same name, then later featured in the television anthology The Ray Bradbury Theater. The power of the short story, and the film adaptations, came from Bradbury’s ability to take something typically benign — rain! — and turn it into a malevolent force that pounds a group of space travelers marooned on a distant planet. Spoiler alert: the men go insane.

I’ve thought of the film often over the past couple of weeks, when Atlanta’s version of the long rain continued with barely a pause from a few days before Christmas before finally stopping just yesterday. You know that soothing feeling you get from listening to the rain when you’re just barely awake in the early morning? It turns into something else, much less pleasant, on the fourth or fifth day in a row that rain beating on the roof wakes you up at 4:00 AM! ๐Ÿ™‚

I suppose it’s only marginally interesting to write about the weather in a blog post; but with above-average temperatures, the rain and clouds clearing away have revealed how nature’s reacting. Irises in my front garden are pushing out a few buds (stay tuned for macros!), normally dormant holly ferns have generated large new fronds, and even perennial lantana and hydrangea stems are dotted with the beginnings of new leaves. But of course it’s not spring yet and unless the temperatures remain above freezing for the next two months, most of this early growth could get crushed later in January or February.

The relentless rain, day after day, did give me a chance to pack up the holiday decorations and sweep out the Christmas glitter, jazz up the theme on my self-hosted blog, and work through the rest of the 200 archived winter photos that I started posting here. I often thought while working on the images that it would have been a hoot if, instead of two weeks or rain, we’d had two weeks of snow … so I guess I was treating myself to a vicarious experience of a snowstorm to blot out the sound of the pounding rain.

From the winter photos I processed, I’ve selected 51 to post here on my blog; below is the first of three sets that were taken in the days after a snowstorm some years ago when I traveled to northern New York around the holidays. Enjoy the photos; as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!