Friday night Pirates games at PNC Park in Pittsburgh in summer feature a postgame fireworks/concert combination. The act on this August night was Collective Soul, their few known songs -- "hits," if you must -- interspersed with pyrotechnics so that towards the end of the set, the spotlights reflected off the smoke for a true rock-n-roll effect.
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.
Yeah, so we're having a little weather here today. I took these photos this afternoon, when my wife and I went out to shovel the 5-6 inches we had. I usually prefer to wait until the snow stops falling, but because that's projected to be tomorrow morning -- giving us pretty much 24 hours' worth of snowfall -- I figured our muscles and backs would be better off tomorrow if we tackled some of it today. In the five hours since then, we've had about another 4-5 inches. And there's more to come.
New York City has no shortage of fabulous neon signs, so a walk around the city at night can take longer than you expected if you're carrying a camera.
I've always been a bigger fan of multi-colored lights than white ones, particularly for photographs, so I changed this one up by going black and white.
I wanted to get a shot of the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue and 22nd St. as it was in Woody Allen's intro in Manhattan (at the 30-second mark) before it changes hands.
A view from the High Line looking west over the end of 14th St., the Hudson and New Jersey.
Heading home, I plotted two waypoints to check two more lighthouses off my list: Maine's Cape Neddick, also known as Nubble, and Portsmouth Harbor in New Hampshire. Portsmouth's is located at the harbor entrance, on land that's now part of the Coast Guard station and also an historic fort, Fort Constitution. This was the last photo I took at the fort and the last photo I took on vacation. With the clouds giving the sky some texture, I went with the black-and-white look.
I love taking pictures in the car mirror. This one came as I was waiting to pick up Casey at the train station.
Yet another new route to work from the PATH -- Washington St. Along the way, Greenwich Village becomes the Meatpacking District, and only the West Side Highway is west of it. This little cobblestoned lane leads west into the highway, the Hudson and the setting sun of late afternoon.
The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures building and the Great Falls in Paterson are at the heart of America's manufacturing history. The site -- finally -- is nearing national park status, an overdue designation. Paterson bears striking similarity to Lowell, Mass., which has long had national park status.
The black and white choice gives it a much more rugged, historical feel, considering this site's place in history.
I first looked over the railing into the oblong stairwell at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and took a photo of the concentric shapes descending to the koi pond. A moment later, a man in a red T-shirt appeared from beneath one of the levels, and I had an even better photo. Then I simply changed everything but the visitor to black and white for a more arty effect -- as befits the MCA.
It's a popular shot.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed this lock attached to a lone pole nestled among some border shrubbery at a corner where driveway meets sidewalk. There's no corresponding pole opposite this one, no gate, no chain. Whatever this lock was once used for, it is no longer needed.
All of you keepers
and wanna be sleepers
Wake up there's a message so
clear
I saw the elephant and I looked him in the eye
-- "Elephant's Memory," Martin Sexton
As winter arrived in force this week, I drove up the road to Paterson to see the Great Falls in suspended animation. As I had hoped, snow and ice clung to the rocks as the still free-flowing sections of the Passaic River cascaded over the cliff. The bright afternoon sunshine prevented exposures that were too long (even with a neutral-density filter allowing for a few more hundredths of a second to be added on), but I managed to blur the falls enough to satisfy me, given the conditions.
It was a cold, frigid day, and so I toyed with the idea of taking a 20-minute ride east, back to Edgewater, where we used to live, to see if the Hudson River had any chunks of ice floating on it. Several years ago, when I could see the river from our apartment, sizeable icebergs littered the waterway between New Jersey and Manhattan. But thinking (correctly) that it hadn't been cold enough for enough days, I scrapped the idea. Had I taken the drive, however, I would've arrived on River Road within minutes of the US Airways jet's emergency landing.
No special effects (as in, the click of a button in Picasa) here -- this is a full-color photo of trees in Yellowstone National Park on an overcast morning. The gray sky and muted backlight render the trees black. It's similar to one of my favorite photos, taken at Oregon's Crater Lake National Park, that for the moment still only lives on film -- yet another reminder that I've got to get organized and start plugging through some of those to get them online.
(I could basically chronicle our trip to Chicago last weekend in each of my three blogs -- my baseball blog, because we went to a Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley; my general blog, because that's where I tend to record everyday stuff; and this one, because my original plan with this was to post photos with some frequency and tell the stories behind them and whatnot. As I was browsing through them in my Flickr account, I decided to explain this one, then came up with the idea to post the photo and account here. Seems like a good idea to do with other pics from the trip, so we'll see how well I stick to that plan.)
[Photo by the wife.]
So we wake up slowly on Saturday morning after sleeping in and miss the free "breakfast" (Lender's bagels, yogurt and boxed cereal) offered by the Hampton Inn Downtown. "No problem," we say. "We'll just go straight to Lou Malnati's for deep dish on an empty stomach." (Which was a perfect plan, by the way.)
It's a warm day -- not terribly humid, like Sunday would be -- and when we sit down, we're given small glasses of water, as one usually is upon being seated at a restaurant. The waitress takes our order, and while Casey has an iced tea, I say I'm fine with the water for now. Yet when she returns with Casey's tea -- in a huge glass like this one -- she also brings me this water.
Casey and I just stare at each other, bewildered. My plan (and I stuck to it, too) was to order a beer upon the arrival of our pizza. Throughout the course of our lunch, I drank the beer and thwarted the bus boys' attempts to refill my tiny water glass, pointing each time (I think three different bus boys came by) to the bucket of water I had that hadn't been touched.
By the end of the pizza, I'd emptied my pint as well as the small water glass. Just before leaving, I wanted one last sip. It was a prolonged sip, and here it is.
