(you thought I was kidding?)
Last summer there was of course a Fourth of July. We went to a friend's house for a picnic and to watch
the fireworks more or less from their front lawn. Unfortunately the fireworks weren't very good so I expect this year we'll go back to one of the better local town shows. We still have this theory of taking the kids to see the Esplanade show but it'll have to wait until 4oJ falls on a weekend or something where we all don't have to get up the next morning. It's on a Friday this year, so we'll see.
We went touristing in Vermont while the kids were at sleep-away camp. That included dinner at a nice restaurant that has its own glass-blowing facility in its basement, and lots of scenic gorges. (Yes, the scenery was gorges.)
We also did
a nature walk that included a lot of mushrooms. The woods were quite wet and shady, which I'm sure the fungi enjoyed but made photography a little trickier. I think I did OK, and Pygment spotted a tiny red lizard that held still long enough for us to get a couple pictures.
We also visited a graveyard - the Taftsville burying grounds. It was kind of different from what I'm used to - the graves were mostly along winding paths, with only the newer ones in open-field areas. It was also surprisingly devoid of religious iconography. Dates seemed to be recorded meticulously, but births not so much. And of course it was all very male-centric hierarchical.
Photographing in graveyards is one of those things everyone does, including me. I don't think I got it right this time, and the hazy cloudy light didn't help. I'll probably try again.
Later in the summer we took a family vacation to Cape Cod.
We stayed in Sesuit, at a place that was essentially an upscaled motel.
The whole family went to the nature museum, which included a tidal pool, several aquaria, a fledging perch for salt march birds of prey (though by August only the last one was still in the nest), and a walkway that you could follow across the marsh and out onto the beach. Someone had made a recreation of a Native solar calendar out of local stones but I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work.
Photographically this was a fun challenge. Going from the macro up-close images of things in the pool to the distant bird perch (I wanted a bigger lens) and then trying to do some landscapes... it was tough. I'm still never sure what I'm supposed to be framing when I set up a landscape shot.
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