Chapoquoit, March 4, 2020
In two weeks, I can go back to Chapoquoit and photograph the kiteboarders.
Snapping a picture of a kiteboarder flipping and spinning over a wave feels pure. It feels true. I won’t solve any big problems by photographing kiteboarders, but those simple, honest moments on a windy beach are good for my soul.
I’ve missed you guys. See you at the beach.
Monte
Monte
2020-07-20
I am obsessed with getting a good image of this comet. This picture was captured using my Sony A7R4 camera and the 70-200 mm lens. There is some streaking of the stars because the shutter speed was 10 seconds, which is too long for the 200 mm lens. Streaking occurs because the earth is rotating, thus the camera is moving relative to the stars while the shutter is open. This creates a motion blur. Wider angle lenses are more forgiving of this phenomenon, but the comet would appear as only a tiny smudge.
Sony A7R4 with 70-200 mm f2.8 lens at 200 mm: shutter speed 10 seconds, f2.8, ISO 2000.
Monte
Chapoquoit Beach July 18, 2020
Last night was actually my second night to try for a photograph of comet Neowise. The previous night was so cloudy that I didn’t even take out my camera. I did not actually see the comet when I photographed it, the sky was too hazy. Two friends were seeing it through their binoculars so I pointed my camera in the direction they were looking and started taking long exposures of different parts of the sky. It only took a few shots to have the comet show up on my LCD screen.
I’m hoping for a clearer night to try again for a better shot.
Monte
Tommy at Chapoquoit in January 2020.
This is Tommy in January 2020 at Chapoquoit, when we were just starting to hear that trouble might be coming.
Reading this morning about how Americans are divided over every issue, no matter how important or how trivial. This ideological divide even extends to the plague currently afflicting us.
Look at this image. It is a snapshot of our world. We live here for a staggeringly short time. Is it really a good idea to spend our brief ride through the cosmos hating one another? Why not consider ourselves fabulously lucky and just enjoy the ride?
Monte
Had an idea to make short (one-minute) videos of the kiteboarders. Here’s the first one.
Monte
April 3, 2020
Jenny goes to work every day in a hospital where the Coronavirus is beginning its assault on her colleagues. I’m sure your situation is the same.
I rummaged through our closets at the beginning of this pandemic and found an old box of n95 masks I’d bought years ago when I was cleaning out our basement. There were thirteen masks left in the box. Jenny uses one per day and we spray it with alcohol and let it sit on a table for two weeks until she uses it again. Not great, but way better than what her colleagues have, which is the less helpful surgical masks provided by the hospital. Her hospital does have a limited supply of n95 masks, but they are reserved for use with patients known to have Covid-19, and they have to be reused multiple times.
Our daughter lives in New York City (Brooklyn). It feels like being a character in a dystopian novel to watch the rising casualty count in New York City and say goodbye to Jenny in the morning as she leaves to work among an increasing population of Coronavirus-infected patients and hospital staff.
I did many medical trips to impoverished countries when I was still practicing medicine. On every trip, I saw the same scene of rooms in which hospital staff were washing disposable items, like surgical gloves, and hanging them on clotheslines to dry so they could be reused. There were actually feral cats living in those rooms in El Salvador. I remember thinking those lines draped with dripping disposable gear were tragic, and I naively, or maybe arrogantly, believed we Americans would never experience such conditions. But now we are.
I have some thoughts about why this is happening, but to state them would only be saying what is obvious.
Our last visit highlighted our philosophical differences. Nevertheless, I continue to think of you as one of the smartest people I know, even if I’m not always sure I understand you.
I hope you and your family are well and holding up in this unusual time.
Be safe.
Monte
Living through a modern-day plague with Covid-19 is making me (and everybody else) think about the fragility of life. I made this video to help myself work through the anxiety of the situation.
Monte
Doug at Chapoquoit, 2020-03-04
Chapoquoit, 2020-03-04
This is Doug, one of the kiters. I don’t see him out at the beach as much as some of the others, so I don’t have as many shots of him.
When Sara, a friend of mine, asked me to make a video of her doing underwater dancing I started thinking about art. She was the artist and I was being asked to capture her performance on video. I've never done an underwater video before, so I was learning by trial and error - mostly error. We had to film in a public pool with other swimmers around her, which wasn't too bad. I filmed her using three GoPro cameras positioned with tripods and joby suction cups under the water. I used portable Yongnuo lights on the side of the pool shining down into the water. The footage came out a bit grainy, as I expected it would. The compression to YouTube specs made the grain worse.
Monte
Evanescent means to fade quickly and disappear. I came across the word while reading “The Fate of Rome,” by Kyle Harper. The Romans were afflicted by many hardships that made their lives evanescent, and we are still afflicted by those same hardships today. The video was shot on Cape Cod in the USA and there is footage from the Pont du Gard in France.
Monte
I take my adult kids out to Chapoquoit and Little Island Beach to photograph them almost every time they come to visit, no matter how cold it is. They are always good sports about it. I’ve been sitting on the video and still images use in this short film for a year. I finally got organized to put it together.
Monte
A five-minute video montage of the Chappy Kiters.
It must seem odd that the first blog post I am making after returning from our vacation to France is another video about the kite surfers at Chapoquoit beach. But how would anybody know I was in France since this is the first time I’m writing about it? I went to Nimes, France so I could photograph the Roman ruins there. Many pictures and some videos are forthcoming.
I have been working hard to get through all the images I captured in Nimes and I needed break, so I went to the beach to photograph the surfers and made this short video. Tomorrow, it’s back to work on the French files.
Monte
Chapoquoit beach October 1, 2019
I’ve often complained that the whole idea of humans shaking hands when they greet each other is a dirty habit that should be abandoned. I don’t know where your hand has been before you grab mine. Handshaking is a known method of transmitting infectious diseases like the flu. Why isn’t it enough to just say hello and flash a friendly smile?
But I have to admit that handshaking is not the worst way to greet each other when I watch how other species do it.
Monte
Peter Traykovski at Chapoquoit September 23, 2019
Look at the patterns in the water. The whole event lasted only seconds, but Peter’s pose inside the walls of swirling water, to me, has a sense of solemnity that feels eternal.
Monte
Ben Stadelmaier holding a painting of himself by Debbie Aimone. She worked from a photograph of Ben taken by me.
This is a picture of my friend, Ben, holding a painting of himself surfing made by another friend of ours, Debbie. Debbie worked from an image of Ben that I captured a couple years ago. I've posted that original picture below.
Consider the life of this image: Ben, a talented kitesurfer, goes out for a session on the water and I show up with a camera and manage to capture a moment that lasted a fraction of a second. More than a year later, Debbie, a talented artist, is inspired by the photograph and creates a painting from it. The image is traveling among the imaginations of multiple people over time, and now one of them has offered her interpretation of it. Debbie is also a surfer, and she was intrigued by the water Ben is kicking up with his surfboard.
Humans are captivated by images, especially images of other humans. We publish books of photographs and display pictures on the walls of our homes and in museums. I have several books of photos from various photographers. I love to look through the books at pictures of strangers, some from many decades ago, and wonder about who they are, or were. I wonder how their life compares to mine?
A frozen image from the past speaks to the transient nature of our existence. The issue of impermanence is unsettling for most of us, but somehow, at least for me, seeing pictures of other people is comforting. It reminds me that I'm not the only person for whom life seems like a series of moments that pass too quickly. To live in a moment, to appreciate it, I need a picture of it that I can ponder and revisit. I could be accused of living in the past, but the future isn't here yet, and the present happens so fast that it becomes the past before I know it. I need a picture.
Monte
Ben Stadelmaier at Chapoquoit Beach.
The “Chappy Kiters,” September 8, 2019
The After Party
The scene is a group of kite surfers having a Sunday afternoon parking lot celebration after a day of kitesurfing at Chapoquoit. I'm lucky that they let me hover about and photograph them. They are a rare group of people that are happy to let me take their pictures. At least I think they’re happy to let me take their pictures.
Like me, many of them are very close to qualifying for senior citizen discounts. But their behavior during these impromptu parties reminds me of similar events I was part of in high school. They play music, praise each other for their surfing skills, tease each other, play practical jokes, and enjoy the camaraderie they share. They are, in the best sense of the word, a tribe.
With my camera, I feel like I'm documenting an aspect of human behavior that dates back to our origins as a species more than 200,000 years ago. Our tribal instinct is old and strong. Even older, and now extinct, human species like Homo Neanderthalensis (dating back 400,000 years) and Homo Erectus (maybe two-million years ago) must have grouped themselves into tribes.
I'm not a kitesurfer, which is why I'm so amazed to have gained admission to these after parties. I lack the primary qualification for being in the tribe. But this particular group of humans can overlook my shortcomings and welcome me, even though I’m pointing a camera at them.
When I look at the newspapers, I read about modern human tribes in our nation and around the world that seem to be driven primarily by their hatred for other tribes. I've developed a dim view of people as a consequence. But my experience with the kitesurfer tribe gives me a reason for hope.
Monte
I went to the beach with my cameras to photograph the surfers a couple days ago. It was my first time out there since June. The forecast was for SW winds at 18 mph all day. I got there at 1600 and the wind was a bit slower than predicted, but there were plenty of surfers, including a few new faces, like Holly, the young woman wearing orange shorts.
I stayed out for close to two hours feeling the wind and watching the show. It was good to be back.
Monte
Chapoquoit Beach at sunset on Labor Day, September 2, 2019.
The tourists have left the beach … Yay!
I’d planned to go down to Chapoquoit beach around sunset on Labor Day to photograph the beach after the end of the summer vacation. I avoid the beach in summer because, like my whole town, it’s packed with tourists. I’m not necessarily saying I don’t like tourists, but I prefer not to be around them.
I never lived in a popular resort town before I moved here. After sixteen years, I’ve learned something valuable — when I travel as a tourist to other places I am very aware that I need to be on my best behavior. I try to conduct myself with humility and be mindful that I am a guest in other people’s home towns. Sounds obvious, but evidently not everybody gets it. I probably didn’t get it before I had the experience of living full-time in a beach town.
Most likely, I’m just a cranky old man who’s grown intolerant of crowds. The global population is expected to reach ten billion in a couple of decades. I’ll need to get more comfortable with having lots of people around me.
Monte
Jenny, Falmouth Road Race, August 18, 2019
Jenny and Lindsay ran the annual road race in our town of Falmouth this past Sunday (August 18, 2019). For Jenny, this was the 16th consecutive year that she had run it.
The first year she ran the race was 2004. She was very excited when she registered us to run. But Jenny got an infection in her blood that happened suddenly and unexpectedly and almost killed her several weeks before the race. I remember sitting with her in the intensive care unit and watching her lapse in-and-out of consciousness late one night. It was sometime past midnight, and I was thinking about the lab tests that I'd seen for her an hour or so earlier: they pointed to a bad outcome. I knew this because I’d seen the same trending lab results in many patients before, most of whom died. Jenny awoke abruptly with coughing and a look of panic in her eyes. She summoned the nurse, and when the nurse arrived, Jenny, who is a doctor, looked straight at her and said: “I’m developing pulmonary edema. Give me 20 mg of Lasix IV, right now.” The nurse looked at me and asked if she should follow the order. I answered that Jenny was the smartest doctor I’ve ever known, and I’ve never known her to be wrong about anything. The nurse gave the drug, and the coughing began to subside within half an hour. She drifted back into a restless sleep. I watched her breathing while simultaneously struggling with the fear of losing her and marveling at how clear-headed she was even as she was fighting for her life.
After another two or three days, Jenny started to show signs of recovery. By the end of the week, she was ready to leave the hospital. She’d become so weak that she could barely stand up on her own.
Back at home, we started working to regain her strength. The road race wasn't even on our minds. But after a few weeks, she was ready to try a short run, then longer runs. With just a couple of weeks to go, she announced that she wanted to run the race. I was skeptical and tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted she was going to run. I suggested that she let me run with her just in case she got into trouble. She refused; she wanted to do it alone. It was then that I recognized what was happening: She had been near to death and needed to prove to herself that she had indeed survived. The race would be her statement that she intended to live her life on her terms and was not going to succumb to the fear of her experience with illness.
I can still recall the triumphant look on her face when I found her at the finish line of that first race. Later she told me about the start of the race. She was standing in the middle of an ocean of runners who were all fidgeting in anticipation of the start, and when the Star-Spangled Banner played, she began to cry. Under a beautiful blue sky, and surrounded by an energetic crowd, she felt, for the first time in many weeks, that she was alive and life, at that moment, seemed so precious. She’s run every race since that one and plans to keep running them as long as she can.
I like to take photographs of people, especially people doing things that inspire us. Each of the pictures in this small collection tells a different story, but every story is about human beings striving to do the best they can with the life they have. And the picture of Jenny, arms raised and smiling while running the race that has become her victory lap, reminds me of how much she has inspired me throughout our life together. There is also a picture of our daughter, Lindsay, who still comes home to run the race with her mother. It's a tradition that I'm happy and grateful to be able to document with my camera.
Monte
