We are fortunate enough to have recent graduate Eleanor Conover (no relation) working with us this summer, and applying her artist’s eye and work ethic to generating new timelapse sequences from the surrounding landscapes… and now also adding to this blog. This morning we recorded sunrise over Penobscot Bay from nearby Beech Hill.

Eleanor is getting to know this hill pretty well, having made several trips now to record time lapsing. The hill is also a location where my crew shot with musician Tim Eriksen and friends for BEHOLD THE EARTH. Her observations…

“We had an Edna St. Vincent Millay type morning on Beech Hill, shooting a timelapse of the sunrise. The bay was flat due to the air from the northwest, and as the sun rose and banked right, the reflection looked almost like the water does when the moon rises in the early night.

I keep returning to the islands, anchored stoically in the landscape. From above, you don’t encounter them face-to-face, but their articulated treetops that stretch across the view is, I think, at the heart of a dramatic encounter with the entire bay. The wind turbines that stretch from their foundations on Vinalhaven granite are the newest—and tallest—break in the horizontal composition. They interact with the natural environment in their own way, picking up the rhythm of the wind, and ceding their macbook white color to the oranges of the sunrise, later silhouetted with the pine trees against a pale, daytime horizon.”

DC NOTE: In 1917 Edna St Vincent Milay published a collection of poetry which included the poem Renascence. The first 16 lines are below. She penned this after hiking up another hill nearby in Camden, Maine.

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see:
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.

Posted on August 27th, 2010 in Environmentalists, Indie Film

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