I don't know about you but this time of year (May) feels like being shot from a canon.

I wasn't even here in New England for much of the winter but the part that I was here seemed long, cold, gray and snowy. I know good pictures can be made outdoors in that kind of weather but I may be becoming a fair weather photographer because I don't have much stomach for it anymore.

I just got back from a few days on Martha's Vineyard last week and shot daily. I also had friends visit from the mainland, saw MV friends, made a presentation to a gallery, discussed a new digital book with the publisher and worked on another book project due to be published this fall. I was able to tour my off island friends around the island that one of them had never seen before. This was something my dad loved to do, to show visitors his favorite parts of the island and I love this too. I also dealt with flat tires, dead mice in the basement, broken water lines and the exciting topic of hiring someone to dig a drywell for drainage from one of the scuppers on the roof.

Early May is pretty spectacular on the island. As it is surrounded by water and in the spring the water is cold, it keeps the island wet, foggy and colder than the mainland. It also means that spring doesn't happen on the same schedule as it does in the continental USA. That's cool on its own. The light can be bright and blue, if the sun is out:

This is the same tree I was shooting last fall

which has turned into one of those projects where you see the same thing, over and over again, in different seasons. Can be relentless. We'll see if I overdo it. I like pictures that are about the differences between things.

I also am making more long lens pictures, probably because I worked that way in California in February.

These textural pictures must be a little hard to understand at your screen size... a few inches across. But try thinking of them as 30 inches across and you might begin to get it.

I know, pretty much a cliche´, this vertical. So sue me. That's No Man's Land out there on the horizon, an unpopulated island I photographed from the air a couple of years ago.

This is down in Oak Bluffs at the new fish pier. 

The other thing that's really nice about Martha's Vineyard now is that it isn't crazy yet. Before school gets out and midweek, the Vineyard is very relaxed and not  crowded in May. The tradeoff is that it can be very cold. But get a few days of warm weather and beaches are empty, there are no lines and traffic is sparse. A month from now things will be very different.

My daughter was there last weekend, with her family, and as the weekend went on I was getting texts asking if the house was available this coming weekend as they wanted to come right back. That's the Vineyard: you can't wait to get there and you hate to leave.

Ah, the Vineyard. You must have a place you hold dear in your heart. Mine is the Vineyard.