"Waiting, Clifton Station," February 2008

Waiting, Clifton Station

Winter really hit us last week. We'd had a few snowfalls here and there, two or three days where I had to get out the shovel and clear the sidewalks, but our first storm of the season came on Friday. Four or five inches covered the ground by the time we left for work at 8 a.m. and we walked down the middle of our street because the inch or two that had fallen since the plow came through made it easier to walk than trudging along the untouched sidewalks. Trains were running a little behind schedule, but we settled into a seat and watched the blanketed landscape as we passed through the towns and crossed the Meadowlands. On the bridge over the marshes, the clouds obscured everything to the north, so that looking out over the water we saw nothing beyond a few hundred feet -- no sports complex, no Harmon Meadow office complex and condo tower, no highways. It could have been the open ocean out there in the mist.

"Postgame exodus," South Bend, October 2006

Postgame exodus

The quad becomes quite busy after the end of the game.

"Turnstiles, Hinchcliffe Stadium," Paterson

Overgrowth at Hinchcliffe

At one time, fans passed through these lanes on their way into Hinchcliffe Stadium. The entrances are now gated, the walls covered in graffiti, the concrete steps on which the bleachers rest cracked with holes and gullies through which trees have been growing for years. It's another crumbling relic of Paterson, hard by the Great Falls, just like the abandoned factories and mills that line the Passaic River of this once-pivotal industrial city.

"Cherry blossom day, Newark," April 2005

Cherry blossom day, Newark, originally uploaded by DC Products.

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.

"Starbursts, Rockefeller Center," December 2006

Rockefeller Center starbursts

I had to put up something new for the holiday, and this is one of my favorites of a recent holiday photo excursion around Manhattan. Dozens of images are in my Christmas set on Flickr.

Happy merry.

"Central Park colors," October 2006

Central Park Colors No. 5, originally uploaded by DC Products.

I don't care if it's cliche, overdone, banal or played out -- I'll always set aside a day or two in the fall to head out on a photo expedition to let nature do what I might otherwise do in Photoshop.

In this case, it was an afternoon stroll through Central Park before work. It was about a week -- maybe more -- too early for the peak color in the middle of Manhattan, but I found a few hot spots. I'm planning to drive west through northern New Jersey tomorrow to see what remains, though I fear that the gusting winds on Sunday may have ripped the peak color off the trees. We shall see.

It's seemed like a down year for the autumn leaves this year. The trees seemed to change late and not as uniformily as in past years. But a year ago, I did venture out into the New Jersey Highlands during the first week of November and came away with some decent shots, so hopefully more is in store this year.

"I-90 rainbow, Montana," May 2006

"I-90 rainbow, Montana," May 2006
Speeding along I-90 in southern Montana a few weeks ago, we passed through a late-day storm and witnessed the beautiful spectacle of the dark clouds to the east and the setting sun in a clear sky to the west. It created the rainbow and illuminated the rangelands and windmills (those three white specks to the left of center, receding toward the hills in the distance), not to mention cast a shadow of our car on the side of the road. Taken from a moving -- 80 mph -- Seabring convertible, eastbound in Interstate 90, heading for Billings. I figured with the shadow of the car and because it was taken from the car, it fit nicely the automotive theme.

Light on leaves No. 4, January 2006

I find it hard to sit still this week. With a new camera, I don't want to watch TV. I don't want to go to work. So the camera comes with me, and when I'm finished with lunch and have half an hour before my allotted 60 minutes are up (not that my job is a strict nine-to-fiver; it's more of a 10-until-everything's-done, so a 90-minute lunch can be made up on the back end of the day) then I'm going to stop off at a park around the corner from the office before I return.

The beauty of a digital camera -- other than the instant gratification that it provides -- is that I can be less discerning in what I shoot. I don't have to conserve frames on a roll of film; I don't have to fret over a bad shot. I can look for little things like the way the light hits a leaf on the ground and see how it looks through the viewfinder -- and I can see how it looks after taking a picture, knowing that a simple press of a button (or two) will reopen those bytes of memory should the result not be up to par.

With this renewed passion for photography, I now wonder how best to utilize the various accounts I have set up on Flickr, Yahoo!, Snapfish and others, not to mention this blog. For now, I think the answer is this: Flickr is the main album, Snapfish is the site from which I'll order prints and this one is where I'll choose one or two images from each outing to display, and where I'll allow myself to write at some length about this hobby.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Gates series

Gates reflection, Central Park, February 2005


Atop Great Hill, Central Park, February 2005


Near the Great Lawn, Central Park, February 2005

If there's one thing that meant "orange" this winter in New York, it was Christo's The Gates. I took close to 200 photographs in four different trips to Central Park during the installations three-week run. I went into the city on two consecutive mid-week off-days and treked from Columbus Circle in the southwest corner (at 59th St.) of the park up to around 100th St. and then east, over to Central Park East and down to the 80s. My plans were more ambitious than I'd expected, and I didn't get to explore the northern edge of the park, which now remains the last great section I've yet to explore.

"Former ALCOA Factory," Edgewater, New Jersey, March 2005

There are three overriding categories of photographs that people seem to consider ghostly: blurry people in motion, long exposures in which a subject (or the photographer) moves into the shot and pauses before moving away, and cemeteries. There were also at least three images of jellyfish in the first 400 listed that I looked through as I endured a slow day at work yesterday.

While I was flipping through them, one-by-one, using the link viewer, iTunes shuffling in my ears, this page came up just as "Clocks" by Coldplay began and I felt the song — particularly the intro — fit the image perfectly.

So when I got home -- at 2 a.m. -- I set up the tripod on the balcony and shot a few 4-second exposures of the abandoned ALCOA factory adjacent to the cemetery next door. It's the factory moreso than the tombstones that I wanted to capture.