In the fall of 2019 I took a day to drive up to the Hampton Airfield to fly over the marshes that are just in from the coast near the Seabrook Nuclear Plant in southern New Hampshire.

Gold, bronze, brass, copper, chestnut, russet were the colors that day.

Incredible really and such a vivid contrast to what I'd shot in May a few years earlier of the marshes just south of the NH border near Newburyport and Ipswich.

But why the title "Significant"?

Ever since I began to make aerial photographs the formula for success has been whatever Nikon DSLR I was using at the time, be it the D3X, the D800E, the D810 and now the D850 with whatever generation Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 lens I was using. So very many successful photographs that it seems impossible to single any out. 

Here are a few:

https://nealrantoul.com/projects/wheat-2019

https://nealrantoul.com/projects/aerial-wheat-2016

https://nealrantoul.com/projects/salt-lake-utah

If you go to the site and search through the aerials, they are all with some Nikon DSLR, except one: The New Hampshire Marshes.

By about 2010 or so I was clamping the Kenyon Gyro Stabilizer to the tripod fitting  on my camera when I was making aerials. Initially, starting with a too small unit, later upgrading to a larger one as my heavy camera needed a bigger gyro to work effectively. This made a tremendous difference in my aerial imagery and brought me close to 90% sharp compared to more like 30% without it. Vibration is no joke from a small airplane.

I won't bore you with the steep learning curve to making good aerials. Email me (nrantoul@comcast.net) and I can steer you in the right direction. 

But, ever since I started with the Sony mirrorless cameras I wondered how things would go using one when making aerials. Initially, I was working with earlier versions of the full frame Sonys known as the A7r's. From the II to the III they were making files smaller than what I was getting with the Nikon, but when I switched to the IV at 61 megapixels I knew I'd need to try it from above. 

The NH Marshes pictures were made with the Sony A7R MK IV and the Zeiss 70-200mm F4 lens. I used the gyro stabilizer on this shoot with internal and lens stabilization turned off.

The end result? A major success. Excellent files, a good percentage sharp and well exposed. Lighter to hold too, as with the stabilizer this is a heavy set up and my arms get tired after shooting for an hour or so.

This one above was in a group show at the Concord Art Association this past winter (2021)at 40 inches across. It looked very good. 

How often can you make pictures for research and have them turn out to be useable for your practice?

Would I photograph aerially with the Sony again? Yes, absolutely. It was just too good. This therefore removes the last obstacle to selling off the Nikon kit, sadly. It is always hard for me let go of gear that has made me really wonderful pictures. The days of the Nikon D850 and a slew of first rate lenses are numbered. Photography has always been dependent on technological changes to making better pictures. From analog to digital and more recently from the single lens reflex to mirrorless. 

Thanks for reading the blog, always. 

I have been talking about and showing my series pictures lately in a variety of presentations so they are very much on my mind. While I usually start with the Nantucket pictures made in 1981 (here) there is a series I made earlier that in some ways can serve as a predictor of things to come. It is called "Fences and Walls" and is the topic of this post.

To recap: I finished gradate school at RISD in 1973 and by 1978 I was teaching at New England School of Photography in Boston. By the fall of 1979 I was teaching at Harvard University as well. I made pictures constantly, almost without discrimination, of anything that seemed remotely interesting. I made major photo trips to Europe, to Bermuda (twice), to the American Southwest, and worked locally.

Looking back at that chaotic time, I remember thinking I was out of control, passionate about now being a career teacher and artist but not able to bring clear focus to any coherent presentation or method. One day while in Newport, RI on a photo trip in the early spring I made a discovery. 

I found I was frequently pointing my camera at walls and fences, separators and barriers we use to edge our property or to keep people out and our pets and children in.

This was the beginning, I believe, of my ability to understand what I was making intuitively. 

By combining the new pictures I was making and sifting through pictures I'd made in the past year or so I found a common thread of a preoccupation I'd had that I hadn't been aware of. This was an odd sensation, to find something in my work prevailing that I hadn't seen before and taught me something about the importance of the subliminal and the need to search our own work for answers. It also helped me slow down and look harder at the pictures I had made rather than only shooting and printing at this frantic pace of making but not looking.

The series also split into two other interests, full and empty, as a subset.

If you've followed along with my writing on other series, such as Nantucket, Hershey, Oaksdale, Yountville, Portland, Solothurn (all searchable by name on this blog), you know that we are looking at the series that predates all those others. 

Whether Fences and Walls can really be used as the foundation series of pictures to the subsequent ones will be for better minds than mine to determine.

But I do believe that in my oeuvre of series works, Fences and Walls needs to be counted as a player in the mix. 

One note here: I don't regard Fences and Walls as a contributor to my idea of "narrative" in my work. That wasn't a concept that had coalesced yet. It would take the Nantucket pictures to make that happen, still two years away. 

The full series is now on the site, way down at the bottom of the Gallery page, as it is arranged chronologically from the earliest to the latest.

As always, I welcome your comments:  Neal's email

As most of my readers know my teaching career was primarily at Northeastern University for thirty years in Boston with 13 years at Harvard University that overlapped with NU during the 80's.

I had been hired by Northeastern in 1981 to head up a new program in photography. By 1990 I was a tenured associate professor and was successful in helping to design and oversee construction of all new facilities in a renovated building. We were teaching as many as 5 intro photo sections per semester with 25 students in each class every semester year around. Even then the classes were wait listed with as many as 150 students trying to get in.

Photography at Northeastern was on a roll.

In the early 90's I wrote a grant application to take an intro to digital photo class in Camden, Maine at the just built Kodak Center for Creative Photography. The class, I believe, used Photoshop 1. I remember being shown how to use a mouse. It was early days. I  learned that the Center had an 8 x 10 film recorder in a special cool room that also had a hi-end Howtech drum scanner. This was for "special projects" only. I definitely wanted hands on these machines. I wanted to use the 8 x 10 LVT (Light Value Technology) recorder in the worst way. Although this was very early digital days scanning was a fairly mature technology.  

Back at Northeastern I made my case to my dean that I needed to do more research in Camden. He funded me and I began 1 1/2 years of going back and forth to learn more, to take classes and to get hands on with the 8 x10 LVT. Eventually I was awarded the status of using whatever I wanted and to be there whenever I wanted, sit in on any classes and, in the end, had a one person show of my photographs in the Center's gallery. The Kodak Center was built to research, use and develop software and hardware for the coming digital photo revolution.

Why so hungry for that one piece of equipment, the LVT? The only way I was going to be able to make a high quality print from a digital file was to scan existing negatives on the drum scanner, work those files in Photoshop and then write that file with the LVT back onto another sheet of unexposed film to be able to take it back to my darkroom to develop it, and then print it conventionally from that negative in my darkroom using an enlarger, trays and chemistry. In those days there were no inkjet printers.

That's just what I did.  I wasn't thinking of applying digital technology so much to my own work yet. That came later. But I was very interested in it for the program I ran and for my students. 

Back in Maine at the Center I scanned an 8 x 10 negative of an alleyway I'd shot in Cambridge, worked on the digital file with a computer to remove some trashcans with the clone tool, wrote the new image back onto an unexposed sheet of 8 x 10 black and white film using the LVT and developed the negative back in Boston in my darkroom.

I made a print of both the original negative with the trashcans in the frame and also the new negative with the trashcans removed. I tried to make the two prints as identical as I could.

I then went to see the same dean who had funded me to be up in Maine in the first place. I brought the two prints.

I remember this very clearly. His name was Jim Stellar and he was a young, savvy  and aggressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and he had been a psychology professor before becoming an administrator. We sat on either side of a coffee table, he on a small sofa and me in a chair across from him. After initial pleasantries, I placed the two prints side by side on the coffee table saying, "see if you can find the difference between these two photographs". He looked at both for a second, looked back up at me as though he didn't get why there were two prints of the same thing, and then looked at the prints more closely, going from one to the other, back and forth. Finally, a light bulb went off in his head and he said, "the trashcans!"

Remember, this was very early times in the world of digital. I explained to him just what I'd done, so easy to do now and yet so difficult in those early days. He was dumbstruck but got the importance of this one example right away. For him it became his tactic to take the idea of beginning to teach, support digital photography and computer based programming at Northeastern to the school's provost, president and board of trustees for funding. These two photographs became a symbol of the creation of new labs, equipment and a curriculum in a broad array of disciplines that became the major in Multimedia Studies a few years later. New faculty, additional support staff, continuing allocations for updating, software and yes, not an 8 x 10 LVT, but our own 4 x 5 LVT.

This framed image with the two photos side by side still hangs in the Multimedia lab in Ryder Hall at Northeastern today. It's a little hard to see but if you look closely you can tell that the image on the left has no trashcans along the side of the left building, the one on the right does. 

No way could I lay claim to sole credit for all this. Getting the University to first understand and then move on this whole new and large scale project took years and scores of dedicated people to plan, initiate, lobby for and succeed in obtaining what was needed but yes, it all started here with these two prints.

You can draw your own conclusions but the takeaway from this is what I would say to my students: act on your ambitions, innovation doesn't come easily as there is always resistance to the new. Be persistent. Patience helps. Confidence too. Don't take no for an answer. But if you know you're right, hang in there.