very simple

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my camera system last week. I had been looking to move on from my Nikon D80 for a while. It was a workhorse, but it was also a decade old, and had seen better days. In particular, it had severe ISO limitations and really couldn’t shoot at night or in low light, which became painfully evident when I got nothing but noise last summer in Wyoming when we all stayed up all night trying to shoot the Perseid meteor showers in the beautiful clear skies. I had been looking at just upgrading my Nikon base, but after some advice and research, and the exhaustion of lugging around a giant SLR (and knowing that most of the newer Nikons were even bigger and heavier than the D80), I decided to go in a different direction and go with a mirrorless Olympus system instead. So I’m testing it out. I’ve got a lot of new things to learn, reading through the manuals and figuring out the settings, menus, etc., but in the meantime I’ve been carrying it around with me (it’s small enough to carry in my purse) and taking this Memorial Day weekend to do some deep diving. I’ve still got a bunch of photos to sort through and edit, but in the meantime, here are a few shots from my commute to work on Thursday morning when I was really just getting my “camera legs” going.

In addition, I’m finally attempting to move away from Aperture before it completely dies on me – I still despise the way Adobe Lightroom organizes photos using reference files, and I’m completely opposed to their entire subscription system, so I’m avoiding that for now and retrying the upgraded version of Photos. It’s still terrible by itself as an editor, but now that they allow extensions, there have been a few developed over the past six months or so that seem to have real promise, so I’m willing to give it a try in the hope that it continues to evolve (with third party help) into a total solution. As someone who primarily only does color correction and minor cropping in any event, I’ve never needed the real “power” tools of something like Photoshop.

In order…newsstand turned coffeeshop by the subway, escalator stairs, grand central terminal in motion, and the incredibly ornate office building in which I work…

Not as delayed as last time. As always, there are cats and coffee. Plus some (sort of) kosher baked goods and it was primary day here in NYC, as you may have heard. The weather started cooperating a little more, but not as much as one would like, and I’ve begun experimenting with an antique film camera that I found at a tag sale, but since that requires film, you’ll have to wait even longer for anything other than a picture of the actual camera (so far I’ve shot 2 out of the 3 rolls of film I bought, and so I’m looking for something interesting to use the last 12 shots on before I send everything in together to get them processed).

This is a massive photography catchup, going back to october. I didn’t post a lot of photos in general that month, so i figured I would wait another month, and then things just got away from me. And as with anything, the longer one waits to catch up, the harder it gets to actually do the work. So now that February has ended, I’m biting the bullet today and getting everything through the end of the latest month up. pre-spring cleaning, shall we say. As always, this wouldn’t be a roundup of my instagram without coffee and cats. plus subway kvetching, pretty much the entirety of winter this year (of which there wasn’t much), and some more baking experiments.

september was a lot of apples, apple pie, and in a strange irony or coincidence, both madonna (the sacrilegious one) and the pope showing up in town. and other random assorted stuff. In an even stranger turn of events, no cats.

On the fifth anniversary of September 11, I wrote about what I saw and experienced that day, living in New York and seeing the buildings on fire. Not on TV, but actually from the street. And then on TV, because that’s how we share experiences as Americans. I was by no means nearest or most affected by the events, but like every New Yorker who was here on that day, it will always be a part of me. I sometimes find myself stopped in my tracks by a random thing. Yesterday I got weepy several times for “no reason”.

As we move further and further away from the day, some of the continued reminiscences begin to feel maudlin. like rubbernecking. I don’t want to begrudge people who don’t live here, who never lived here, their own feelings, but there are times when I start to get offended by the meme-ification of the events scattered through various feeds, most often seemingly posted by people from far-off locations, and then I try to stop myself, because it was such an overwhelming event and people have their own ways of dealing with things. The New Yorkers post tangible, sometimes terrible, actual memories, because we have those, not that we want them.

Things that made me cry yesterday, in order…

– Completely randomly, based on my OCD podcasting queue habits, when I got on the subway yesterday morning, Episode 4 of Mystery Show started playing. The description in the link is intentionally vague (I had no idea what it would be about when it started), and if you don’t want to be spoiled, skip to the next bullet. The episode involves Starlee trying to solve her own mystery – of a license plate that she saw that read “I Luv 911”. Did it refer to EMS? a radio station? or well, 9/11? A lot of people have theories, and the fact that the conclusion made me cry on yesterday of all days should probably clue you in to the answer.

– Towards the end of the day, Sars posted her fourteenth anniversary essay on the events. And the fact that she never found Don. And that she even considered, yes, contacting Mystery Show to look into it. I commented on the post itself, but the essay, plus the callback to my own morning, left me a little weepy.

– And then, of course, on the heels of renewing my commitment to photography, I dragged my camera to work yesterday with the intention of finding some spot to actually take some good pictures of the tribute in lights. I think I’ve gotten one halfway-decent iPhone photo of the lights up until now. After doing a little online research, I decided to head over to Roosevelt Island. I figured downtown and Brooklyn Bridge Park would be too crowded, and there was just no chance I was going to New Jersey. There was a lot of opportunity to simply stand around and wait, in relative quite and solitude, and it was the right choice. (Side note – the last time I went to Roosevelt Island, the half surrounding the old smallpox hospital was all overgrown brush. It’s now been converted into a quite lovely park and they are still developing a whole “Four Freedoms” center on the island. The only downside is that I couldn’t get a good shot of the Pepsi sign because access to the path to get a good shot was behind a locked gate at this hour).

As with every year, labor day weekend conveniently coincides with my dad’s birthday, so I headed to the berkshires for the weekend. It was an opportunity to bake a gazillion pies with the ridiculous number of apples from our garden (links to instagram), and to visit friends tag sales and gardens. and dogs. everywhere. Other than the first few pics, which were taken at our friends’ tag sale, most were taken at our friends’ Maria and Roberto’s farm/garden/horse paddock/retreat. Their garden puts everyone else’s to shame and these pics don’t even begin to capture it.

I never got around to posting my instagram pics from july, so I’m posting everything from july and august together, now that we’re heading into labor day weekend. Pics include my normal subway related fare, snapshots from my trip to wyoming and mini trip to the botanical garden, the cat (of course), and some culture by way of the most anticipated, awesome show on broadway right now.

As part of my “summer vacation, part II – staycation”, on Wednesday a friend and I went to the New York Botanical Garden for the Frida Kahlo – Art, Garden, Life Exhibit. One might question our sanity in going to a greenhouse exhibit on a humid, 90+ degree day, but it was still quite amazing. and sweaty. The exhibit also has a collection of artwork, but photos were prohibited in that area, and I am nothing if not a rules-follower (unlike some obnoxious hipster art students who were holding everyone up in the tiny room while trying to “secretly” take pics).

One note about the photos – the first half are a bit grainy – I forgot to reset my minimum ISO after the rodeo on Friday night and didn’t realize until halfway through the day.

I know it seems like I travel a lot, but last week I actually started my first vacation of 2015 (provided you don’t count the fact that I took January 2nd off as part of the tail end of last year’s holiday break). I’m still finishing up the two weeks of PTO that I took off by doing some touristy stuff in and around New York (and running errands, always errands), but last week I attended the National Geographic Wyoming Cowboy Country Photography Workshop. It was quite fantastic. I’ve wanted to do one of the NatGeo workshops for a while, particularly after my trip to the Galapagos, and this one fit in with my already planned PTO schedule. The instructors (Jay, Jeff and Frank) were amazing, the entire class group was a blast, and everyone who worked at the CM Ranch was phenomenal. I may have threatened to kidnap the chef on more than one occasion.

And the scenery…

I haven’t spent a lot of time traveling to the “interior” of this country. Living on the coast has made it all too easy to choose to fly east when planning a trip somewhere, but a while back I made a commitment to try to see more of this vast expanse of a nation of ours. So I was really glad to have the opportunity to take this trip for that reason as well. Many years ago, one of my European friends remarked that the biggest difference they saw between Europe and America was just how big and open everything was here – Europe is not only geographically smaller, but developed at a time when, by necessity, everything needed to be close together. You simply don’t understand the vastness of America without seeing it.

Rather than trying to explain everything up front, I’ve embedded descriptions into the slideshow itself. And if you think there are a lot of pictures here, please note that these 115 or so pics have been whittled down from over 3300 that I took over the course of the week. That was the hardest part.

Back to columbus circle, this time for the A/B/C/D train platform. These trains were part of the IND line, and were built later than the IRT 1 train previously discussed, and Columbus Circle is one of the major transfer points between different lines in the system. The platform itself, being part of the IND and newer, doesn’t have mosaics that are as interesting as the IRT platform, but they do have useful, large “59” tiles identifying the station.

In addition, this side of the station, at the mezzanine level, includes a large colorful mosaic by Sol LeWitt titled “Whirls and Twirls”.

This station also highlights one of the unique features of the New York City Subway system – the NYC Subway is (I believe) the only system in the world that runs multiple different train lines along the same tracks. you can see that in this station, which has 4 lines running along 2 tracks. The “color coding” that was instituted when the systems were all merged were to help identify where trains shared “core” tracks – So the B/D are orange, and run south of columbus circle along 6th avenue (and are joined by the F/M trains), and the A/C are blue and run along 8th avenue (where they are joined by the E train below 50th street from queens). But north of columbus circle, the A and D go on the express track, while the B and C run on the same local track for the length of central park west until they split again after 145th street. The color coding gives the impression that they are the “same” train, but if you actually look at a map, you can see that each individually numbered train often starts and terminates in a completely different place, and there are places where different “colors” essentially merge for sections of the map. In places like London and Paris, you may see a local and express train run together, a particular line that has two “branches” where it will split in two potential destinations near its end, but I think NY is the only (or was the first) system that is designed to run multiple lines on multiple tracks. This also makes the system surprisingly flexible (given its age and funding issues) and able to divert trains to different tracks during construction and emergencies.

The only caveat – you cannot run an BMT train car on an IRT track. the IRT trains were narrower than the BMT trains. The tracks are the same width, but the tunnels are not, so BMT trains are too wide to fit in an IRT tunnel.

Station opened: September 10, 1932
Original system: IND
Trains: A/B/C/D
Source/More info: Wikipedia