Even, or perhaps especially, the Imperial War Museum in London has to deal with dust and smudges. Below, a group of middle school students deal with a Spitfire from the Battle of Britain in World War II, with a Nazi V-1 (or is it a V-2) rocket to the right. And below that the funeral ad.
Something about the photo or the approach to this subject doesn’t seem quite right. Is it the smiles? Or does the fact that they are blissfully piloting a scooter in London traffic suggest impending doom? Maybe you have to be British to get it. Brixton, London, UK.
The variety of landscape and people in France is staggering, and every part has its own beauty. For Americans Normandy is always a place of pilgrimage, to imagine what it was like on June 6, 1944, but it is also a beautiful rural landscape of winding roads, cideries, ancient villages, hedgerows, orchards and fields away from the D-Day memorials, museums and shops. I was there and in Brittany with friends for a few days in November. Above, a peaceful farm road outside of Carentan, where fighting raged during and after D-Day. If you read Band of Brothers, or saw the TV series, the battle for Carentan is unforgettable. Pictures at the link below also cover Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc, where US Army rangers scaled a 90-foot cliff from the ocean to take a German gun emplacement. The American soldiers suffered a 75 percent casualty rate. One of those killed was from my birthplace, Bethlehem, PA. Below, cider-maker with a very, very old bottle of cider at the Domaine Dupont cidery, where they make not only fine hard cider but famous calvados; the hilltop town of Dinan, Brittany; fresh shellfish from the Baie de Saint Brieuc in Brittany; and the Armistice Day observance in Dinan, marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the slaughter that was World War I, November 11, 1918. Click here for the gallery.
Night and snow settling on LBJ’s Grocery, Worcester, VT. You can get garam masala and basmati rice here in addition to Bud Light and Hershey bars.
It’s been a busy winter, and I haven’t posted much, but I have been posting more regularly on Instagram (@lazenbyphoto), so if you have Instagram, follow! Meanwhile, I’ll be catching up here.
The New England Nordic Ski Association started its Eastern Cup racing season out Saturday and Sunday at the Craftsbury, VT, Outdoor Center. There were top racers from the East, eastern Canada and elsewhere as well as masters racers and everything in between, including kids in the Bill Koch League races at the end of the day. Click here for a big gallery.
Sweden’s Stina Nilsson, Ebba Andersson, Charlotte Kalla and Anna Haag faced the cameras after winning the silver medal in the relay at the 2017 Nordic World Championships.
I really appreciate the recent article the Faster Skier web site did on some of my work covering the nordic ski racing scene. Above, one of the photos from the article, taken in Lahti, Finland, in 2017. You can reach the Faster Skier article by clicking here.
And I was happy that some of the photos of the Chaloux Brothers firewood business that I published in the blog back in July are in the Autumn issue of Northern Woodlands, below. The Chalouxs are great people and hard workers in a tough business. I photographed them and their firewood operation over the course of several months. Northern Woodlands is an excellent magazine focusing on the forest ecology and economy of the Northeast. Click here for my original gallery of the Chalouxs at work. Click here for a link to the Northern Woodlands article. And subscribe or buy the magazine.
After a long cloudy day, the sun came out and the kids started jumping off the mini-mountain of manmade snow at the Craftsbury, VT, Outdoor Center last weekend. The guy on the bottom started out facing the other direction and in this series is en route to a 360.
After the bat mitzvah comes the post bat mitzvah party!
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to photograph a pheasant shoot in the countryside about an hour west of London. Pheasant shooting in England is both sport and social activity. The pheasants, a species introduced to England long ago, are bred, raised and released in the millions annually and then nurtured with feed and forage. Expenses are shared among a group of hunters. This was a driven shoot—the birds are flushed toward the hunters by “beaters” walking the woods and fields—and shot in flight. The hunters use shotguns; dogs fetch the downed birds. I photographed this using a small Fuji x100F mirrorless camera with a fixed medium wide angle lens (35 mm equivalent; no zoom; no telephoto), which was a challenge. Click here for a gallery.
O.A.R.S. boatwoman Joelle Stanion pilots her passengers through Lava Falls, Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, in the second week of October. We were able to fill some cancellation spots on a raft trip down the 138-mile section of the river from Phantom Ranch to Diamond Creek. We walked down the Bright Angel Trail from the South Rim, met the rafts at the river and headed downstream. The Colorado was brown from Hurricane Rosa’s rains, but it was a great trip, floating through the ever-changing landscape, hiking in the side canyons, and meeting new friends. Click here for a big gallery.
