Okay, Mike, here’s another

March 14, 2008 – Cloudy, 40’s. Mike Huggins figured out where the farm in yesterday’s Farm Journal (see picture below)  was in a couple of hours, and in two ways. First, since he grew up around Argyle, he guessed, based on memory, that the picture looked West from McEachron Hill Road at the backside of the Lufkin Farm, on the way to Goose Island and McKernon’s farm (you may have guessed that the area was settled by Scotch/Irish farmers).
  “If I’m right, “e-mailed Mike, a geologist who tracks down the location of my farmscapes by terrain, memory and digital technology, “Lufkin’s barn and house is on a mound that is the remains of a subglacial esker (meltwater stream at the base of a glacier) that runs along Route 40 (and was the source of all the gravel pits along there, that have been mined on and off for years for roads).” He said some people from RPI and the U.S. Geological Survey helped figure that out.
  In all seriousness, the connection between Mike and this blog is remarkable. He can often (not always, he says modestly) track a farmscape from the hills and terrain shape and e-mail me an extraordinary account of its geological history.  This adds a dimension of history, science and background to a photograph that might otherwise just be a landscape. It brings it to life for me, in ways that are exciting. This seems to me a real leap in communications, between a farm, a writer, a geologist and science. When else in history could a photographer take a landscape shot and know within hours the history of the ground going back a million years? Wow.
  This is where the Internet brings great things. I can’t wait to meet Mike who, as it happens comes to Argyle regularly to meet his family and who knows Steve, the Hound from Heaven.)
  This is perhaps my favorite farmscape, at the bottom of this post, (not the Lufkin barn) and now the photo means even more. Thanks Mike. The one above may be tougher, though probably not for you. It is in Washington County.

The photo Mike just ID’d.

This farm, on Kinney Road, in Argyle, is my favorite place to shoot farmscapes because it sits up on one of the few hills with big sky around it, and I can get the whole farm silhouetted. Many of you are asking me to include more info about lenses. This one was shot on manual, (don’t remember the setting) with an 18 mm. fisheye landscape lens, very wide and great depth of field. This is the first farm Mike Huggins spotted when I put the first picture of it up and I got an e-mail history of moraines (I don’t know exactly yet what they are).