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 a leisurely, slow morning, we headed out with Casey's dad and stepmom to the step-grandparents' house and on an errand before a trip to Bedford Springs, a hotel and resort in the Pennsylvania countryside. It's a sprawling resort dating back to the 1800s, with the lobby adorned with various artifacts, photos and guest ledgers and records books from past centuries. After lunch, we walked through the lobbies and sitting rooms and ducked into the indoor pool, which was active on a cold, foggy, winter day. It's an interesting scene -- I can't say I've ever been swimming with a Christmas tree on display near the pool.
This is Christmas in Johnstown, 2009: a light freezing rain pelts the windows and forming a crisp coating over the snow in the yard. Luckily, we're comfortable and warm inside, with no place to go all day.
Happy Christmas to all!
A branch fights against the force of the falls -- as minor as they are -- on the North Branch of the Raritan River on the Natirar estate in Somerset County, New Jersey.
I was hoping to spend one of my days off this week on another drive through northern New Jersey's rural highlands to take in the foliage, but the weather didn't cooperate. But I didn't want to miss the peak days of my favorite tree in the yard, so I opened the window next to it and shot from the dining room -- staying dry the whole time.
Not the prettiest of days in Manhattan, but the cold, wet weather meant no line at Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. And then it provided this dual image.
Flickr (or Blogger, not sure which is responsible) is ticking me off. The "blog this" link isn't working, and the "Try Again" button does nothing. It's so much easier to post when technology doesn't crap out on you.
Anyway, my previous (slightly) longer post has been whittled down to this:
The Harmon Cove Towers reflect the setting sun from across the Meadowlands, and the Hackensack River reflects the condo/office complex as I zip by on the train on my way to work.
Taking a rented rowboat out for a spin in Central Park.
There are plenty of Chelsea Market photos I've taken in the three years I've worked in the building, but there will always be more. Tonight, as I headed to the Manhattan Fruit Exchange, I snapped a couple of shots, including this curious fellow at the well.
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.
Harry has a ritual every night, just as we do. When we head up to brush our teeth -- and nine days out of 10, he knows exactly when that is -- he bolts up the stairs and heads straight for the bathroom. Once there, he hops up onto the sink and begins meowing until we turn on the water for him. And he's not satisfied until we pour some water from the cup, letting him lap up the stream as a cap to his night. He's as regular with this stunt as we are, meaning we have to incorporate it into our morning routine as well as our evening one.
The title and music of this Howie Day song were in my head for this shot, taken at High Point State Park in Sussex County. It's a great driving song that goes best on a warm enough afternoon to have the windows down and the sunroof open. While the lyrics take a more serious tone, I tend to ignore that underlying meaning. It has to be late afternoon, when the light is low and tinted gold or orange. The location can vary -- in the rolling hills, along a beach road, across a flat and straight stretch of highway in the plains. And though I stopped the car and made my way to the shore of this lake, the cool October breeze and mid-autumn light still put this scene into "perfect time of day" territory.
Let your colors collide
The time is so right
I keep running behind
But I know your meaning
You love to fall
The perfect time of day
Yeah, this is an oft-reproduced image of Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous private residence, the Kaufman house in the western Pennsylvania woods, Fallingwater. But this one's mine, and I prefer it as a means of depicting "The Great Outdoors" because it touches upon what Wright tried to accomplish with his projects when he fused man-made structures with nature. He tried to make the houses part of the landscape rather than just building on the landscape.
It's great that Fallingwater and a few other Wright projects I've visited -- Taliesin West and Kentuck Knob, which is privately owned but open to the public -- are now accessible, but damn if I wouldn't love to live there myself.
Is this not iconic or what? The Golden Gate Bridge belongs in the mist.
On a brutally hot day, the Crown Fountain brought relief. Not for us, of course, because I wasn't aware of the opportunity to soak myself, so I was in shorts and a shirt and socks and sneakers. No bathing suit or flip-flops for me. So I got close enough for the mist off the water to feel good and trained my camera on the scores of families taking full advantage of the cascading -- and spouting -- water coming from the two towers at either end of the plaza.
The public refreshment is an updated -- and architectually noteworthy -- take on the mid-century summer cool-down ritual based around the fire hydrant on the block. The kids come out to play together, to have good, wholesome summer fun in the middle of the city, their parents happy to let them run around and burn off energy, the children thrilled to cool off on a blistering afternoon. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that I wasn't better prepared, and I even contemplated various scenarios in my mind in which we could go back to the hotel, change, enjoy the fountain and still knock off the rest of our agenda that afternoon. But we'd gotten too late a start and the Garfield Park Conservatory was only open so late, so it didn't happen. Next time, though.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.
-- final lines of On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Anchovies at Monterey Bay Aquarium, California. They're silvery, though the lights distort that a bit.
