Photography

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Coast-to-Coasting

September 1, 2008 in Photography, Places, Travel | 2 comments

I’m flying back to Boston today. Weather looks bad for shooting over the West. It’ll be dark over the rest of the trip anyway, though sometimes I get some good city shots at night.

Flying out here on the 19th, I sat on the sunny side of the plane, which never makes for good shooting, but I still got some decent shots of Gloucester Bay, Mt. Blanca in Colorado’s Sagre de Cristo range, Great Sand Dunes National Park, center–fed farms (such as the one above) in the San Luis Valley, the San Juan River running through a hogback, Shiprock, the painted desert, the Black Mesa Mine, the Kayenta Mine, the Grand Canyon, salt evaporators, Mt. San Jacinto, Mt. San Gorgonio, mountains of coastal southern California and Los Angeles freeways. Some are good. Enjoy.

Church of New England

August 22, 2008 in Art, Past, Photography, Places, Travel | 5 comments

I grew up in New Jersey, which I think of as “New England without the universities”. There are many places in New Jersey with beauty equal to, say, New Hampshire’s. But New Jersey never had the same ethos of preservation, the same not-quite-a-mythology that explains why Norman Rockwell and his sentiments fit New England like a shoe while to the rest of the country they remain a maudlin approximation of bygone times elsewhere.

I transferred my state citizenship from New Jersey to North Carolina in early 1974, when I left our small rented house on Route 94 in Yellow Frame, out in Sussex County, the beautiful northernmost county of the state. Back then Sussex County had more cows than people, and featured fall colors and pastoral scenes worthy of calendars and post cards. Best of all it shared the with Pennsylvania. The shores of the river were settled first by the Indians and later by the , descendents of which continued to farm the islands and lowlands alongside the river, right up to the point in the 1970s when the United States government, with help from both states, condemned the land, including perfectly good towns such as Dingman’s Ferry, and let it all fall to ruin while fighting and failing to build the unnecessary. It was, and remains, a disgrace.

Can you imagine the feds, or Vermont and New Hampshire, doing the same to the ? Of course not. We’re talking about New England here.

The difference was brought home to me this past weekend when we picked up The Kid from camp in Vermont and took our time heading back to Boston. We visited Middlebury, Waterbury (including the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream headquarters), the Rock of Ages Quarry near Barre, and various towns along the Connecticut River before having some okay Thai food in Keene. New England is truly a beautiful region, even with almost no available hotel rooms.

Much of that was recorded photographically. Here’s the set. Here’s the slide show.

Nice to know New England is there. Less nice to know that much of the same beauty has long since been paved or otherwise profaned in other states. (Of course, I also realize that much has been lost in New England as well. Just less of it than elsewhere.)

The shot above is of the Congregational Church in Middlebury, Vermont. I shot a series of photos of the church, most with white and grey clouds boiling up in the sky beyond. I wasn’t sure which was best (which is why I kept them all), but I am sure that several are better than the one the church uses for its own website.

I also did some experimental shooting with this brick building in downtown Middlebury, which is about as nice a little college town as you’re gonna find anywhere. The best of those shots, by the way, were taken not with my Canon 30D SLR, but with a little Canon Powershot SD850is. Partly that’s because the little camera likes to yield more vibrant colors than the big one; and partly it’s because the big one wasn’t fixed right and read the light wrong.

Anyway, I’m back out in California, where I am now a citizen, even though most of the next year will be spent back at the Berkman Center in Cambridge.

Shoot

August 16, 2008 in Blogroll, Business, Photography, Travel | 11 comments

Several weeks ago, while we were walking around Mystic Seaport, in the mist of shooting these pictures, I dropped my camera, a Canon 30D — a workhorse that has served ably for more than two years. Afterwards it seemed to work fine mechanically, but it could no longer read light properly. For whatever reason, it overexposed shots by two stops or more. (All the shots I took with it after that were in manual mode using guesswork about light, trial and error.)

So I took it in to a camera repair shop near Boston, and they sent it to Canon. On Friday (yesterday) I got it back. It was an almost entirely new camera. New back, new top, new electronics. I didn’t have time to test it out before hitting the road for the weekend in Vermont and New Hampshire, but I didn’t expect any problems.

I was wrong. The problem wasn’t fixed. It still reads light wrong and overexposes by two or more stops. How could they replace so much of the camera and not fix the one thing that was wrong with it? Amazing.

I suppose I should bring the camera back on Monday and repeat the process, but I really want to have it in California this next week, and on the trip that follows that one. In fact, the first day I’ll be able to pick it up is September 12.

Right now I’m hoping that Samy’s in Santa Barbara (where I bought it) will be able to send it into Canon and expedite a fast turn-around on a fix.

Meanwhile I’m wondering if I should just go ahead and get a soon-to-be-discontinued Canon 5D, which is getting down around $1000 now. It’s a great camera, much better than the 30D. And use the 30D as a second camera. But… I dunno. Probably not, mostly because I’d also have to invest in all those good lenses that will make the 5D sing. Right now I have only one really good lens for the 30D. The other two are cheapies: a Tamron 18-200 (sharp, but not fast, and with fuzziness at the long end and barrel distortion at the wide) and a Canon f1.8 you can still get for just $80 or so.  They do a good job for the money, but they’re not real good lenses.

I’m a pretty good photographer. Not great, but pretty good, on the whole. And I feel like a pretty good musician using an almost good instrument. The 5D is a good instrument. Not the best, but close enough. To get a 5D and the “glass” that would do it justice… say, three primes (fixed length lenses) and a zoom would cost several thousand dollars. That’s out of my range, at least until my get-rich boat comes in.

I’m sure it will. And for that to happen, I need to focus on other work.

Radio now

August 14, 2008 in Ideas, Past, Photography | 4 comments

I listen to a lot of WBUR in my car. ‘BUR is Boston’s main NPR station, and where I’m I do most of my public radio listening. While weather isn’t the main thing on ‘BUR, it’s a frequent thing, and what makes me feel at home when I listen. Lately the report has been what we’ve heard most of this summer: more rain. Flash flood watch, even.

Still, as I looked around here, it’s sunny and clear and perfect in the same way that Boston weather this summer has been sucky. That’s because I’m listening in Santa Barbara. At home I use our Sonos system, and in the car I use the Tuner app on my new iPhone. Tuner costs money and is missing some pieces (just like the iPhone), but it’s a great way to listen to radio.

I got an iTrip AutoPilot to go with it. The design is good, but its FM signal is way too weak. Not sure if I’ll take it back, but I’ve abandoned it while jacking the iPhone into one of those fake tape cassettes on a wire, which I shove into the car’s cassette player. (The car is a ’95 Infiniti.) ‘BUR is easy on the cell system because its stream is just 24kbps. I’ve also done a lot of listening to faster streams, all the way up to 128kbps, and I gotta say those work pretty well too, over the 3G system. My fave at the top rate is , which is just an awesome music station.

The main result for me is a new set of prelminary conclusions about the final stage of radio.

1) Live still matters. I have lots of stored music and podcasts on my iPhone. They’re great to have, but there’s no substitute. Stored and live are not the same. Both have their virtues, and now both can be maximized.

2) Human still matters. When I listen to WBUR in the morning, I expect to hear Bob Oakes, even if what he’s saying could be said by anybody.

3) The primary medium for radio, as with every other form of digital communication, is now the Net. Over-the-air (OTA) will still matter for a long time, but it will be become secondary rather than primary.

4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we make that happen, the better.

5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.

6) iPhones and other MIDs (mobile internet devices) will become bags of tools for doing all kinds of highly personal and engaged stuff. Today I’m in Toronto blue-sky-ing at PlanetEye (I’m on their board), thinking about all this. Long ago Larry Josephson told me “Radio is personal. That’s it.” But when all you had were transmitters and non-interactive receivers, there was a limit to how personal it could be. Not any more.

I’ll add more, but I gotta go.

Mark-up

August 11, 2008 in Photography, Travel | Permalink

In May of last year I flew from London to Los Angeles and shot a lot of pictures out the window. While still ascending toward the sky over Scotland and beyond I shot a city I later discovered was Manchester.

Since then the photo has acquired 21notes by 3 different people. Go through the 49 shots at that last link and find many more notes from more people than I can count. Amazing. I love that kind of help.

Speaking of which, many shots like this also serve duty in Wikipedia. I just discovered where they live.

New daze

August 5, 2008 in Art, Life, Photography, Places | 1 comment

We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms this summer in Boston. On Sunday we followed the last ones out of town, veering west after departing from Logan, while the clouds puffed off to the east. The dawn weather was dreary at ground level, but quite pretty, as clouds go, from altitude. So here’s a set of pictures I shot on the way out of town.

Most of the rest of the trip was cloudy, wasting a perfectly okay window with no obstructions. But I still got nearly 200 shots. I’ll be putting the rest of those up soon.

Opening the Book Cliffs

July 26, 2008 in Geology, Ideas, Life, News, Past, Photography, problems, Travel | 7 comments

A few dozen million years ago, in the Eocene — not far back, as geology goes — a large lake covered much of what’s now western Colorado and eastern Utah. A lot of organic muck fell to the bottom, and now that muck is oil. Problem is, it’s locked in shale, and extracting it is no bargain… yet.

If and when it ever gets to be a bargain, look to see some of The West’s prettiest landscape ripped up.

Edge-on, the old lake bed presents itself as the Book Cliffs*, which overlook I-70 for a hundred miles. I took some shots of the region when we drove past them last year. And one of those shots now illustrates this post by Brandon Keim in his Wired blog.

[* My geography and my geology were corrected below in the comments by Ron Schott, a genuine geologist. Brandon Keim wrote about oil shales using my photo. There are oil shales, but not in these Book Cliffs deposits, which are older. The oil shales are in strata above the ones exposed here. Apologies for the errors.]

What we’re presented with here is a set of costs that can only be rationalized in terms that regard the extraction of all the world’s oil as an economic necessity — and nothing else.

I hear arguments for mining oil from places like this and a few memorable lines from the Doors’ “When the music’s over” come to mind:

What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
Stuck her with knives in the
Side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and
Dragged her down.

Great song, by the way. Also the one that foreshadowed the demise of Tony Soprano on the penultimate episode of Tony’s show.

Is there foreshadowing here too?

Shootings

July 26, 2008 in Art, Events, Fun, Life, Past, Photography | 3 comments

I’m in Mystic Seaport with family, looking at boats and learning history. It’s a great place that I remember well, even though I’m pretty sure the last time I came here was in the 5th grade, which would have been a little more than 50 years ago. Most of the antique boats currently on display here are younger than that. Perspective.

Anyway, earlier today I dropped my main camera, a Canon EOS 30D, and it no longer takes accurate light readings. It works, but I have to use another camera to read light, or guess at exposures and use trial-and-error. So I need to send it in for repairs. Any recommendations on that? The unit is long since out of warranty.

By the way, the shot above was taken not with the 30D, but with a little PowerShot SD 850IS, through one lens of my polarized sunglasses. The lens of the camera is small enough to do that. Other shots in that same series were taken with the 30D, but lacked the polarizing filter. They are much sharper and less grainy, but also less colorful.

I should be adding many more before the weekend is out, even with the 30D limping along.

Getting around

July 23, 2008 in Art, Business, Fun, Photography, Travel | Permalink

I shot some Puffins the other day, from an old lobster boat piloted by my cousin George, who is a local on Maine’s Muscongus Bay. We skirted just past the surf surrounding Eastern Egg Rock, from which puffins disappeared in the 1800s after settlers ate all their eggs. The birds have been re-established there with great help from Project Puffin and the Audubon Society. There was a nice story in the Boston Globe yesterday about puffin restoration at the small, rocky island. I was there a few days earlier, and I’ve got the pictures. Fun combo.

Puffins are smallish birds with large colorful bills. Except when they’re laying eggs or fresh from hatching between hard rocks, they spend their whole lives on the open sea. The Globe story mentions one bird that’s 35 years old. That’s a long time on Earth for a sea creature that lives mostly on or above the surface.

Anyway, travel. I do a lot of it, along with plenty of photography. For those and related reasons I am on the board of PlanetEye, a new company that just launched on the Web. Check ’em out. Give’m feedback, too. They have a link for it, and I know they listen.

Polar Xtreme

July 17, 2008 in Art, Fun, Photography, Places, Science, Travel | Permalink

J. Dana Hrubes has been reporting on his work and life at the North and South Pole for the last few years, but I just discovered his site this morning via the 12 July Aurora Gallery at SpaceWeather.com.

Here’s his report on 2007-2008. Here is the June page, with some amazing pictures of the aurora australis in the midst of stars. Plus this paragraph:

  June is the month when we celebrate the midwinter solstice. It means that we have lived through 3 months without the sun and there are 3 months until sunrise on September 21st. As for me, I get sad when the sun starts to rise because it means that the magic of walking miles each day to work and back under the beautiful skies of the South Pole will be over. But for now, we still have plenty of darkness left and the two coldest months are just beginning, July and August. I hope to beat my record low of -110.7 F (almost -80 C) which was in early August, 2005. I personally would like to experience -118 F and break the all time record since records at the Pole began in 1957. That also happens to be the temperature that carbon dioxide freezes at this altitude (over 10,000 ft equivalent). By the way, these are actual static temperatures, not any of that wind chill nonsense. Even at temperatures below -100 F, we still hike out to the telescope every day. I haven’t missed one day at South Pole Telescope since I got here on December 8, 2007.

His weather widget says it’s -89°F right now, or -65°C. Still, good to be there, if only vicariously.

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