Egret and Motocross

A bike loop today from Sunapee to Newport, Claremont, Charlestown, Langdon, Alstead, Marlow, Lempster, Goshen, and back yielded two surprises: a Great Egret in downtown Claremont and a Motocross race near the wind turbines of Lempster. First the egret. Here it is. Can you find the egret? Below is a cropped version of another photo. Why is the egret so small? Because I do not carry my “big” lens when I ride my bike. In fact the camera I had with me (LX3) goes only to a 35mm equivalent 60mm—what we used to call a “normal lens”—definitely not a telephoto.
Before I reached Claremont I rode out of Sunapee with the early sun at my back casting a long shadow before me. Occasionally the sun would flash in my mirror.
On the outskirts of Claremont a closed vegetable stand had an interesting collection of “stuff” on the side of the building.
And on the other side of the building some sleds and a painted wall.
Entering Claremont, Rt 11 was quite deserted. The image below is a two-shot merge taken from my moving bike. Photoshop CS5 did a good job of merging, but it needed some clean-up work. The images is not great but it shows how quickly the sky was changing when compared with the next image taken only 6 minutes later.
The light started to get interesting as dark clouds formed to the west.
I stopped briefly in Claremont, saw the egret, then headed south on Rts 11 and 12. In Charlestown I found an old barn with the changing sky behind. Just like the “Prompto” sign, dramatic light can change a ho-hum scene into something a bit more.

Not far from the barn is a field where hang gliders land. Interestingly this field is filled with powerlines—not the things one wants to hit while gliding to the ground. The clouds had moved further to the east and started to hide the sun (which I didn’t see for much of the ride). This caused streaks of light to paint the fields in quickly-changing patterns. In both of the images below you can see tiny red “dots”. These are balls attached to the power lines to help the gliders avoid them.

I rode through Charlestown and turned east on Rt 12A through Langdon and Alstead, then Rt 123 to Marlow. There I headed north on Rt 10 through Lempster where I heard someone talking over a loudspeaker in the woods to my right. As I rode on I heard the roar of engines; then got glimpses of bleachers and large trucks. I turned into the Jolly Roger Motorsports Park and walked my bike through a jumble of vehicles and people to some bleachers overlooking the track. I arrived for the tail end of a race and managed to get a few quick shots as the racers flew past me on the track below. I panned with the vehicles hoping to convey a sense of rapid motion by freezing the rider while having spinning wheels and a streaked background. It is challenging to take these kind of shots with a point-and-shoot camera compared to a DSLR. Shutter lag, slow autofocus, and lack of a true burst mode are significant hindrances. But I got several shots that worked well including the following one taken with a shutter speed of 1/100 sec. When panning, the faster the action, the faster (shorter duration) the shutter speed should be. Photographing a person on a bike or a moving animal I might be shooting more in the range of 1/30 sec or less.
Lempster is also the home of a wind turbine array on a hillside. Here is a photo I was able to get without venturing from Rt 10.

In Goshen I turned on Brook Road where I began a long climb to the high point of my ride in the eastern “foothills” of Mt Sunapee. When I finally finished my ride my GPS indicated that I did 73 miles in a total time of 6 hrs and 30 minutes and that for just over an hour of this time I was not moving.