BEGINING:
To explain my work I must begin by telling you what my motivation has been.
This is my nineth year of taking aerial photos of the Last Green Valley, but it’s my 30th year living in Woodstock. I know that I’ll never be a local, but I value this place and know its fragility the more for having lived in places like the Santa Clara Valley in the early Seventies. There I watched an orchard valley turn into a sea of tract houses with frightening velocity. I liked the weather in California, at first, but I grew bored of it. I longed for the seasons and the sense of my culture’s history that I had left back in New England. The State seemed to flee its history, leaving only the Spanish place names and the Spanish tiles on the tract houses.

Living in Cambridge, Mass, in ‘76, I created a business that would allow me to live wherever I wanted in the East. I started looking for a place to marry. There are levels of understanding and accomplishment that we know when we stay with one person or one place, but you want to choose carefully.

I spent 18 months researching rural areas in the nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina, within a two hour drive of the ocean. I had many criteria - culture, land prices, arts and educational opportunities, beauty, landscape diversity,- and likelyhood that the area would not be sprawled in the near future.

That battle is fought in every rural part of the East, and I’m sure that every person in this room is here because they know that they can’t leave the work to someone else. I built my solar and wood-heated home here, contributed my creativity to our cultural organizations, tried to buy everything locally and joined my town’s conservation commision. It wasn’t until I started flying in 1998 that I found an unfilled niche.

I saw great vistas and small, local features that changed my understanding of our area in ways that twenty years of looking at maps and driving around our roads and hiking her fields and woods had not.

I wanted to bring every person who makes decisions affecting this area, up with me to see what I was seeing, but it seemed very difficult for folks to find time to come flying in my half-century-old, single-engine Cessna.
So I started taking photographs.

Amelia Erhart said
"I have often said that the lure of flying
is the lure of beauty.
That the reason flyers fly,
whether they know it or not,
is the aesthetic appeal of flying"

I wanted to share that beauty.

EQUIPMENT & TECHNIQUE

Most aerial photographers use high-wing single engine planes like my ‘52 Cessna 170B. It’s very simple, easy to maintain, based 10 minutes from my house at the little airport in South Woodstock. It’s taildragger, so gear is forward, out of the way, and the center of gravity is back behind the main gear so it can land on a rough field with less likelihood of flipping over.

Cameras: Main one is a Fuji GW 690 III - rangefinder, medium format. 6x9 format has the 2 to 3 landscape format of 35 mm but with over 5 times the information. Fixed 90 mm lense is a slight wide angle. Bought it by chance, wouldn’t trade it for any.
Kenyon Gyrostabilizer, made right down in Essex, CT, 2 pound egg with counter-rotating discs, a “stedicam”, takes about 6 minutes to spool up - invaluable in turbulence or low light.

I shoot and fly at the same time. The plane is very stable, pilots routinely trim with throttle and trim tab on the tail to fly level, hands-off. I have my feet on the rudder pedals to make gentle turns and it only takes a moment to take the images. “My instructor said it’s OK.”

“It’s not hard to take photos while flying, it’s hard to change roll film in a 100 knot breeze!”

I usually take the door off, even in the Winter, so I can shoot down at a high angle without having to bank the plane. Still, I manage to take alot of photos of my left wing and strut and tire, and sometimes my elbow.

I can only shoot between the 7 and 9 o’clock directions, so when I see something I want to shoot I usually circle it, watching the variation in light from the different points of the compass, watching for other aerial traffic, if I’m low, watching for towers or hills. As I come up to the point where I want to shoot, I take one last look around to be sure I’m alone, pick up the camera from the case on the passenger seat and take a few images.

I make very steep turns sometimes to position the plane for a shot, which is one of the reasons I never fly with anyone when I’m taking pictures.

Most of my photos are taken during the first and last hours of the day. The warm light is so pleasing and the long shadows give deffinition to the low hills, trees and structures. In the middle of the day the landscape looks very flat, topographically and visually. The air is usually more turbulent in the middle of the day.

"Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment...and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival."
- Eliot Porter

I SEE THINGS ALOFT THAT I WANT TO SHOW TO EVERYONE:

I want to show them how beautiful the little city of Willimantic is, at the confluence where the Natchaug and Willimantic rivers become the Shetucket, with ornate houses in the forested hills all around, the beautiful farm at Chestnut hill, the huge downtown mill buildings. From 800’ you don’t see peeling paint or trash or dead cars - you see a commuity around a river.

I want them to see the UCONN buildings from Horsebarn Hill, rather than the other way around. This beautiful, huge, undeveloped grassy drumlin is perfectly symbolic of the school’s agricultural origin and a ballance to its tightly packed urban campus. I think my photos show why they mustn’t ever put buildings on it.

I want them to see how much of our corner of the state is taken up by Forests and Farms.

So much forest up in Union and Ashford, extending north across the mass line, that you’d think you were in northern Maine, such that the Nature Conservancy has dubbed the area the Quinebaug Highlands, and has a special campaign to protect this, biggest block of continuous forest in Southeastern New England.

When I take people up, they often comment on how much of our area is uninterupted forest. You can see from the air how development cul-de-sacs are breaking up some of the private forests and reducing the range of some of our shyer wildlife, but from the air it’s clear that the really endangered species are open fields and farms.

Aviators love farms, because they are relatively safe places to land in an emergency and we have them everywhere, big ones,
making patterns on the land that change with the farming year that even the farmers probably don’t fully appreciate. For instance the “envelopes” that appear when corn is planted by taking the equipment around a small field. In the midwest it’s all just back and forth.
I see the farms besieged by developments and roads, like the Norman farm over in Jewett City, sandwiched between the city, Rt 395 and a housing development.

I see these rivers that we normally only see a few hundred yards of at a time, the Quinebaug, French, Five Mile, Shetucket, Willimantic, Natchaug, Fenton and Hope, winding all down through our watersheds as if the roads and the town and state borders weren’t even there.
I see the Mills in their context with the rivers and the rows of identical houses surrounding them. It’s looking back into history.

I know, from my historical readings, that back before the Civil War there was very little forest in Southern New England. Our countryside was almost entirely farmed, even the swamps were drained to make pasture. In the westward expansion, most farmers left this used-up, rocky soil and so, every year since the war, there has been more standing timber and forest in Southern New England. It’s hard to believe, but when you go up on a snowy day, you can see it and photograph it. You can see an endless mosaic of stone walls running through the woods, far from any houses or roads. You can see where old roads were and sometimes groups of foundations. It gives me a sense of the ephemeral, fragile qualities of our settlement of this land. I wonder if, in another 150 years, pilots will look down and say, “Look at all those old concrete house foundations, way out here so far from public transportation connections. That must have been back when private transportation was so cheap.”

I see where we have dumped our trash, usually next to our rivers

I see the places we dump our junk cars, again, often by rivers or in pristine areas of forest

Sometimes I have no agenda but the beauty of a pattern that I may not at first recognize.

“To show people the ugly doesn't accomplish much. I came to the conclusion that I can't really make much of a change in society's attitude towards land use by just showing them what's wrong. I've come to the conclusion you have to show them what's right, and inspire them."
-William A. Garnett


I’ve had one-man shows at the UCONN library, Windham Hospital, the Legislative Office Blg in Hartford, Roseland Cottage, the Vanilla Bean Restaurant in Pomfret, QVCC.

I’m proudest of the use that our Quiet Corner environmental organizations have made of my work, in their brochures, their websites, their campaigns. The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, UCONN’s Agricultural Extension Service, the Last Green Valley Institute and the Quinebaug and Shetucket River Valleys Heritage Corridor have used my aerials. I think the QSHC director, Charlene Cutler, is my biggest fan. She uses my work beautifully, and I am very impressed by what she and her staff have done to help connect, coordinate and assist the towns and organizations that are trying to protect our natural and cultural assets.

AVIATION:

One of our amazing American freedoms is access to aviation for private citizens. In many countries aviation is dominated and controlled by the Commercial and Military fleets. What we call General Aviation is extremely expensive and very limited in terms of where and when you can fly. I can fly my little plane right into Bradley or TF Green. I can talk to Traffic Control and fly right over Manhattan or down the Hudson River. If I follow the safety rules and use the right radio frequencies and proceedures I can go almost anywhere.
I got my private pilot’s license right here at Windham airport. It took me about 10 months, 80 hours of flying costing about $5000. I bought an old plane in good con dition for about the cost of a new SUV, with annual maintenance costs about that of a wooden boat. It’s expensive, but not out of sight.

But the good news is, the bar has been lowered, and I’m not talking about ultralights, but something between ultralights and 4-place aircraft like mine. New category of license, sport pilot, designed to take half the time to get, and a new category of plane you can fly with that license. The license requires only 20 hours, you can’t fly at night but if you learn to use the radio you can fly into controled airspace, go out and land on Nantucket. You don’t need an exhaustive Medical every two years, you can fly if you have a driver’s license. The planes are about the size of a classic Piper Cub, though most are of much more modern materials and design, two-place, under 1300 pounds, can’t go faster than 120 knots, fixed landing gear but floats are an option. If you get a kit plane and do 51% of the assembly yourself you can do all the mainetnance yourself, to save money. The General Aviation community and the FAA have been working on this for a decade and it was finally passed last Summer. There are a limited number of planes and instructors available at this point but more are being developed and trained all the time. Go to EAA.ORG for the latest and most detailed information.

Back to the bad news - since 9/11 there have been restrictions on general aviation and alot of politicians who want to prove they’re doing a good job of protecting us from ourselves want to put on more restrictions. There’s a special, narrow corridor down the Hudson River, through the busiest airspace in the nation. It was designed to small planes like can mine can go up and down the east coast without bothering the air traffic controlers handling the commercial traffic in and out of JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Teterboro airports. It enhances air safety. I can’t fly it when the Yankees have a home game because their stadium is within five miles of the Hudson and their restricted zone chokes off the corridor. Now, what greater safety issue is served in this case? It it to protect Yankee fans from my little plane and its 40 gallons of gasoline? Is it so I can’t spread some biological agent over an assemblage of people? I could still fly over Central Park any other day or right down Jones Beach on Saturday afternoon in the Summer. What’s being protected is the advertising monopoly the stadium owners enjoy when no one can tow a banner within sight of the fans. Banner tow operations are mostly out of business even though no banner towing plane has ever been involved in any terrorist act.

You may remember that Mohamet Atta and his boys took some flight training, but do you remember that they also worked on getting hazardous cargo trucking licenses? If other terrorists do someday drive gas tankers into American Synagoges, do you think we should ban all wheeled vehicular traffic from, say 500 yards around any assembly of Americans?

STORIES: Nothing hair-raising. With the ink not yet dry on my license, and about 15 hours in my new used Cessna, I flew to Iowa and back with my wife, visiting friends on the way. It’s about 10 hours in my plane, but we took a couple of days. It was fun. I was fresh out of an excellent training program. My instructor was a very experienced and very hard on me. I’d passed the flying test the first time I took it and gotten a perfect score on my written exam. At one point I was unsure of how close I was to a line of embeded thunder storms but other than that it was a very pleasant trip. Gosh I wish they trained automobile drivers as thoroughly as they train pilots.

Try talking about auto accidents in a group of drivers, say, at a party, and you’ll find youself alone by the punch bowl. Pilots love to talk about accidents. They know that considering every detail and cause of accidents helps prepare them to recognize the mistakes that could contribute to a similar crash. We hope it makes us, and I know it makes us feel, safer.

ARTIST OPEN STUDIOS,

one weekend left, Sat and Sun 10 to 5. 90 artists in 72 locations from Tolland to Thompson to Lebanon. We put out the same signs with baloons on them. Find one of us and you can get a map to all the others or get the map and artist list from the website:
www.artistsopenstudiosofnect.org

Artists are listed by town, but don’t just take off and start following the map. We’re all farther apart than it looks on the page. Read down the artist’s descriptions of the work and plot out a loop that takes in what you want to see.
If you live west of Willimantic and are interested in painting, watercolor and photography, you’ll see that a loop through Coventry and Lebanon and back through Willimantic can take you to nine studios without driving all over the county.
If your walls are full but your garden is not, please take my recommendation and go see William Stallman’s metal sculptures. We’ve all seen people who make animals and birds out of metal junk, but Stallman is one of the very best at it - he’s right on South Eagleville Road in Storrs and he’s open this weekend. There’s a guitar and musical instrument maker, Carla Kelly, right on 44 near Kathy Johns.
..and, if you’re on 44 headed east...
In a few miles of driving around my part of Woodstock, you can see Bruce Lippincott’s beautiful nature photos that he prints himself in a wet lab in his home. He’s a master. See Linita Shimizu’s prints made using a Japanese technique involving multiplewoodcuts to apply different colors., Even if you don’t have any room on your walls, go look at her work, it’s incredible. Come see me up on Rocky Hill Rd - I have my bentwood oak lamps that I’ve been making for 25 years, as well as my aerials. Just north of me on Bradford Corners Rd is Kathy Woodcock with her Shetland wool scarfs and shawls. Another hundred yards up the road is Meb Boden, with her wooden kitchen utensils and cheeze boards including a line of spoons and utensils made for lefties!