very simple

I took a lengthy walk along the hudson river greenway with my camera today, and more pictures are forthcoming, but I wanted to highlight this little series of a mother goose (or father goose, who really knows?) either trying to scare away the pedestrians or get her gosling’s attention, or both. The gosling, however, couldn’t care less.

Just putting up a few additional pics from my most recent weekend in the berkshires. The trees weren’t blooming much yet, but it was still quite lovely taking a walk around Ashley Falls.

Once in a very blue moon, someone approaches me about buying a print of one of my photos. I end up having to deal with this manually, given that I don’t upload hi-res images here for copy-protection reasons, but I recently saw that blurb was testing out fotomoto, and I thought I’d give it a try. I had two big concerns – first, whether fotomoto would be able to take into account the slimbox plugin that I use to create the lightboxed albums on some of my entries, and second, whether it accounts for the fact that I upload low-res copyright bugged images to my site (no one would want to buy those!). It handles both issues. In particular for the latter, if you were to attempt to purchase one of my photos, I would get a notice and then have to upload a ‘clean’ hi-res image directly to fotomoto for the print to be made. If I failed to do so within a limited amount of time, the sale wouldn’t go through.

I’ve tried to keep the pricing reasonable, while not undervaluing my work (such as it is). I’m still working out the kinks on how the ‘buy prints’ link actually looks, because it’s defaulting to something kinda ugly in the lightbox, but it’s functional.

In any event, this isn’t an attempt to push sales or anything, it’s just to address an issue that has come up a handful of times over the many years that I’ve been posting photos.

Since it’s gorgeous out, it was starting to get a little warm and stuffy in my apartment. So I opened the living room window (with screens of course). Sadie hasn’t moved since (other than to shift her position in between sitting up and crouching).

For years, I’ve been going up to the Berkshires, and one of my favorite towns is Great Barrington. It’s a combination of quirky-cute and quite practical (unlike, say, Stockbridge, which has quirky cute down pat but after 20 minutes of wandering around, you realize that you can only buy country kitsch, or Pittsfield, which, in its development as an industrial company town has plenty of practicality but just looks ragged). And then I realized that I had never taken my camera over to Railroad Street to take pictures. So here you go.

As I may have mentioned before, my brother is getting a (second) master’s degree, this time in international development (his first is in education), at the London School of Economics. Because he’s such a slacker, he obviously couldn’t make it home for Passover. But that didn’t stop us from trying to include him in the festivities, even if he couldn’t actually partake in the wondrous density of my annual matzo ball failure.

In the Berkshires this weekend for Passover, and thought that this shot of my dad was an example of pretty much the quintessential Berkshires life. Coffee, paper, dog, big leather chair. And flannel. Always flannel.

Plus, a bonus shot of Ollie. As cute as ever.

I was so struck by the sky tonight that I had to stop and take a picture. And then blog about it on the bus because I didn’t want to wait til I got home.

Taken at 125th and Lenox.

The knife man is one of those ‘only in New York’ (or perhaps even ‘only on the upper west side’) things that my friends who grew up in the city talk about. This guy drives around the neighborhood, waiting for people to bring downstairs knives, scissors, or anything else with a blade that needs sharpening, and then he sharpens them in his ever-more-antiquated truck. A service that only works in a community stacked with close neighbors who don’t drive.

In November, I went over to London to visit my brother (who is attending the London School of Economics), and my trip was documented by my posting a handful of photos while I was over there. And then the rest of my photos have been sitting on my computer for the last 4 months waiting for me to sit down for an hour and given them a good pass-through. I took hundreds, but here are the 40 or so that I thought were worth posting. Full images and descriptions when you click on the thumbnail.