Jeanine, Kyle, Maya, and I flew to Denver this morning and then drove to Colorado Springs. There we were reunited with Nicolai and introduced to Kubo, the dog he gifted to his girlfriend Karuna. He is very nice and reasonably obedient. It is very clear that we are a dog family. Kubo received as much or more attention than Nicolai.
When Maya joined the ultimate frisbee team at Olin College she was new to the sport. Her only frame of reference was soccer which, for those who know the game, involves a great deal of physicality. Her Olin teammates were amused when she innocently inquired at the teams’s orientation meeting if ultimate frisbee was a contact sport; it is not, she was informed. During her first practice game Maya leaned heavily on her soccer training and apparently on the opponents she was guarding as well. This style of play quickly earned her the nickname “Punchy.” On most levels this is really not a very apt nickname for Maya, but it does have a slight ring of authenticity to it — a debate with Maya leaves you feeling like you just went 15 rounds in a boxing ring with the champ. It remains to be seen if “Punchy” will replace her current family nicknames of “Maya Moo” and “Maja.”
Earlier today she moved out of her campus dorm room and returned home having successfully completed her freshman year of college. She will be here for a couple of weeks before heading to Indianapolis where she will begin a summer engineering internship with Rolls Royce.
Before the rains struck yesterday, I was asked to photograph some Copenhagen Wheel-equipped bikes for an upcoming review article. If you look closely, this bike does not have a kickstand yet it is standing upright with no visible means of support. It is about two feet from the wall behind it and there are no strings or rods of any kind supporting it. Any guesses as to how this was done? I will share the answer in tomorrow’s post.
My work commute is bad enough under normal circumstances. Add in torrential rains and it becomes downright unbearable. It took me 1 hour to travel the first 3 miles of my return home this evening. I could have made better time on foot. The final 17 miles took another 30 minutes making for a very frustrating experience. I made a lot of experimental photographs while stuck in traffic including the one above. It is taken through my rain drenched windshield of the car and traffic lights in front of me.
Olin’s Expo is an end-of-semester celebration of student learning and achievement, where students from every class share their project work through poster sessions, interactive demonstrations, and artistic performance. The projects range in topic, including but not limited to course assignments, competition teams, passionate pursuits, and research projects. Jeanine, Kyle, Caleb (Maya’s boyfriend) and I were in attendance as Maya shared two of her projects. The first a mobile app called Thrifter, a sustainability project aimed at extending the life of used clothing by facilitating barter exchanges between interested parties. The second, a data visualization project showing the shooting location and conversion rates for NBA players compared to league averages over the last seven years. Maya was as confident as she was ebullient. It was an inconvenient time of day to miss work but I am very happy I did even if it meant staying at the office until 10:30pm to make up for it.
Having decided to give my knees a couple of weeks to recover from soccer competition, I decided to photograph my teammates as they cruised to an 8-0 win this morning. When you reach the over-56 age group, the game becomes less physical and more strategic. While just as satisfying to play it does not produce the same level of photographic drama that can be found in younger age groups. Even so, there was still plenty of action to shoot. A full set of photos from the game can be found here.
The 2,100-acre Crane Estate in Ipswich was home to the family’s summer country mansion built between 1924 and 1928. The Great House, as it is called, contains 59 rooms and is surrounded by no less than 21 outbuildings. I stopped here briefly yesterday as I drove from Rockport to Plum Island where the final three photos were taken.
Rockport is a quaint and extremely photogenic fishing village and artist colony located at the tip of Cape Ann located about 40 miles northeast of Boston. I have visited several times and taken many photographs of the iconic Motif No. 1, a red fishing shack at the end of a granite wharf. The picturesque old structure may be the most photographed building in the United States, if not the world. It has also appeared in movies, as an award-winning float, on magazine covers, on a postage stamp, in a 1960s Winston cigarette ad and as a Kentucky bourbon bottle. Using my drone, I was able to capture some new perspectives of the shack and bay.
I was deleting old text messages this morning and came across this photo from Maya of a project she did with a partner at Olin. I believe they had to design a boat hull and then mathematically predict at what angle it would capsize followed by experimentation to confirm their calculations.
John F. Kennedy was born in a house on Beals St. in Brookline, about a mile from my office. Later this month will be the 101st anniversary of his birth. I decided to make it my morning walk destination. It is a rather simple home which really makes you appreciate the ambition of the Kennedy family. During my walk, I had a chance to enjoy some very beautiful spring flowers in bloom.
If the water isn’t frozen, you can expect to find crew teams training on the Charles every morning. Now that warm weather has arrived, I may elect to do a little rowing in the morning instead of walking. This will require switching vehicles with Kyle since the Audi is the only one of our cars fitted with a roof rack. I have kayaked the Charles before but have long since forgotten where I was able to park and put in.
A business meeting in Bedford took me past a lovely park this morning. I paused for a few minutes to see what I could see and was glad I did. I love living in such close proximity to beautiful natural settings. As Jeanine and I contemplate where we will move after downsizing, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that I would not be very happy living in an urban center.
Alissa is my only sibling to follow in the footsteps of our parents who met on the ballroom dance floor and danced together for the rest of their lives. My mother, soon to turn 90 years old, still dances every week. Alissa has created a website to document her performances and those of her daughter Rachel and husband John as well as those of our mother and father. The impressive collection of videos can be found here. I often think of myself as being fairly athletic (my substandard performance on the soccer pitch this morning notwithstanding) but the truth is that both of my sisters are even more so, Alissa with her dance and Mayela with her swimming and hiking.
A brief visit to the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge netted some nice photos. Pictured above is a marsh wren, the first I have been able to capture in 15 years of visiting. They are very small and rarely stay perched for more than a few seconds. Below we have a clouded sulphur butterfly and water snake. The former has to be followed until it lands; virtually impossible to photograph in flight. The latter is easy to photograph but hard to find.
(a) Toddler chain gang
(b) “Make Way for Ducklings” reenactment
(c) Iditarod training
I walk to Central Square from my office twice daily; once for breakfast and again for lunch. The shortest path has become quite banal so each day I seek to find a new, if somewhat longer, route. Today I was rewarded with daffodils and construction motif artwork.
Last month the Phase 2A section of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail opened to the public. It includes this pedestrian/bike bridge over Rt. 2A/119. The next two phases (2B & 2C) are in Concord with scheduled completion dates a year from now. Once finished, the trail will follow the 25-mile route of the old New Haven Railroad Framingham & Lowell line. I stopped for this photograph on the way to a business meeting in Westford this morning.
The Boston Common and Public Garden was my morning walk destination today. Spring will be here and gone in a matter of days so I took advantage of the nice weather to visit one of the prettier destinations in the city. I only had time for a 15 minute visit but found many nice compositions in that time.
Taken from the window of my car as I drove past Harvard Square. You would be amazed at the number of unusual things I observe while passing through this corridor.
On the way to my soccer match this morning I was compelled to stop for a turkey rafter sighting. Had I a few more moments to spare, I have little doubt that these photos would have been x-rated. My team secured a 2-0 win over Lexington today, our toughest opponent thus far. We remain undefeated and have yet to give up a single goal this season. I started full-strength dosing of Ibuprofen two days ago and the regime paid off. I managed to play without any knee problems. It remains to be seen how I will feel when the drugs wear off, however, and I will likely continue taking them for another day or two. If this works it will confirm that my pain is from inflammation rather than any serious mechanical problems.
As a favor for Jeanine, I took photos at a retirement party for the architect who helped design the new Open Table facility. The complete set can be found by following this link and includes my favorites shown here.
The Boston Public Improvement Commission just announced that it would return Yawkey Way to its former name, Jersey St. at the request of the Boston Red Sox organization. Tom Yawkey owned the team for some 44 years and is generally viewed today as having been a racist. Despite the good works of the Yawkey Foundation, created after his death, many felt that it would be racially insensitive to continue to associate his name with the street bordering Fenway Park. I personally would have preferred to keep the name of the street and added a very prominent plaque which acknowledged his racist behaviors while also recognizing his accomplishments. I think we gain more by understanding than trying to simply erase.
I thought I would get a photo of one of the signs before they all get stolen (I am sure they will be quite the collector’s item one day). While I was in the neighborhood, I put up my drone for a nice aerial view of Fenway Park.
Geese are not high on my list of interesting photographic subjects but I found the wavy tall grass reflections in the water as they swam away very interesting. I encountered this pair on my morning walk which took me to the Fenway Garden Society this morning.
A sure sign that spring has arrived is the nightly chorus of peeper frogs that can be heard throughout the night. I had to work rather late this evening and did not return home until ~10 pm. As I drove down ORNAC (Old Road to Nine Acre Corners) I could see dozens of frogs hopping across the road (also a number who were run over in the process). I pulled over and used my flashlight to illuminate the little fellow above. He was quite cooperative, remaining still as I struggled to hold my light with one hand and properly focus my camera with the other. It made for a very satisfying conclusion to a very long workday.
At work today I needed to create a photograph that will be used in a media campaign by one of our bike frame partners. The goal was to convey a sense of motion while still featuring the brand identity of the product. There is a standard technique for doing this. You set a relatively low shutter speed and pan with the action so that the background is blurred and the subject is in focus. Easier said than done was my takeaway after the exercise. It took over a hundred shots to get the one above and I am not really all that pleased with it. Next time I will use a tripod with a panning head, and a lens with a larger aperture and spend more time scouting a better background. Live and learn.
At long last, signs of spring are beginning to pop up. It has been a long and unusually rough winter that has dragged on far too long. As I looked around today there were signs of new life everywhere and I am reminded how quickly the spring season in New England comes and goes. Hopefully, there will be enough sunny days between rainy ones to get some decent photographs of the transition from greyscale to color.
Still nursing an injured knee from last weekend, I did not play soccer this morning. Instead, I watched from the sideline as my teammates ran up an 8-0 score by halftime. The final was 9-0, limited only by a desire not to further humiliate our opponents. The weather could not have been nicer so I invited Jeanine to join me on a waterfall hike. Pictured above and below is 45-foot tall Royalston Falls reachable by a steep 1.6-mile hike. It took us much longer than we expected given my bad knee and Jeanine’s still recovering calf muscle. Despite the slow going, the journey was well worth the effort. We also visited Doane Falls but I prefer the winter images I shot of it back in February to the ones I took today.
The field containing the trees pictured in the foreground has been fully inundated by the Sudbury River. The uniform and stark contrast between the water and trees makes for a rather compelling photo. Another interesting angle is from directly overhead. In another few weeks, the trees will be covered in buds and the water will have likely receded creating an entirely different scene.
The South Bridge Boathouse is familiar to anyone who has rented canoes for a paddle downriver to visit the Old North Bridge. Occasionally I pay the proprietor a few bucks to put my kayak in and take it out from their dock. Money well spent when I prefer to stay dry (most other put-ins and take-outs along the river are wet). Currently, the river is so high that there is scarcely clearance to paddle under a number of bridges on the river. In a few weeks the water level and temperatures will be conducive to kayaking and I hope to do more this year than last.
Now that I am shooting exclusively with the Sony a7R3 I no longer need crop body only primes such as this 30mm f/1.4 prime that I used with my a6300s (sold both over the last couple of weeks). It can now be found on Craig’s List in search of a new happy home.
At this time of year, few people are willing to brave the wind and cold to ply the waters of the Sudbury River. For those brave souls who are, the reward is having the river to yourself at a time when it is swollen with winter snow melt and spring rains. I captured this image with my drone minutes before sunset, the kayaker oblivious to its presence.
