very simple

Picked up a new wide angle lens yesterday, to supplement my mid-range 35-70 lens and my 70-300 telephoto. today I took it out to play around a little bit. These are actually pretty cropped from the originals, meaning I get a nice amount of range in the images, something I’ve been lacking with my otherwise awesome mid-range. Did some shopping and wandering around the union square/flatiron area in what was completely ridiculous heat and humidity, and then had to trek over to 8th to catch the bus home (thanks to a street fair on 6th).

In anticipation of my trip to the Galapagos in August, I went to B&H today and picked up a new wide angle (11-16) camera lens. Anyone who knows photography knows B&H, as it’s pretty much the biggest photography supply retailer in the country. It’s always an experience to go there, with the controlled chaos, and the tourists, and the crowds, and the fact that it’s in kind of a no-man’s-land on 9th avenue in Manhattan. As a bonus, it’s owned and almost entirely operated by members of the Orthodox/Hasidic Jewish community, so they’re closed on Saturdays and all major and minor jewish holidays, making it incredibly convenient for anyone who has a Monday thru Friday job. But I totally love it and pretty much won’t shop anywhere else for photo equipment (bonus tip – if you actually need to know when some obscure jewish holiday is, the calendar on their website is very handy!).

In any event, one of the upsides of visiting a store in the somewhat dodgy neighborhood near madison square garden is the plethora of older buildings and signs. Nothing glossy to see here!

For the 4th of July, a closeup of the flag that draped my WWII-veteran grandfather’s coffin in 2002.

missed a few days, but trying to catch up. a lot going on in real life.

The twin towers were never considered an aesthetic gem, and it was primarily the means of their absence that caused most people to miss the architecture of their isolating, monolithic frames that sat in a windswept (wind tunnel) plaza that cut off that section of the city from what would otherwise be actual street life. The new one world trade center is, in many ways, an architectural mess as well, a bastardization of what was, at one point, a beautiful form by Daniel Liebskind that was morphed by corporate interests into another generic facade.

Before 9/11, you could always orient yourself in the maze that was “below 34th street” Manhattan by looking up and seeing the towers and knowing they were at the end of the island. I always loved seeing them when driving back from school through New Jersey, because it meant I could know precisely where the vast wasteland of the New Jersey Turnpike ended and the island of Manhattan began. I have a visceral memory of the first trip I took through Jersey (to visit a client in PA) after 9/11, and on the way back just not being able to tell where New York, my home, began, and being so immensely sad at the thought. But I was moved today, sitting in the union square barnes & noble, when i realized that we once again had a signpost to southern manhattan. And it made me extremely grateful that they did build again.

This is a little cheat-sheet I made when I was re-taking photo classes a few years ago. It’s how the various stops work on the camera. It’s helpful for a few reasons. First, my camera has 1/3 stops, so it’s good to remember which are the “real” stops and which are the parts of a stop. Second, it’s good for comparison’s sake. if you take a photo at a particular aperture and shutter speed, and then you move one full stop “up” for the aperture and one full stop “down” on the shutter speed, you’ll actually have the exact same light exposure (but things like depth of field will change). Film speed/ISO also works the same way (and is much more adjustable on a digital camera for obvious reasons). So if you’ve got your aperture wide open at 1.4, and your shutter really slow, and you’re still not getting enough light, you can increase the ISO. Or buy a good flash.

Had to take a little work trip to Atlanta Wednesday and Thursday. No actual photos of Atlanta proper, given that I was in windowless conference rooms in a suburban office park, but this should give you a sense of the excitement of my trip.

This photo was actually taken on Tuesday night. It was me setting my alarm clock for 3:30am so that I could catch a car to the airport for my 7am flight. Yes, I hit snooze when it went off.

My hotel room at the end of the day. The hotel had clearly been recently renovated, and they did a pretty nice job. It was an all-suite Hyatt, and I had a living room and a bedroom (bigger than many NYC apartments!). Too bad I didn’t get to really enjoy it with just crashing for one night.

And finally, this was what the jetway looked like about 5 minutes before we were supposed to board the plane to head back to New York. Not promising. The plane actually showed up a few minutes later. The most fun part (meaning not fun) was that it was a completely full flight, so even though I had packed a completely compliant carry-on, by the time my group got called for boarding, it had to be gate-checked together with the bags of a bunch of other passengers. And unlike every other time I’ve ever had to gate-check a bag, they actually sent them all to baggage claim, where they were the very last bags off the plane. Annoying.

Our town in the Berkshires is one of the smallest and, as a consequence, our memorial day parade is quite small. There’s the veterans (including my dad), the village improvement society, the boy scouts and the 4H club. Plus lots of random townspeople. The 4H club is the only one that has its act together enough to have a float. Everyone’s welcome to march, but I feel I’m doing my part by actually watching the thing. Which lasts approximately 20 minutes, including speeches.

There’s not a lot of actual color in my parents’ garden yet, but things have started to bloom. Including the apple trees. We haven’t had apples in a few years because there seems to be an unpleasantly timed frost every year that kills everything off, but this year…no frost.

Baby apples:

bonus purple flower:

My friend Scott, from up in the Berkshires, has run a local favorite establishment for many, many years. Recently though, he closed caffe Pomo d’Oro in west Stockbridge in order to buy, restore and reopen the Monterey General Store. MGS is the oldest general store in the United States and, except for the months it was closed between when it shut down and when Scott bought it with the intent of reopening it, was open continuously for over 200 years.

…and bonus. Scott’s words when he saw me in the doorway of the kitchen with my camera were something along the lines of “I better not end up on that blog of yours!”