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It snowed yesterday! It never snows this early. This can't be a good sign.
Tracking the progression of the autumn foliage, from when the colors started to turn at the start of October, through when the leaves were all gone some time in November.
* October 2 (mostly green, boat, lens flare) (11th month of monthly photos here)
* October 9 (overcast, two boats)
* October 13 (raining)
* October 14 (sunny & crisp)
* October 15 (night mosiac)
* October 16 (colors fading, a boat)
* October 19 (still waters, lens flare)
* October 20 (still water, lens flare, boats)
* October 21 (rippled waters, no polarizer)
* October 22 (morning mist, boaters, sun)
* October 22 (evening headlights, fogged waters)
* October 26 (few clouds, colors blooming now)
* October 26 (evening, blue light, auto traffic)
* October 27 (grey skies, still waters)
* October 27 (evening, motion blur on waves)
* October 28 (group of boaters being filmed)
* October 29 (group of boaters being filmed)
* October 30 (lone boater on still water)
* November 2 (lone boater on cloud reflecting water)
* November 2 (evening view of clouds & traffic)
* November 3 (cloud-free sky over dappled waters) (12th month of monthly photos here)
* November 4 (cloud-free sky, dappled waters, lone boat)
* November 6 (grey skies, two boats, very brown trees)
* November 10 (grey skies, tree branches becoming visible)
* November 11 (blue skies, thin clouds, still waters)
* November 17 (bare trees, clear blue skies, still waters)
* November 18 (bare trees, dappled clouds in blue sky, rippled waters)
* November 20 (calm & partly cloudy, just after major morning rain)
* November 24 (light rain, grey skies)
* November 25 (fog & mist, like first photo a year ago)
* November 30 (crisp, grey, monochrome day, with boat)
* December 2 (no clouds & very, very still waters)
* December 3 (warm day after overnight storms, no clouds, rippled water, geese) (1st year / 13th month of photos here)
Notably, the bottom of the coop itself was netted with what looked like modern chicken wire fencing.
Either colonial era farmers had this kind of wire fence earlier than I realized (in which case, why bother with this stick business?), or the park service was hoping people wouldn't notice or care.
On the other hand, the buildings themselves, some of which went back to the 1600s, had been discretely upgraded with things like fire sprinklers (and while they were at it, plumbing for a hidden bathroom & kitchen area), so the chicken-wire wasn't really a big deal.
It did get me wondering though how the bottom of these huts would have been built back then. A solid floor that got cleaned out periodically? Yuck. Some kind of netting or basket maybe? Hmm...
This place went out of business last week.
How often do you see a McD's go out of business? Not very.
Fortunately for us, no one seemed to mind that we used their parking lot while on the Fenway Park tour.
Somehow, I can't see that being a feasible place for free parking on Red Sox game days.
• • • • •
This photo was seen on Bostonist, "Mass. Workers Lovin' McDonald's" on May 8, 2011.
We saw this man working as a park ranger at the nearby William Smith House back in August. Apparently one of the perks of the job is multiple Minuteman uniforms, as this jacket is tan & he was wearing maroon the first time we saw him.
Anyway, he was a really nice guy -- a retired professor from Boston College, working part time as a park ranger now, and a good sport with Isaac running around in his nice little national park.
Of course, Isaac was slightly less happy with him today when the gun went off with an unbelievably loud BANG and scared the living snot out of him. Right up until that moment though, he was having a blast. Well, sort of.
For Independence Day & the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, a flotilla of tall ships and naval ships came to Boston for the 4th of July celebrations.
The centerpiece of the week was the annual turnaround cruise of the frigate USS Constitution, escorted this year by the barque USCGC Eagle, and a flyover by the Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets and other military airplanes & helicopters, and parachute jumpers
We got to watch this from the Danish royal naval ship HDMS Esbern Snare, which was on a sort of shore leave from pirate hunting duty off the coast of Somalia.
HONK! Parade from Davis Square in Somerville through Porter Square to Harvard Square in Cambridge. Pasting from the honkfest.org site:
* * * * *
The Honk Parade this year will include most of the Honk bands plus a wide array of community groups, each responding to the theme of “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet” in their own way. The goal of the parade is to create a spectacular processional theater piece with striking visual images and plenty of brass band music in order to show by example how our streets and public spaces can function as places for community celebration and fun, as well as for their everyday practical purposes. The parade showcases alternative modes of transportation (pedicabs, bicycles, feet) and celebrates the possibilities of live performance as a mode for entertaining and thoughtful inspiration.
The local organizations inventing colorful processional street spectacle for the Honk Parade include community performance groups such as the Open Air Circus, the Boston Hoop Troop, Tumbling for Two, the Royal Frog Ballet, the Disbanded Drill Team, and Can-Can Revolution; activist groups such as the Livable Streets Alliance, Food not Bombs, Somerville Climate Action, Veterans for Peace, the Red Bandanna Brigade, the Green Streets Initiative, the Tufts University Peace and Justice Group; and fascinating art and performance projects such as Mitch Ryerson’s Star Wheel, the Endangered Species with Lipstick parading comparsa, the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont, Jamaica Plain’s Spontaneous Celebrations, and Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club. The parade has also attracted neighbors joining together to have fun, such as Somerville’s Barbecue Co-op, which is constructing a four-wheeled wagon full of pigs (children in costumes) to be pulled by a contingent of chefs (their parents, also in costumes).
This photo has been stuck in processing for a while. Mostly I thought that it has a lot of potential, but I do not feel that I have quite finished it, though I do not really know what is bothering me concretely—except that it is not at its best form yet.
It is a panorama stitched together using 5 captures, though I have decided to crop to a square as I am mostly interested in the “extension” of the cloud immediately next to the mountains, and the additional area to the right of where the frame is cropped is somewhat unnecessary.
Keeping only what is necessary to complete an image is what I generally aim for. When I made the shot it seems useful, but it feels more successful when cropped as a square.
# SML Data
+ Date: 2013-06-07T18:48:53+0800
+ Dimensions: 4423 x 4423
+ Exposure: 1/80 sec at f/8.0
+ Focal Length: 17 mm
+ ISO: 100
+ Flash: Did not fire
+ Camera: Canon EOS 6D
+ Lens: Canon EF 17-40 f/4L USM
+ Panorama FOV: 131 degree horizontal, 94 degree vertical
+ Panoramic Projection: Spherical
+ GPS: 22°25'9" N 114°13'25" E
+ Location: SML Universe HKG (Vista Paradiso, Ma On Shan, Hong Kong, China)
+ Subject: 香港中文大學 Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
+ Workflow: Autopango Giga 3, Lightroom 4
+ Serial: SML.20130607.6D.05426-SML.20130607.6D.05430-Pano.i5.131x94.SQ.BW
+ Series: 寧 Serenity, 全景攝影 Panoramic Photography
# Media Licensing
Creative Commons (CCBY) See-ming Lee 李思明 / SML Photography / SML Universe Limited
日落山雲觀 Sunset cloudscape / 香港中文大學全景之寧 Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Panoramic Serenity / SML.20130607.6D.05426-SML.20130607.6D.05430-Pano.i5.131x94.SQ.BW
/ #寧 #Serenity #SMLSerenity #自然 #Nature #黑白 #BW #SMLBW #CreativeCommons #CCBY #SMLPhotography #SMLUniverse #SMLProjects
/ #中國 #中国 #China #香港 #HongKong #雲 #Cloud #天 #空 #Sky #山水 #landscape #CUHK #sunset
That's not a ghostly image of Hitler in Mr Dalek's grille there — that's, err, me & my phone, not a mustache. Geez.
The things a father will do...
Went to Powderhouse Park, found a good spot to watch the Tufts University "Tuftonia’s Day" fireworks, with no obstrutions. Only problem is it's a little far, but that's good, as it shouldn't be loud. No good, The Boy wants to get closer. Fine, we have time, we walk.
The Tufts quad turns out to be about a 20 minute walk, mostly uphill, with The Boy riding on my shoulders. We get there. I'm tired. We find a spot right up front though, so it seems worth it. We sit down & settle in. The show hasn't started yet.
The Boy puts on the industrial ear protectors I picked up at Home Depot the night before.
Just as I open up a can of Coke and sit back to enjoy the show, the first fireworks are launched. They're loud. We're impressed.
Then the second one goes off moments later.
By the time the third one goes off, it's all "Daddy! I'm scared! It's too loud! I wanna go back to the car!"
We end up lasting about 90 seconds before he's back on the shoulders and we walk back downhill.
The fireworks show is short, and seems to finish by the time we're back off the Tufts campus. But The Boy keeps the earmuffs on, just in case.
We walk 20 minutes, thankfully mostly downhill, back to the car, with him on my shoulders the whole way, and the earmuffs on his head the whole time.
We get to the car. I buckle him in. By the time we pull into traffic, he's asleep.
This was our tour guide, Victoria Welch -- yay Flickr referer logs. :-)
Funnily enough, she also seems to be a staff writer for Bostonist, which has been nice enough to highlight some of my photos in the past, and again today. Small world, eh?
Victoria: you gave a great tour, and my son had a lot of fun. Thanks!
Quoting from hacks.mit.edu:
Following the visit of Doctor Who's TARDIS to campus in August 2012 (photos), a Dalek appeared on a spire on the roof of MIT's Stata Center. Hackers placed the Dalek, a cyborg from the British sci-fi television series Doctor Who high up on the roof of home of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
These time-series photos (there has to be a term for this sort of composition) of the Charles River in Boston were done after seeing how hugovk did his time-series photo of the Naurissalmi strait in Finland, and before that, Eirik Solheim's One Year in One Image.
The composites were generated with a fairly simple shell script. The original version by Aslak Hellesøy hard-codes the image dimensions & the column "stripe" width, and it turns out that if you get these wrong, then the resulting image might be interesting in an "abstract impressionism" way, but it won't look like the original scene at all.My version improves on this by using jhead to figure out the dimensions of each of the source images, then does the arithmatic to come up with the optimal dimensions & average stripe width to use. As a result, you can just point it at any folder full of images, and it will generate a reasonable composite based on what was found there. So, in my case, that means that months where I just took a few photos — like in 2009 — will come out more or less as well as months where there were many photos.
The remaining problem, which I obviously haven't solved yet, is the "garbage in, garbage out" you get from not framing the photos absolutely consistently. Eirik Solheim's brilliant composition avoided this problem because he had his camera on a tripod out his window for a year. In my case, as with hugovk, the photos were hand-held, and while it helps a little that I'm using a camera with a built-in virtual horizon (so that the images are at least level, if not aimed consistently), there's still room for improvement. A script to auto-align & auto-crop source images would improve the results considerably.
Still, this isn't bad, and some of them — particularly some of the single-month composites — I quite like.
Feel free to try your own with the script, pasted below. It requires jhead & ImageMagick, but otherwise just needs a plain old Bourne shell, which any Mac, Linux, or Windows machine (with [free] Cygwin) will have — no fancy & expensive Photoshop tricks here.
$ cat ~/bin/eirikmagick.sh
#!/bin/sh
curdir=$(pwd | sed 's#^.*/\([^/]*\)#\1#')
jhead -n"${curdir}_%Y%m%d-%H%M%S" *jpg
tmpdir=tmp
if [ -d "$tmpdir" ]; then
rm -rf $tmpdir
fi
mkdir $tmpdir
img_count="$(ls -1 *jpg| wc -l)"
echo "`date` processing $img_count images in $curdir ($(pwd))"
height=$(jhead -c *jpg 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $2}' | sort | sed 's#.*x##' | head -1)
echo "shortest image is $height, so setting output height to match"
img_width=$(jhead -c *jpg 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $2}' | sort | sed 's#x.*##' | head -1)
echo "narrowest image is $img_width"
width=$(($img_width / $img_count))
echo "setting column width to $width (average of $img_width width divided by $img_count images)"
n=0
for f in *.jpg
do
offset=$(($n*$width))
c="$(printf "%05d" $n)"
echo "Creating slice $tmpdir/$c.png: convert -crop ${width}x${height}+${offset}+0 $f $tmpdir/$c.png"
convert -crop ${width}x${height}+${offset}+0 $f $tmpdir/$c.png
n=$(($n+1))
done
count="$(ls -1 $tmpdir | wc -l)"
echo "Joining $count slices into out.png"
montage $tmpdir/*.png -mode concatenate -tile ${count}x -verbose ${curdir}_$(date '+%Y%m%d.%H%M%S').png
At night, the commercial use car park at Chung On Shopping Centre is almost empty, leaving behind a couple of white vans. But the trash that was left behind at the loading docks are still seen everywhere.
This is a handheld panorama stitched together using 14 full res 7D RAW. I photographed this at night because during the day there is no way I can see the venting pipes on the ceiling so clearly. It is beautiful. On the right are the gates to the carpark. To the far side you can see more densely populated public housing development in Hong Kong.
# SML Data
+ Date: 2013-03-23 23:46:49 GMT+0800
+ Dimensions: 10358 x 3237
+ Exposure: 1/25 sec at f/4.0
+ Focal Length: 17 mm
+ ISO: 3200
+ Flash: Did not fire
+ Camera: Canon EOS 7D
+ Lens: Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
+ Panorama FOV: 224 degree horizontal, 67.1 degree vertical
+ Panoramic Projection: Cylindrical
+ GPS: 22°25'18" N 114°13'37" E
+ Altitude: 35.1
+ Location: 中國香港馬鞍山頌安邨頌安商場 Chung On Shopping Centre, Chung On Estate, Ma On Shan, Hong Kong, China
+ Serial: SML.20130323.7D.36202-SML.20130323.7D.36215-Pano.Cylindrical.224x67.1.BW
+ Workflow: Hugin 2012, Lightroom 4
+ Series: 商場 Shopping Malls, 人流 Human Logistics, 建築 Architecture, 全景 Panoramic Photography, 形 Forms, 黑白 Black and White
# Media Licensing
Creative Commons (CCBY) See-ming Lee 李思明 / SML Photography / SML Universe Limited
“頌安商場商用停車場 Chung On Shopping Centre Commercial Use Car Park” / 香港商場人流建築全景夜之形 Hong Kong Shopping Malls Human Logistics Architecture Panoramic Night Forms / SML.20130323.7D.36202-SML.20130323.7D.36215-Pano.Cylindrical.224x67.1.BW
/ #商場 #ShoppingMalls #人流 #HumanLogistics #建築 #建筑 #Architecture #全景 #Pano #SMLPano #形 #Forms #SMLForms #黑白 #BW #SMLBW #CCBY #SMLPhotography #SMLUniverse #SMLProjects
/ #中國 #中国 #China #香港 #HongKong #攝影 #摄影 #photography #夜 #Night
www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/8585404338/
www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/8585404338/sizes/o/ (10358 x 3237)
From the Museum of Bad Art, in the basement of the otherwise lovely Somerville Theatre. The Museum, of course, has its online collection of bad art, but I figure bad photos of the bad art can only be a positive contribution to the cause.
This may possibly be the best baseball painting ever.
As the ump looks down over the catcher laying on home plate, a Red Sox runner is trying to slide to the base. For reasons unknown, the runner is apparently coming back from first base. On his way to home plate, the runner is brutally interrupted as a mythological fan -- roughly a deer from the waist down, but with seemingly human arms, and nearly no head -- who devours his left leg. In the confusion, the baseball itself appears to be lost, and the smudgy spot near the catcher's head may possibly be the decapitated head of the fan.
This is, I repeat, very possibly the best baseball painting ever.
HONK! Parade from Davis Square in Somerville through Porter Square to Harvard Square in Cambridge. Pasting from the honkfest.org site:
* * * * *
The Honk Parade this year will include most of the Honk bands plus a wide array of community groups, each responding to the theme of “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet” in their own way. The goal of the parade is to create a spectacular processional theater piece with striking visual images and plenty of brass band music in order to show by example how our streets and public spaces can function as places for community celebration and fun, as well as for their everyday practical purposes. The parade showcases alternative modes of transportation (pedicabs, bicycles, feet) and celebrates the possibilities of live performance as a mode for entertaining and thoughtful inspiration.
The local organizations inventing colorful processional street spectacle for the Honk Parade include community performance groups such as the Open Air Circus, the Boston Hoop Troop, Tumbling for Two, the Royal Frog Ballet, the Disbanded Drill Team, and Can-Can Revolution; activist groups such as the Livable Streets Alliance, Food not Bombs, Somerville Climate Action, Veterans for Peace, the Red Bandanna Brigade, the Green Streets Initiative, the Tufts University Peace and Justice Group; and fascinating art and performance projects such as Mitch Ryerson’s Star Wheel, the Endangered Species with Lipstick parading comparsa, the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont, Jamaica Plain’s Spontaneous Celebrations, and Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club. The parade has also attracted neighbors joining together to have fun, such as Somerville’s Barbecue Co-op, which is constructing a four-wheeled wagon full of pigs (children in costumes) to be pulled by a contingent of chefs (their parents, also in costumes).
Image appeared on Diddlyi Magazine: Michael Flatley Plans Spectacular Irish Dancing Circus (as an April Fools prank)
Stitched together from photos taken on three sides of the building, looking from roughly northeast to south and back to the west.
I'd try a full circle panorama but don't have access to a room with windows on the north side of the building.
This was taken around the same time as this neighborhood panorama, and a few days after this Boston skyline view.
24/04/2019 and Flickr has recorded that I've accumulated three million views! Here's the summary:
Total aggregate of .................... 3,000,000 views
All time daily average of ................... 1,068 views
Highest day of .................................. 35,330 views on 21/08/2018
(the image is of press photographers in Tokyo, 17/12/1954)
The past month I made Explore four times. This caused peaks in the view counts. The Explore photos were mid-ranked 200 to 400 range and gained several thousand views then trailed off. My baseline views remain the same in the 2,000 to 3,000 range. Despite this apparent popularity, my comments are relatively low @ 7-15, maybe 20 on a good day. This may reflect the fact that I've had limited time these days for flickr. I try to keep my contact ("Follower's) list low, around 100 so I can reciprocate.
Thanks to those of you who visit my stream and keep in contact, it's very much appreciated!
For some reason, he adored the tarantula spider. Just thought it was fantastic. Didn't even seem to mind the tank full of giant hissing cockroaches next to it (which, I'll admit, really freaks me out).
On the other hand, the lion sleeping lazily nearby terrified Isaac.
I crouched down to get a picture of the lion napping, look behind me, and Isaac has bolted. I poke my head around the corner and see him sprinting down the path back where we came from saying "I'm scared, I don't want it, I don't like the lion. Nooo!"
Which is really strange to me, as he always seemed to like the lion here in the past, and likes the lion in, say, GoodnightGorilla.
I guess the lion was just a lot more intimidating in person, and with the tarantula, since he doesn't yet know concepts like "venom" or "poison", it's just a big cute fuzzy bug to him.
The harsh winter in New Haven. I was a photo editor at TheYaleHerald at the time. It was fun doing stuff in the darkroom, although prolong exposure under the safe light may be hazadous to your health.
CC-BY-SA 1996 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
SML Thank You
+ 2009-12-05: Blogged: CBS MoneyWatch.com: The Top 10 Colleges Which Reject Nearly Everyone by Lynn O'Shaughnessy
One of three panorama shots taken while driving through New York City in December, 2008:
* NYC Panoramas: Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges
* NYC Panoramas: Brooklyn Bridge
* NYC Panoramas: WTC construction site
For most of these panoramas I do, I zoom the lens all the way out to 18mm (~36mm equivalent on a 35mm film camera, or about ~1.5x wider than the human eye's normal field of vision), then pan across a really big setting. That's how I did the broad view of the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges.
Some other times though, I zoom all the way in to 200mm (~300mm equivalent on a 35mm camera, or about 6x zoomed in compared to the human eye), then go for more detail on something in the distance. That's how I did the one of the Brooklyn Bridge while standing at the same vantage point as the one of both bridges.
As for the Brooklyn Bridges, one thing that jumps out at me with both versions is how the tops of the towers are leaning away from each other. To an extent, this is actually true -- due to the curvature of the Earth itself, big suspension bridges are further apart at the tops of their towers than they are at the bottoms. But the difference is only a matter of a few feet -- it shouldn't be possible to pick up a difference that subtle this way. I'd blame it on the abstractness of the panorama shots, but the same effect shows up in this normal shot of the main span. I think it's probably just an optical effect from the lens I use (Nikon 18-200 VR) and [maybe] from the fact that these were taken just above the water level, so I'm looking up at the towers (even though they're so far in the distance).
Anyway.
My favorite detail with this one is the way I caught several views of the same sea gull flying from left to right as I was taking the individual photos. I think the bird is in here at least 10 times, starting over Brooklyn on the left, and coming toward the Manhattan tower on the right.
Universal Hub: Here we go again: Suspicious package at Back Bay bank
Boston Police tweet the bomb squad scrambled to respond to a report of a suspicious package at the Bank of America branch at 133 Massachusetts Ave. around 3 p.m.
Hmm, Bank of America? Branch in college neighborhood? Could it be another dummy?
Kind of makes me wish Terry Gilliam would use this facility as a movie set for a "Brazil" / "12 Monkeys" type movie.
One Million Visits - Screenshot Dec 15, 2013 - Photographer Russell McNeil PhD (Physics) lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia where he works also as a writer and a personal trainer.
Compare & contrast:
* no flash (this one)
* bounce flash (the other one)
In this case, as in many other cases, i think it came out better with no flash.
But if you have to use flash, the external flash works way better than the built-in one, which I pretend just isn't there at all.
15/08/2020 is my ninth anniversary on Flickr and below is a statistical summary. As always, many thanks to my followers and the occasional browsers. I appreciate you all for looking at my snaps, your comments and the 'faves'.
Total aggregate of ............................ 3,552,471 views
All time daily average of ......................... 1,080 views
Last two year daily average of .............. 1,456 views
All time highest day of ......................... 35,330 views on 21/08/2018
(the above image is Herbert George Ponting and telephoto apparatus, Antarctica, January 1912. Photographer unknown )
Tracking the progression of the autumn foliage, from when the colors started to turn at the start of October, through when the leaves were all gone some time in November.
* October 2 (mostly green, boat, lens flare) (11th month of monthly photos here)
* October 9 (overcast, two boats)
* October 13 (raining)
* October 14 (sunny & crisp)
* October 15 (night mosiac)
* October 16 (colors fading, a boat)
* October 19 (still waters, lens flare)
* October 20 (still water, lens flare, boats)
* October 21 (rippled waters, no polarizer)
* October 22 (morning mist, boaters, sun)
* October 22 (evening headlights, fogged waters)
* October 26 (few clouds, colors blooming now)
* October 26 (evening, blue light, auto traffic)
* October 27 (grey skies, still waters)
* October 27 (evening, motion blur on waves)
* October 28 (group of boaters being filmed)
* October 29 (group of boaters being filmed)
* October 30 (lone boater on still water)
* November 2 (lone boater on cloud reflecting water)
* November 2 (evening view of clouds & traffic)
* November 3 (cloud-free sky over dappled waters) (12th month of monthly photos here)
* November 4 (cloud-free sky, dappled waters, lone boat)
* November 6 (grey skies, two boats, very brown trees)
* November 10 (grey skies, tree branches becoming visible)
* November 11 (blue skies, thin clouds, still waters)
* November 17 (bare trees, clear blue skies, still waters)
* November 18 (bare trees, dappled clouds in blue sky, rippled waters)
* November 20 (calm & partly cloudy, just after major morning rain)
* November 24 (light rain, grey skies)
* November 25 (fog & mist, like first photo a year ago)
* November 30 (crisp, grey, monochrome day, with boat)
* December 2 (no clouds & very, very still waters)
* December 3 (warm day after overnight storms, no clouds, rippled water, geese) (1st year / 13th month of photos here)
For Independence Day & the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, a flotilla of tall ships and naval ships came to Boston for the 4th of July celebrations.
The centerpiece of the week was the annual turnaround cruise of the frigate USS Constitution, escorted this year by the barque USCGC Eagle, and a flyover by the Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets and other military airplanes & helicopters, and parachute jumpers
We got to watch this from the Danish royal naval ship HDMS Esbern Snare, which was on a sort of shore leave from pirate hunting duty off the coast of Somalia.
Wasn't happy with how this shot came out compared to some of the others in this series -- too much sky glare (should have adjusted the polarizer), wasn't quite levelled (had to straighten/crop in iPhoto), wasn't framed like the others in the series (got more trees on left, lost some on right), etc. But oh well.
It's interesting just how much thicker the leaves are here than they were a month ago, and now we're starting to see people coming back out onto the water on the sculling canoes, which is nice to see.
Same scene, through the year:
* May 2009
Via WBUR: Saying Goodbye To The Historic Olmsted Elm
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Tuesday is your last full day to bid goodbye to the historic Olmsted Elm, which is scheduled to be cut down Wednesday after a 200-year life and a long battle with Dutch Elm disease.
The Olmsted Elm is not just any tree. It stands beside what was once the office of Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture and the man behind Central Park in New York City and Boston’s own Emerald Necklace. When Olmsted bought the property in 1883, he chose to clear away the other trees that surrounded the elm — to leave it standing alone on the south lawn.
Now, the site is a national park and the once-magnificent elm is visibly thinned out and unhealthy. Supervisory park ranger Alan Banks and others at the National Park Service worry it could fall and damage the building. So Banks, who has been a ranger at the site for 20 years, is preparing to say goodbye.
• • • • •
Via the Frederick Law Olmsted page from the National Park Service
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost parkmaker. Olmsted moved his home to suburban Boston in 1883 and established the world's first full-scale professional office for the practice of landscape design. During the next century, his sons and successors perpetuated Olmsted's design ideals, philosophy, and influence.
Bidding Farewell to the Olmsted Elm
Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site is preparing to bid farewell to its "Olmsted Elm" due to its hazardous condition. The tree removal is expected to take place at the end of March. The National Park Service hopes to replace the elm with a genetic clone derived from the original tree once the ground has been prepared and one of several clones, or propagules, has reached sufficient size. To learn more about the elm's history and its removal click here for a .pdf download (1.3M).
If you would like to share your thoughts or reminiscences, please join the discussion on The Olmsted Elm Facebook Page.
