Had a pretty awesome weekend. This makes several awesome weekends in a row now, with expectations of more to come. Baxter State Park in Maine has been quite good to us this summer, with road trips, epic hikes, and idyllic campsites aplenty.

Hammered the Traveler’s Ridge this past weekend, with great weather the whole time. Good group, which is always a bonus. It’s great when you can get back to the site at night and just nod at each other. Yes. Yes it was.

Still looking through a stack of photos from the weekend. I seem to punish myself by hauling massive amounts of photo gear up these mountains, but I think it works out in the end. One photo for now, of part of the ridge along the top of the hike.

Obviously, I must pick a track for this journey. Aside from sitting on a hill top with Amon Amarth blasting into my ears while hiking, I’m going to go with Tori Amos, with Bouncing off of Clouds. Enjoy.

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have had a hard time coming up with something specific to say. I’ve been getting out with the camera a lot lately, which is good. It’s getting colder in the morning, and now I am beginning to understand why professional photographers can return to the same locations year after year, and not get bored or tired of it. Scenery changes. Things grow, things die, light changes, and so on. It’s a challenge I welcome, the act of looking at something I’ve looked at hundreds of times and extracting some new motif, something I haven’t noticed before. The significant inside of the insignificant, perhaps?

One of the geek things I’ve been doing of late is geotagging my photos. I connect my handheld Garmin to my camera via an obscenely over-engineered cable system and the coordinates of the camera are actually stored right in the exif metadata of the photograph. If you jury rig it right, the camera will also store the direction it was pointed in, since my GPS has an electronic compass. But how significant is the data I capture this way? All about the frame of reference, I suppose. In order to find the place I took the photo, you’d have to know that I was on the Earth when I took it. How do you find Earth, if you’re not from here?

Years ago, Dick Hardt posted a cool set of graphics to his blog that makes the point about how significant Earth is, relative to everything else in the Universe. Makes you think. And Antares must be freaking hogeous.

It appears that the frosty weather has arrived early, and thus begins my training and acclimatization for another winter of snow and breezy Train Bridge crossings in Fredericton. It’s early this year — below zero on the walk in this morning, despite it being absolutely stunning outside. The fall has been generally weird, especially the timings for fall colours. Leaves have been turning at different rates, which has made for a longer photography season, but fewer opportunities to get big swatches of colour at once. Still, it’s all good. I return to the same places and experience different colours, a different palette, trees and shrubs shedding their cloaks of green for ones shimmering in reds, yellows, and gold.

Despite this, the soul grows restless. I’m examining my options, both for travel and more long term endeavours, and will let things fall as they may. Casually, of course, but still. Fall is a time of change, after all.