very simple

Another classic – the clock in the middle of grand central station.

That’s right – it only took three days, and I’m already resorting to cat photos.

I actually took this last night as I was wandering around on my last day off for the holidays. Yet another really cool piece of street furniture that often gets overlooked in favor of the flatiron building across the street.

While my SLR will forever remain my primary camera, I’m going to spend some time experimenting with more mobile options – in particular because I’ll be more likely to remember to take pictures if I don’t wed myself to the “fancy” camera over my iPhone 5. More mobile tools also means not having to wait until I get to my home computer to edit/upload. This was taken with my iPhone, uploaded to Dropbox to share with my iPad, then edited on the iPad with snapseed (drama filter and frame) and iWatermark (copyright bug). Now posting to my blog with the WordPress app.

My traditional weekender breakfast, consisting of an espresso and a bottle of pellegrino. And squatting at my favorite non-chain local cafe/coffee shop/wine bar for a few hours.

I’ve been periodically contemplating starting a new 365 project, despite the fact that I’ve failed to complete any of the group projects that I’ve participated in in the past. Maybe a self-directed one will work better. At the very least, I’ll only be disappointing myself if I fail (again).

In the spirit of getting things started with tomorrow as day 1, here’s a preview. Took myself to PJ Clarke’s for New Year’s Eve lunch (because I’m off of work). They have very fancy ketchup here.

I realized the other day that I had a few albums of photos that I had never gotten around to uploading. Given the delay, and the interest in these photos largely to myself and no one else, I went through and plucked out just my favorites. Most are from the country, but they should all be fairly self explanatory. Really, I just like them because I think they’re pretty.

Just a few additional pics from my trip to Plymouth for Thanksgiving (I’ve already featured the rock earlier). Featuring Plymouth bay, the fake Mayflower, and thanksgiving kitsch as only the town where the pilgrims landed can do.

I’m sitting at the providence train station waiting for my train back to New York, after spending the thanksgiving holiday with my family in Plymouth. Lovely time, good food, and all the rest, but we couldn’t very well spend thanksgiving in Plymouth without going to see Plymouth Rock, now could we?

Slowly making my way through those pictures from labor day weekend. While I was up for the week, I saw in the local paper that it was time for the annual Columbia County Fair in Chatham. I distinctly remember going to this thing as a kid when my parents would drag us up to stay with friends, and thought it would be a good photo opportunity.

Let’s just say that it was a lot…smaller than I remembered from when I was 10 or 12. But the 4-H club is still going strong, and there were lots of farm animals, which always make for a good subject. And the most depressing midway ever. Seriously, I remember this being MUCH bigger when I was a kid.

A few months ago, I integrated a photo-selling service onto the site. Well, this morning, I got an email telling me that they were not only doubling and tiering their pricing structure, but that it was going to happen in less than 2 weeks, AND that we would both be forced to pre-pay for the prints before getting paid ourselves and that we would have to use PayPal or some service called stripe that I had never heard of. Oh, and the announcement email didn’t even have all the detail. It’s ‘coming soon’. Presumably some time between now and the change on October 10!

I liked fotomoto precisely because it didn’t require PayPal, which I avoid at all costs if it can be helped (sometimes it can’t, but I continue to use an “unverified” account in these circumstances because I will never, ever, give them access to my bank account information, so getting paid from PayPal would obviously turn into a giant headache).

I don’t have a problem, philosophically, with price increases or tiered pricing by themselves, but the short window is obviously a big issue, particularly for more active users who have done things like publish their price lists. It’s the timeframe (I’ll barely have enough time to get the code off my site this weekend before the deadline), and the forced use of a super-problematic service like PayPal that are forcing my hand.