very simple

In my now ever-present availability of free time that I’m trying to enjoy while staving off panic attacks about the fact that I don’t have a new job yet I decided to sign up for a photography class. I had been thinking about it for a while, and taking a months-old recommendation from glark, I signed up for a class at photo manhattan. Classes were pretty reasonably priced (certainly as compared to the apparently self-indulgent crap that goes on at the ICP), and I started last week. While I’ve taken film photography classes in high school and college, I really remember very little, and never learned quite a bit of stuff having to do with my digital SLR that I bought 2 years ago. Sure, those pictures of India were pretty, but I took at least 4 times as many pictures as the ones that are actually posted, and the other 3/4 were crap. So I’m taking the Intro to Photography class, and the first class last week was pretty basic. and very helpful. In the interest of keeping content on this blog, I’m going to post my homework here as I go along. The first assignment was purely technical – it was about understanding how light gets into your camera and how it’s read.

1. Find a completely monotone surface (like a brick wall). Take a picture with lightmeter centered, and keeping aperture constant, change only the shutter speed to stop up 2 full stops and stop down 2 full stops.

2. From inside, take a picture that is half window and half wall with the lightmeter centered.

3. Early evening or overcast day. Stand on a busy streetcorner. Take 4 photos at the following speeds: 1/15, 1/8, 1/4 and 1/2. Lightmeter should remain centered for all photos, so will need to compensate by adjusting aperture settings.

this year, I decided to take a trip to governors island for the fourth of july. It was really just because it was a beautiful day, I had been dying to see what they had done since last year, and all the rain has prevented me from a really good bike ride for almost a month (speaking of which, I have to re-break-in certain parts of my body, again! which sucks). Anyhoo, for future reference, I would most vociferously advise against picking a route to the ferry that involves going anywhere near battery park on the fourth of july. between the concert they were setting up (and the requisite temporary gates) and the fact that this was the first day in almost 9 years that the crown on the statue of liberty was open, it was a bit of a madhouse.

But, I did do my part as an ugly jingoistic american on this independence day by yelling indiscriminately at tourists to get out of my way.

The island itself was a pleasure – not crowded at all, lovely to ride around, and the entire thing is open this year (unlike last year when the back “half” was closed off) – it’s now got a nice picnic area as well as a freshly paved bike route. Lovely.

In addition to the video I put together last night, I did also take some actual pictures during the stops on our ride. I included a few of these at the tail end of the video, but, due to the conversion process, the quality is not so good. Here they are in all of there originalness.

I’m getting better. It has only taken me one month to sort through my photos and get them posted on the site. Pictures from my diving trip to Roatan are now available for viewing. In addition, I shot some underwater video on my camera, which I’m including here. The first part is just your general diving experience, getting to sound like darth vader. The remainder is from the dolphin dive that I had the opportunity to do. which was pretty awesome.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos from this trip are now below.

Yes, even I’m amazed at how long it took me to actually get these things up. But I decided that it needed to get done before I went on another trip and only added to the photographic backlog. I’ve finally posted photos from my various fall cycling adventures. There aren’t that many, because I was busy holding onto the handlebars and trying not to fall into traffic (again), but if you’re looking for proof that (a) I’m willing to wear ridiculously unflattering clothing and (b) I have an almost uncanny ability to forget to reapply sunscreen, it’s all there.

One week until Honduras!

Today I rode the 55 mile route of the NYC Century Bike Tour sponsored by Transportation Alternatives. Aside from the fact that I now look like a giant lobster (albeit one with bike short and bike glove lines) because I sweat off my sunscreen by about 8am, it was a great day. I can’t feel my legs, but it was still great.

Here’s the route I took. It was so long that google maps made me break it up into two lines, but you’ll see that when added up, my total ride was about 61 and a half miles. Not bad if I do say so myself…

View Larger Map

And now I’m going to crawl under my covers and hope that this ridiculous sunburn chill goes away at some point. As it is, I’m going to have to wear long sleeves to work tomorrow, to hide the combination of t-shirt and bike glove tan (making it look like I’m wearing giant red (or, really, purple) arm warmers). I always wear pants, so hiding my legs isn’t too much of a problem…although I imagine it’s going to hurt like a mofo.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos can now be found directly below.

Did anyone else read this story when they were a kid? I always loved it, probably in part because it was based on a real lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge.

They’re clearly rebuilding the park up in that neck of the woods, but last night I made it all the way up there, and was surprised at how easy it was to get up close to the lighthouse (and how tiny it was).

Photos that I took on Tuesday while biking from the upper west side to battery park

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos now appear directly below instead of in a separate album.

This weekend was one of the most beautiful weekends in recent history. Warm, not humid, and absolutely begging people to be outside. On Saturday, I spent the day with my friends and their 9-month old, and we went wandering around Central Park for a good portion of the afternoon…

And people wonder why I always want to hang out in the city. For all I complain, nothing beats this sort of energy.

In an effort to reduce duplication on this site, as well as bring everything “under” the wordpress architecture rather than having pages that sit “outside” the blog, I’m revamping things. The biggest changes will be the integration of photo albums into blog entries using a program called slimbox. One album/entry is done, from Toronto in 2003, and it can be viewed here.

I just got tired of having to manually edit each and every photo page every time I decided to change something about the site. While I had reduced that work a few years ago through implementation of style sheets, there always seemed to be “something” that was hard coded into the html that would need to get changed every time I decided to do a redesign. This new way will allow me to simply change wordpress themes and all of the pages will follow along.

If you encounter any problems with the new pages, or broken links, please let me know! And this is going to take a while.