It's not like I have any shortage of images to fit a blue theme, but as I searched through the images, this one stuck out -- just as it did when I first saw it in the West Village.
And no, I never did get to see Nicole Kidman's bare behind on Broadway, even though that was back when I loved going to plays and musicals with movie stars in them.
This was one of my longtime favorite images from my earliest days playing around with a camera. It's just one of those shots where you're looking at one thing -- the sunset over the water -- and it's an OK photo. But then you get that one element that makes it a better photo -- in this case, the fisherman silhouetted in the sunset.
After Casey and I passed through Turret Arch at the start of our day at Arches, I turned and saw this older gentleman had followed us up the path and I took a photo to use him for perspective on the size of the arch. Then I took this one, but after seeing it along with the previous one, I decided to try this in black and white and that's when this title hit me.
Having read Abbey's The Journey Home and Desert Solitaire before, during and after the visit, I felt more immersed in the words than I have for just about anything else I've ever read. And because of that, this photo not only takes me back to that morning two weeks ago today, but also to Abbey's country, to his time in the Utah desert.
2011 update: In the end, I felt that this was my favorite photo of 2010. It may not have been my best, but it wasn't far off.
So often, I find myself walking to the train station in the late afternoon or evening just as the sky is putting on a hell of a light show.
Nevada City, Montana is a collection of buildings, old equipment and other various gold-rush ephemera laid out on a slightly sloping field in the southwestern part of the state. My college roommate and I walked among its old buildings and rusting farm equipment on a drizzly spring day nearly four years ago.
"Pennsylvania" and "resorts" don't often go together in a word association game, but at Bedford Springs in the rolling countryside between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, the natural mineral springs and quiet surroundings have been a draw for centuries, even in winter.
I've just been going through the motions with this blog the last few weeks. Been busy, what with the weather improving and the out-of-doors frequency increasing, and I merely would post a bunch of daily photos in a batch to get them up.
That's probably not going to change in the next 10 days. We begin a long-awaited and well-earned vacation on Friday, and though I'll have my laptop with me to upload photos each night, I'm not sure how much posting I'll do. Depends on the weather, the hotels' internet connection, my mood.
But I'm looking forward to getting back to Maine, back among the trees, the coastline, the lighthouses.
It'll be nice to get away.
I take a lot of pictures of signs, but this one I particularly like. It immediately takes me back there -- a warm, sunny day in small-town northeast Colorado May, the soft clouds dotting a blue sky. The refreshing thought of a soda to quench my thirst. Remove the cars, put it in sepia, and it could be an ad from the 50s.
The Ballpark at St. George sits right next to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, providing sweeping views of Upper New York Bay on a summer afternoon. On a clear day, the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan stand out (though, sadly, that view is not as spectacular as it once was.
During day games in particular, the traffic on the water provides a moving backdrop to the game -- as with this container ship just beyond the right-center field wall.
When shooting minor league baseball games at night, I tend to get most of my shots during the first few innings, when the late light of a summer day still allows for fast shutter speeds. But on this one night a few years ago, I decided to slow down the shutter speed as night fell and experiment with some blurred-motion action shots. This one of Hagerstown Suns third baseman Leivi Ventura was one of the best, along with one of Lakewood BlueClaws third baseman Welinson Baez.
I'm a sucker for nostalgia. After buying a box of recent-issue baseball cards on a trip to Target last week, I allowed myself to browse eBay and led myself into an impulse buy. For pretty much the same price it would have cost back in their respective years, I purchased boxes of Topps cards from 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990.
I didn't really need that many (540 cards per box), but I've amused myself quite often as I've slowly opened the packs to see the cardboard-mounted images of long-forgotten players. There have been rookie cards of current managers, cards of coaches and former players I never remembered during their active years and images of the hilarious styles of the late 80s -- uniforms, mustaches, hairdos and, with surprising frequency, large, nerd-worthy glasses.
As I walked to work last night and spotted the red-and-green top of the Empire State Building, it occurred to me that it was the first night I'd seen the city's tallest spire bathed in the colors of the season. And that's when I remembered why it was still red and green -- it was Twelfth Night. A few houses in our neighborhood have also kept their holiday lights on through today (I unplugged ours on Sunday), but next year, I think, I'll leave them lit through the sixth.
Having already decided to use an image of my train ticket for yesterday's photo, I saved my shot of the holiday-adorned ESB for Epiphany itself. That proved to be a fortuitous decision. The light rain gave the streets a reflective sheen, yet the skies were clear enough for a good look at the tower 18 blocks and a couple of avenues away.
On a hot August afternoon, I slumped down in a seat on the PATH train at the Hoboken station, awaiting the ride into New York for work. Drained, I was so exhausted I didn't bother pulling out my magazine to read. After taking a gulp of water, I looked up to see this view in front of me and was glad I had my point-and-shoot with me.
Forgive me for being morbid during this season of cheer, but in looking for an image of three of anything, this one stuck with me. Plus, I'm excited to have hundreds of new photos uploaded now that I've gone through so many images recovered from my crashed hard drive.
I took these one afternoon when my wife and I explored the tiny Edgewater Cemetery behind our apartment. Despite talk of regular return visits and a hope of researching the history of some of the names, I never did either. I can't even tell you the name on the grave marker on the right -- I'm only assuming he or she is part of the Darling clan -- that's Daniel on the left and James in the middle. (Though there are only two Darlings listed at FindAGrave.com, I'm not sure the inscription on this third stone is legible even in person.)
I guess for a holiday theme, you could think of them as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And keep him company.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
And live by the side of the sea.
I'll polish his lamp by the light of day
So ships at night can find their way.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper
Won't that be okay!
We'll take walks along the moonlight bay
Maybe find a treasure too.
I'd love living in a lighthouse,
HOW 'BOUT YOU?
The dream of living in a lighthouse baby, every single day.
The dream of living in a lighthouse,
the white one by the bay.
So if you want to make my dreams come true,
You'll be a lighthouse keeper too.
We could live in a lighthouse
The white one by the bay, hey hey.
Won't that be okay.
Yada tada ta ta ta.
"I Wanna Marry a Lighthouse Keeper," by Erika Eigen
So maybe the shining sun got to me on a bright day on Cape Elizabeth. The following, though, isn't mine ...
I must've shot this lighthouse more than any other, with every camera I've ever owned, beginning with my first -- a Kodak disk point-and-shoot. It may be 500 miles from where I grew up, but I have to have photographed it more than Twin Lights or Sandy Hook, only minutes from home. But those, I'd visit on a whim, not always with a camera, and I always knew I could go back at any time to shoot them. At Pemaquid, I always start from behind the light, walking from the parking lot toward the tower, then make my way down to the rocks and around the point, covering it from every angle. It's a tradition, a ritual, one I expect to continue on future visits.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
-- A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind"
From the cold gray-brown Northeast, I flew to Florida for a Spring Training spring break and wasted no time enjoying the warm sunshine. From the plane to the car to the ballpark -- no dragging my feet. Beneath a blue sky and upon a green field, a touch of summer under the Florida sun. When I took this shot, I did so because of the crystal-clear afternoon, the strong light on the buildings and tree, the blue sky, the illumination of the window and the colors coming through the transparent lettering in the name. The post in the center of the frame was an imperfection I'd have to live with. I didn't look at this photo as anything outstanding; it was just a moment of an afternoon.
And then I noticed the jagged top of the photo, the roof of the corner entry to the restaurant, and the M.C. Escher-like effect it has on the scene, particularly the building on the left, and I love it a little more.
Every spring, everyone talks about the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., but Newark's Branch Brook Park actually has more of them. Or so I'm told. They're gorgeous enough, but we didn't actually get to all of them on this day, so maybe there was a nicer setting. But I don't know if any location can compare to Washington's Tidal Basin. Still, Newark's park is pretty nice, and on the trees that didn't hold their white blossoms, they carpeted the ground like an early spring snowfall.
