Category: photos

the lazy photographer

I remember my first camera well, though I can’t remember what it was called. It was a little flat black thing that used 110 film, the kind that came in a plastic cartridge. It had no settings, no special lenses, no way to adjust the focus. You could use a flash with it, a separate cartridge with maybe 5 or 6 individual bulbs which you could plug in on top of the camera, and which you’d throw out once each of the bulbs had flashed exactly once. The camera was passed down to me in maybe 1978 or 1979, when my sister was given her first 35 millimeter camera. I was thrilled with my camera, and used it for many years to take an assortment of grainy, blurry, badly composed pictures that were, nonetheless, precious to me.

I had various other cameras in later years (including, eventually, that same 35 millimeter that had been given to my sister). I would periodically take pictures of things to remember where I’d been, or what was going on. I would take snapshots. What’s more, my camera would sit untouched for months at a time.

About 6 years ago, before a trip to Japan, I got my first digital camera.

It was on that trip that I had an epiphany about taking photos: I had never consciously made an effort to consider composition. Composing had meant little more than “getting what I wanted to take a picture of in the frame before pushing the button.” However, having taken painting and drawing classes for several years, various lessons had apparently sunk in. About color. Light. Contrast. Composition. Negative space. Suddenly, I actually paid attention to the image that was in the frame as a whole. The photos I took started to look more like interesting images, and not just images of interesting things.

About 5 years ago, John started getting serious about photography. He read, he studied, he really learned the technical aspects. It didn’t take long before he had completely surpassed me in terms of photography skills. Watching him work, and seeing the results, I started learning, too. The photos I was taking started looking worse and worse to me. For one thing, my little point and shoot couldn’t hold a candle to SLRs. At the same time, I just couldn’t see myself lugging around a camera that was 10 times the mass of what I was used to. I mean, that would require effort.

After Phoebe was born, I started taking a lot of pictures. And I do mean a lot. The quantity of photos, however, didn’t much improve the quality. I just had more chance of getting lucky with a good shot. I used my little point and shoot because it was small enough for me to keep handy.

In the last couple years, I progressed a bit more with composition. I learned to change my position to find more interesting angles, and it’s not unusual to find me squatting down or climbing up. I notice the light, and the background even if I don’t make efforts to manipulate them.

When John got me a shiny new camera last year before our Spain trip, I wasn’t convinced I’d really use it. It had an intimidating array of options. Figuring out what they were seemed like it would be effort.

But, you know, I haven’t gone back to my point and shoot. Not even once. The improved quality of the photos, just by virtue of having a better lens, made me not want to turn back.

Even so, while I take quite a few photos that I really like, I take almost none that I really love. Of the ones that I love, almost all are happy accidents, flukes in the midst of a gazillion bad and mediocre shots.

My photos rarely look the way I want them to.

Part of why I have undertaken this daily photography project is to change that, and get my photos to more closely resemble the images in my head.

As of a few weeks ago, I hadn’t done much with settings. I hadn’t fiddled around with lenses and serious lighting gear. I’d barely entered the realm of manual focus. I could probably count the number of times I’d used a tripod on one finger.

I’m happy to say that in the time since then, I have made progress with changing settings, have mounted a flash, have used manual focus regularly, and have swapped my lenses back and forth.

A couple of nights ago, I even grabbed John’s tripod. (It’s okay. We’re married.)

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John sent me a link to this graphic a few months ago. I find it fascinating, and a pretty good portrayal of my own path. I haven’t been able to track down the original author of it, as it’s been posted all over the place. But the link from which I grabbed it is here.

I must have missed the fork in the road.

A friend from the 365 Project group commented on a recent photo: “Lots of inspiration on the morning commute, eh?” To which I thought, “I should take more photos from the afternoon commute!”

So it was that yesterday I found myself taking a lot of photos on the train ride home. It was raining, and I was having fun with the water drops beading on the window. As the train moved, the patterns behind the drops changed. Much of the ride was just a blur of green, as we sped past trees and undergrowth, but as we slowed coming into stations, the patterns would get more varied.

As I’ve mentioned several times¹, I’ve started taking the train into work more often. I really like taking the train, and in some ways it is more relaxing than driving: I can read (or even nap) during a big chunk of the commute, and don’t have to worry about city parking or traffic. On the other hand, it takes longer. When I drive, my commute is about one hour each way to get to work. When I take the train, it takes a bit more than 2 hours each way. A good hour of this each way is spent sitting on the train, the rest is spent driving to and parking at the train station one end, and taking the T and walking on the other end.

Yesterday’s homebound commute took 3 hours and 15 minutes. Because of a tree.

At the station 2 before mine, the train started to pull out of the station, and then stopped again. After a few minutes, the conductors came through to announce that there was a large fallen tree on the tracks ahead, and that it was too large for the train to push through. It apparently fell from one side of the tracks, where the root ball was still intact and partially buried, across both tracks, and smashed into the fence on the other side. We were told that a track crew had to be called to cut through the tree to let the train pass. There were murmurs of passengers volunteering to help move the tree, but the conductors believed the tree was too big², and the passengers were told they weren’t allowed to, anyhow. (I’m sure it was a liability issue.) We were told it would be only about a 20 minute wait. I translated that in my head to mean at least half an hour. Since we were still at a station, passengers were allowed to get off the train, and some probably called to get picked up there. Others waited out on the platform.

I was comfortable sitting on the train, and had my camera, phone and various electronic devices handy to keep me busy. John had already picked up Phoebe and Theo, so I didn’t have to worry about being late. I relaxed and took many more shots of raindrops on the window and rain splashing on the platform.

After about 45 minutes, the official track crew had still not arrived. But suddenly all the passengers hurried back onto the train, and we were told we were leaving. Apparently, the group of volunteers had moved the tree, after all. We got moving again, towards the next stop. Rather than continuing all the way to the end of the line, our train was going to let everyone off at the penultimate stop, and head back to Boston. So, I had an extra 15 minutes waiting for another train at a different stop. Just as the next train was pulling into the station, I spied this along side the curb where I was waiting:

Sometimes, in life, you come to a fork in the road. It is a rare occasion when you come to a spoon.

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¹ Perhaps I’m trying to drive the point home?
² Did I mention that the tree was big? It was, from all accounts, a big tree. Also large.³
³ I should also say that I was glad that the tree, which was quite large, did not fall on the train.

a day at the zoo

Saturday was the sort of summer day that could make me like summer. It was warm and sunny, not too hot, and with no trace of the stifling mugginess that we get all too often these days. It was just the right sort of day for spending a lot of time outside. Almost on a whim, we decided to make a trip to the zoo.

A bunch more photos are in the slideshow below.

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Thanks to my participation in Project 365, I really made an effort to take photos. John even convinced me to switch lenses and use my zoom telephoto, something that in my laziness, I have almost never done. What’s more, I used manual focus a lot. Manual. Focus. I felt so frickin’ badass. Except that, you know, I was at the zoo. Do badasses go to the zoo?

1 down, 364 to go


001:365 A wild raspberry from my yard in a shiny bowl.

I have signed on to participate in Project 365, a project which encourages people to learn to count past 364. I keep counting up to about 12, and then I get distracted by something shiny. Why just the other day, I was looking in the fridge to see how many eggs we had and then hey look somebody dropped a dime. I wonder how many dimes I have? Maybe I’ll count them. Did I ever mention that I once had a dime collection? They were shiny.

Where was I? Oh, right. Project 365. A project wherein/whereby/wherefore/whatif/whatwasIsaying people take (at least) a picture a day, and share a picture a day online. The lovely Sue has rounded up a crew to join her in this daily shutterbugginess. I have joined the crew. I’ve never done crew before. I hope this isn’t too strenuous. My freshman roommate was in crew. She had to run a lot. Every day. I can’t run to save my life. And certainly not every day. Hopefully I will be able to manage to take and share photo every day, and hopefully it won’t need to be to save my life. (As far as I know, there are no fatal consequences of missing a day, but perhaps I didn’t read all the fine print.)

I don’t plan to inflict all of my photos on you here. (Just some of them.) If you would like to see all of them, I’ll be aiming to put them up daily on my shiny new Flickr stream. Oooo, shiny.

doodle beads


Phoebe’s butterfly.


Phoebe’s fire in a fireplace.


Phoebe with her hippo.


Phoebe with her birthday cake.


Phoebe dismantling my cake.

I don’t think I ever properly thanked Holly for the fun Mardi Gras beads she sent us. They are ever-so-shiny, and good for all kinds of fun games.

looking at cars in the driving rain

Last Saturday, the hourly forecast showed quick storms at 1:00 and then again later in the afternoon, but with otherwise sunny skies and relatively low chance of precipitation. Even with the chance of rain, we decided to motor on to get to Micro Mini Car Day.

As predicted, the morning was clear and hot. We’d hoped to leave around noon to make the start of the car show at 1:00, but with the typical challenges of getting everyone fed and otherwise ready to go, it was closer to 1 by the time we got the kids buckled into the car. As I ran back to the house to grab one last thing, John called out to me to also grab some umbrellas.

I don’t have many superstitions, but I know for certain that the best way to avoid rain is to bring an umbrella. In this respect, the umbrellas failed us. Which is not to say that we were sorry to have them with us.

The hourly forecast was partially correct. It did indeed rain around 1. But it then continued to rain. And rain. And rain hard. And then it rained harder, and it rained some more. And did I mention that it rained?

I did manage to get a few photos, though, as I huddled under my umbrella.

Here is Phoebe with a bigger Mini. (I have a photo of her with the same Mini from last year.)

As you can see, the attendees were still very enthusiastic about the event. Here is someone braving the rain to photograph a convertible Isetta along with some sort of matching toy version. (I was very curious about the sort of pod-like, three-wheeled gray thing on the right, but didn’t have much chance learn what it was. Note that there is also what appears to be a black pole sticking out of the roof of the museum. That was my umbrella strap.)

Here’s are a couple of bigger Isettas. They seat 4!

Here’s that gray pod thing again, which I think looks a lot like the end of a bullet train or monorail. But a whole lot smaller.

I took this photo from the gift shop, up in the museum building, where I’d gone to get a t-shirt for John. (John’s shirt had gotten completely soaked while he was pushing Theo in the stroller, while trying to keep his umbrella moderately covering Theo.)

We spent quite a while inside the museum waiting for the rain to lighten up. Um…it didn’t.

By 4:00, the scheduled end of the show, the rain finally started to slow. By the time we returned to our car, it was barely raining at all. Then the clouds parted, and the sun came back out.

This is all to say that we went to the car show, but it was very wet. This wetness was, further, the only period of such wetness the whole weekend.

I was not sorry that we went, but it wasn’t quite the experience I might have hoped for. For one thing, they weren’t able to have the rides in the cars, at least not after we arrived. The rain was torrential, for one thing. And the attendees were drenched. (Would you want soggy-bottomed strangers plopping themselves down in your car?) And then to top it all off, a retaining wall collapsed from the rain onto part of the circular driveway where the car rides typically passed. So, no ride in an Isetta for me after all.

But I did have some fun.

Beep beep! It’s Micro Mini Car Day!

I decided not to go to away to the conference this week after all.¹

A sweet bonus of not being away this weekend is that I’ll get to go to something fun that I would have otherwise been sad to miss: Micro Mini Car Day at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. Car shows are not generally my thing, or at least not what I would think of as being historically my thing, and I don’t necessarily consider myself a car buff.

There are, however, a couple of noteworthy exceptions: British cars, and really small cars.² Last year, we went to and enjoyed British Car Day³, a lawn event at the same museum, and when we saw the upcoming listing for Micro Mini Car Day, I was well and truly intrigued.

I have to say the event was even cooler than I’d anticipated. In addition to the Minis and MGs and Smarts and such that I’d anticipated, I got to see all kinds of little cars that I’d never even known existed. I’ve been meaning to share some of the photos from the even for ages, and here I am finally getting around to it. Buckle up!⁴

Seeing as they were my first car crush, I was happy to see some classic Austin Minis. I have long said that I wanted to pinch their little cheeks.

In front of the very impressive museum building is a pair of Isettas, a car that was totally new to me.

The Isetta was also known, not too shockingly, as the “bubble car.” Fond as I am of the Austin Mini, I may want to pinch the cheeks of the Isetta even more. I mean, just look at it!

One of the most striking quirks about the Isetta is that the driver enters through a single front door. (Observe that the little 2-seater above has no side door.) The front door opens sideways on hinges, much like a refrigerator door. By the way, the car was originally made by a company that also made refrigerators. Coincidence?

Below is a picture with one of the “larger” Isetta models with the door open. (In the foreground is one of my own smaller models, who answers to the name of “Phoebe.”)

An especially cool feature of this event is that many of the car owners offer rides to attendees. (You can see people and cars lined up in the background in the photo, below.) I got to go for a ride in this Austin Mini, which was my first time actually inside a classic Mini.

I also went back in line a second time, and scored a ride in this cherry Nash Metropolitain, whose enthusiastic owner was dressed in colors to match her paint.

This year, I’m hoping to have a chance to go for a ride or 2 again–maybe even in an Isetta!

Even if I don’t manage to catch any rides, I’m looking forward to a fun day outside in a beautiful park. There is lots of room to run around, and Phoebe happily did so. (Theo, on the other hand, could barely yet stand.)⁵

And in case you want to see more photos of tiny cars, I’ve put a bunch more in the slideshow below. (If you want to slow down or stop the slideshow, put your cursor over the slideshow to have the controls appear.)

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¹ Much as I wanted to attend the conference itself, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to the travel involved. I’m still recovering from two biggish trips in the last couple of months, and it seemed unusually hard on John and the kiddos to abandon them so soon after my return. What finally helped me stop the waffling, or to tip the waffle into the “stay home” side of things, was taking into account both the expense and the fossil fuel gluttony of such a trip. (After all, I am trying to cut down.)

² You might remember the photos I posted from last year’s British Car Day.

³ And yes, I really love the really small British cars. Really.

⁴ Or otherwise brace yourselves, as many of the vintage cars probably didn’t have seatbelts.

⁵ You may recognize the setting as the same as in my photo I called Theo’s World. That’s because I took that one the same day.

light show

On Saturday night, we went to see a fireworks display at a nearby town. It was a perfect night to be outside, with clear skies and a warm breeze to keep the bugs (mostly) at bay. Kids were running around having fun playing with various light toys, and I had fun playing with slow shutter speeds.

Phoebe was very excited to be out past her bedtime. She ran around and danced to the music coming from the big tent set up for the occasion. She loved the fireworks.

Theo was much more mellow, and slightly intimidated by the scene, happy to sit on the sleeping bag we’d spread out and eat snacks. About an hour after we’d settled into our spot on the field, he was ready to go home. But then the fireworks started, and he went from bored and mildly intimidated to downright frightened. He clung to me, shaking.

I confess that, while I felt bad that he was scared, I enjoyed getting the snuggling time with him. He’s at a stage (please let it be a stage!) where he won’t necessarily give me a hug, even once a day. Part way through the fireworks show (which wasn’t terribly long, it being a fairly small town), John and I traded off so that he snuggled and comforted Theo while I took a few more pictures. By the end of the show, Theo had calmed down quite a bit, and was cheerful again. He even agreed that we’d had fun.

6 in a million giraffes

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a friend telling me about a cool online project: One Million Giraffes. Someone has started a website where he has the goal of collecting, as you might guess, one million giraffes. What you might not guess is that he is trying to do so by 2011, and that he wants all the giraffes to be created by participants without using a computer as part of the creative process. (For the full rules and more details, check out the rules page. There’s even a blog featuring favorite giraffes.)

Whereas my immediate response in learning of this project was to make some giraffes, it has taken me over a month to actually send mine in. But I’m happy to say that I uploaded my photo of 6 giraffes last night, and they now appear on the site. They are currently on page 2 of the site, but I expect they’ll be bumped down pretty fast. For the direct link, go here.

Here are the giraffes I cut out the same night I got the email–I took a piece of orange construction paper, folded it into 6, and cut the giraffes in a stack free-form. Then I taped them to the window.

These are not llamas.

Phoebe observed, very observantly, that my giraffes had no tails, and that giraffes have tails. She was right, and my giraffes looked more llama-like than giraffe-like. So, I retrieved them and retooled them to be tailed.

I also liked this picture of their shadows.