I found these items in a rusted paint tray on my back porch. It gave me a good opportunity to play around with aperture and experiment with depth of field.
What do you think?
Exif data:
Taken on: January 1, 2011
Shutter speed: 1/10 sec
F-stop: F5.6
ISO: 100
Focal length: 55mm
One thing I love about New York City is how you can entertain yourself just watching others’ lives go by. Recently I stopped outside the New York Public Library on 40th Street & 5th Avenue to ponder life in all its woe and wonder.
It was rush hour on a Friday, about two weeks before Christmas, and the streets were filled with urban worker bees heading out for the weekend. The Chrysler Building hovered quietly a short distance away in the freshly darkened night sky. I was moved by what I saw so I decided to see if I could capture it, especially since I haven’t tried much night photography before.
Armed with my Gorillapod, I positioned myself on the concrete railing and managed to find a perspective I liked. I drew a few stares but I guess if I’m going to shoot what I like I’m going to have to get used to that.
I took about four shots before I got what I thought accurately captured the scene in front of me. When I look at it now, I can almost place myself right back there on that street.
Exif Data:
Taken on December 17, 2010
Shutter speed: 0.3
F5.3
36mm
ISO 100
Flash did not fire
Camera: Nikon D60
Since it’s taking me a small millennium to work through my photos from my trip to New York City earlier this month, I thought I would share one of my favorites from another trip to the greatest city on Earth.
I took this one back in May 2009, just after I had purchased my camera. I was so excited to have a nice camera that I didn’t give much thought to composition, lighting or focus. If I liked it, I snapped it. (This would explain the 105 photos I took of a squirrel in the park. He was quite the poser.)
I was walking in the Garment District, and as I looked up, I saw the Empire State Building slowly rising behind the buildings just in front of it. My awe of its unique design mixed with the sheer awesomeness of its size against the blue sky gave me pause from this particular perspective.
Also ironic is that for the five days we had been there, it had rained non-stop. This was literally the only five minutes of blue sky we saw the entire trip.
Someone threw a little inspiration my way that day. It’s one of the few photos that I feel accurately represented what I remember seeing in front of me.
See the whole set, including two pictures of the aforementioned squirrel…
White Space
White Space
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| Before Best Camera |
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| After Best Camera |
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I love taking photos with my Nikon D60, but the reality is because of my other equipment needs, I can’t always have it with me. My iPhone, however, never leaves my side. A few months ago, I ran across this great iPhone app called Best Camera ($2.99). Through the use of 14 easy-to-use filters, layered and applied any number of ways, you can create some fun art with your iPhone photos.
Here’s a photo I took with my iPhone of a red door on a church. I wanted to be able to capture the contrast of the door against the creme-colored wall. After plugging the photo into Best Camera, I achieved a kind of vignette look.
Granted, I won’t be putting this photo on a billboard, but for sharing with friends, it’s more than ideal. It also helps me build my photography skills simply because I’m willing to take more photos.
Once you’ve edited your photo, you can then send it to any number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Best Camera’s community, where you can see contributions from other iPhone users.
Well, looks who’s been taking a blogging break. Actually, I took it a step further and partook of a social media fast. I went two whole weeks without checking Facebook or Twitter (gasp). After a couple of weeks, one friend of mine was genuinely concerned after she posted some NYC pictures to Facebook and saw no comments, likes, or retweets from me. If you know me, you know that’s serious stuff because I always have something to say about the greatest, most fantastic, amazing city in the world (see?).
Here's me being narcissistic.
After some personal reflection, I felt it was all kind of narcissistic and pointless. I was an early adopter of social media. As a high-functioning introvert, I enjoyed the connection to others on my terms, sharing information with peers, colleagues and friends. While I’ve never had a huge network, I felt the connections I established were meaningful, not just numbers to puff up my ego. And it was fun.
Over the last year or so, however, I’ve witnessed two things:
I found it was harder to retain any of it, much less engage. I would scroll through 200 Twitter updates on 14 different platforms, and not click on any of them. If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t easily determine how much of it was really important to me, if at all. It wasn’t fun anymore and totally not necessary for human survival, so I stopped….for… two weeks.
Two weeks was long enough to clear the palate, re-evaluate my purpose in the online world, and maybe write a little creed, which follows:
One day I will leave this world, a cold Diet Coke firmly in my grip, and 60 years after I leave, my own family won’t even remember me. If I choose not to tell the world where I’m checking in today, it’s not going to matter one bit. So just have fun with it.
Lori
While Olivia Newton-John got physical and Jane Fonda introduced her workout video, there was Bess Motta and the “20 Minute Workout.”
This show epitomized the 80s workout craze, with high-cut leotards, shiny tights, legwarmers and Reebok aerobic sneakers. I loved those sneakers! I think I had four pair by the time 1989 rolled around.
Bess would look into the camera, which never stopped moving, and encourage you with her mantra of “Four more, come on three more, aaaaand two more….”
She was way over the top, but this was the 80s, after all.
I just finished reading “Black Cloud: The Great Hurricane of 1928,” by Palm Beach Post writer Eliot Kleinberg. I picked it up because I had heard vague references to the Great Hurricane of 1928 in the years I’ve lived in South Florida, but never heard anything close to the whole story.
The book is a well-researched and compelling narrative of a storm that took lives and livelihoods from the Caribbean all the way to the Northeast part of the U.S.
While the book covers the storm’s path from its inception, it focuses primarily on the devastation and aftermath of the agricultural communities bordering Lake Okeechobee.
Entire families were wiped out. Homes were washed away. Children were pulled from their parents’ arms by the horrific winds. Scores of black migrant laborers were buried in mass, unmarked graves or burned in funeral pyres. Crops were destroyed, fields flooded for weeks.
The official count of this unnamed storm’s dead sits at 2,500, but is most likely much higher. In today’s world of satellite forecasting and Hurricane Hunter missions, this is hard to imagine.
As I drive through these communities from time to time, I’m moved by the heartbreak that occurred there just a little over 80 years ago.
South Floridians talk much of Andrew, Charley, Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma, but these storms truly paled in comparison to the 1928 storm. Modern Floridians have much to be thankful for.
If you live near West Palm Beach, and haven’t yet visited the new West Palm Beach Public Library, I highly encourage it. After moving from its old home at the Eastern end of Clematis, the new library is now nestled inside the City Center at 411 Clematis.
The layout of the building is easy to follow, and each floor has ample sitting and desk areas, especially next to spacious windows overlooking various downtown views. The fourth floor makes me think a bit of the Rose Reading Room in the NYC Public library; a long, running, open space with enormous windows at either end. The library also offers free wifi, a cafe on the first level, and self-service book holds and checkout. Of course, it has other stuff; this is just the stuff I’ve taken advantage of already.
One unexpected nicety is the fourth floor ladies’ room, which has a partial view of the downtown skyline. Nice touch!
Visit their web site at www.mycitylibrary.org.
No matter how confident you feel in the beginning, if three people in your house get a cold, you are getting it, too. Use all the Purell you want, wear garlic around your neck if you must, you’re toast.
Several brush fires continue to burn in Martin County. Late yesterday afternoon I had the notion that the smoke would make for a glorious, colorful sunset photo. When I got home from work, I quickly changed clothes and rushed out with my husband, camera and tripod in tow to catch some rays (in that order).
We found an open spot, and the sky even teased us with a bluish white plume of smoke billowing on the horizon. Sadly, the sun decided to dip behind a large bank of clouds (my son could tell me what kind they were). The result was not quite what I was after, but we did provide a welcome distraction to some nearby bovine beings who were, like us, praying for rain.
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