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The scenes of Halloween became evident long before I got on the subway to head downtown to Greenwich Village.
This young person (boy? girl? who knows?) and his companion (sister? mother? who cares?) were walking near the corner of 96th Street and Broadway in the middle of the day on Halloween ...
What's particularly interesting to me, having spent my childhood in suburban towns all across the country, is that city kids march up and down the streets, and dart into every shop, store, and restaurant to demand candy in a loud, raucous voice.
Well, I suppose you can't blame them, for they have no choice ... but notice that in addition to the plastic bag that's already got large quantities of junk food, the companion has a large pink bucket with which to get even more junk food. This was confirmed by a neighborhood restaurant manager, who told me that he found it incredibly annoying that the parents reached into his restaurant's candy supply to get a double scoop of whatever they could get their hands on.
Such is life in modern-day America ...
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street, the cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
A subset of the Seen Series devoted to George Floyd. All scenes are from Portland's Peninsula Park, the site of the city's first organized vigil gathering for George Floyd on Friday May 29, 2020.
These iPhone photos were made the next day as people continued to show their respect and express their anger and grief.
Seen. A series of iPhone scenes from daily walks around Portland neighborhoods with the dogs. Musky here.
Heliconia, derived from the Greek word helikonios, is a genus of about 100 to 200 species of flowering plants native to the tropical Americas and the Pacific Ocean islands west to Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in rainforests or tropical wet forests of these regions. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise. The last term refers to their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers (Strelitzia). Collectively, these plants are also simply referred to as heliconias.
The Heliconia are a monophyletic genus in the family Heliconiaceae, but was formerly included in the family Musaceae, which includes the bananas (e.g., Musa, Ensete; Judd et al., 2007). However, the APG system of 1998, and its successor, the APG II system of 2003, confirms the Heliconiaceae as distinct and places them in the order Zingiberales, in the commelinid clade of monocots.
These herbaceous plants range from 0.5 to nearly 4.5 meters (1.5–15 feet) tall depending on the species (Berry and Kress, 1991). The simple leaves of these plants are 15–300 cm (6 in-10 ft). They are characteristically long, oblong, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles often longer than the leaf, often forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, and consist of brightly colored waxy bracts, with small true flowers peeping out from the bracts. The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna, Strelitzia, and bananas, to which they are related. The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges, yellows and greens, and are subtended by brightly colored bracts. The plants typically flower during the wet season. These bracts protect the flowers; floral shape often limits pollination to a subset of the hummingbirds in the region (Gilman and Meerow, 2007).
Windows to the Tropics, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami FL
These four images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveal the chaotic birth of stars in the Orion complex, the nearest major star-forming region to Earth.
The snapshots show fledgling stars buried in dusty gaseous cocoons announcing their births by unleashing powerful winds, as well as pairs of spinning, lawn-sprinkler-style jets shooting off in opposite directions. Near-infrared light pierces the dusty region to unveil details of the birthing process.
The stellar outflows are carving out cavities within the gas cloud, composed of hydrogen gas. This relatively brief birthing stage lasts about 500 000 years.
Although the stars themselves are shrouded in dust, they emit powerful radiation, which strikes the cavity walls and scatters off dust grains, illuminating in infrared light the gaps in the gaseous envelopes. Astronomers found that the cavities in the surrounding gas cloud sculpted by a forming star’s outflow did not grow regularly as they matured, as theories propose.
The young stars in these images are just a subset of an ambitious study of 304 developing stars, the largest-ever to date. Researchers used data previously collected from Hubble as well as the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope.
The protostars were photographed in near-infrared light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The images were taken Nov. 14, 2009, and Jan. 25, Feb. 11, and Aug. 11, 2010.
Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, N. Habel and S. T. Megeath (University of Toledo); CC BY 4.0
This was taken on the corner of Prince & Lafayette, in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
Part of three photos showing some of the construction of a medical office building for most of the block bounded by Polk Street and Van Ness Avenue on the east and west and Cedar and Geary Streets on the north and south. This building (now completed) created medical offices supporting the a new Hospital (also, now completed) across Van Ness Avenue (the building under construction in the background).
With construction in this area going apeshit, the disruption/change to this neighborhood has, so far, been enormous and neither the hospital nor this office building were even completed. The homeless in the neighborhood are visibly, being driven into the streets and you see many of them wandering about aimlessly. On a personal level my ophthalmologist moved to a nearby, cement, office building. Built in the 80s, it is as characterless as it is nondescript.
Finally, the geotagged map says this neighborhood is "Lower Nob Hill." Lower Nob Hill is a recent, bullshit appellation created by pimping real estate personnel to try and give cachet to this traditionally, down and out neighborhood. In reality, this area is part of Polk Gulch, a subset of the Tenderloin and closer to Russian Hill and Pacific Heights, both of which are easily as wealthy as Nob Hill.
If you don't like the shot, check out the video of Pete and Eddie (hold the command (or control) key and click the link): www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUAky0rlLEY
This was taken at the end of Prince Street, between Elixabeth and Bowery, in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
(more details later, as time permits)
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
Menger sponge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An illustration of M4, the sponge after four iterations of the construction process
In mathematics, the Menger sponge (also known as the Menger cube, Menger universal curve, Sierpinski cube, or Sierpinski sponge)[1][2][3] is a fractal curve. It is a three-dimensional generalization of the one-dimensional Cantor set and two-dimensional Sierpinski carpet. It was first described by Karl Menger in 1926, in his studies of the concept of topological dimension.[4][5]
Construction
The construction of a Menger sponge can be described as follows:
Begin with a cube.
Divide every face of the cube into nine squares, like a Rubik's Cube. This sub-divides the cube into 27 smaller cubes.
Remove the smaller cube in the middle of each face, and remove the smaller cube in the center of the more giant cube, leaving 20 smaller cubes. This is a level-1 Menger sponge (resembling a void cube).
Repeat steps two and three for each of the remaining smaller cubes, and continue to iterate ad infinitum.
The second iteration gives a level-2 sponge, the third iteration gives a level-3 sponge, and so on. The Menger sponge itself is the limit of this process after an infinite number of iterations.
An illustration of the iterative construction of a Menger sponge up to M3, the third iteration
Properties
Hexagonal cross-section of a level-4 Menger sponge. (Part of a series of cuts perpendicular to the space diagonal.)
The n nth stage of the Menger sponge, M n M_{n}, is made up of 20 n {\displaystyle 20^{n}} smaller cubes, each with a side length of (1/3)n. The total volume of M n M_{n} is thus ( 20 27 ) n {\textstyle \left({\frac {20}{27}}\right)^{n}}. The total surface area of M n M_{n} is given by the expression 2 ( 20 / 9 ) n + 4 ( 8 / 9 ) n {\displaystyle 2(20/9)^{n}+4(8/9)^{n}}.[6][7] Therefore, the construction's volume approaches zero while its surface area increases without bound. Yet any chosen surface in the construction will be thoroughly punctured as the construction continues so that the limit is neither a solid nor a surface; it has a topological dimension of 1 and is accordingly identified as a curve.
Each face of the construction becomes a Sierpinski carpet, and the intersection of the sponge with any diagonal of the cube or any midline of the faces is a Cantor set. The cross-section of the sponge through its centroid and perpendicular to a space diagonal is a regular hexagon punctured with hexagrams arranged in six-fold symmetry.[8] The number of these hexagrams, in descending size, is given by a n = 9 a n − 1 − 12 a n − 2 {\displaystyle a_{n}=9a_{n-1}-12a_{n-2}}, with a 0 = 1 , a 1 = 6 {\displaystyle a_{0}=1,\ a_{1}=6}.[9]
The sponge's Hausdorff dimension is log 20/log 3 ≅ 2.727. The Lebesgue covering dimension of the Menger sponge is one, the same as any curve. Menger showed, in the 1926 construction, that the sponge is a universal curve, in that every curve is homeomorphic to a subset of the Menger sponge, where a curve means any compact metric space of Lebesgue covering dimension one; this includes trees and graphs with an arbitrary countable number of edges, vertices and closed loops, connected in arbitrary ways. Similarly, the Sierpinski carpet is a universal curve for all curves that can be drawn on the two-dimensional plane. The Menger sponge constructed in three dimensions extends this idea to graphs that are not planar and might be embedded in any number of dimensions.
The Menger sponge is a closed set; since it is also bounded, the Heine–Borel theorem implies that it is compact. It has Lebesgue measure 0. Because it contains continuous paths, it is an uncountable set.
Experiments also showed that cubes with a Menger sponge structure could dissipate shocks five times better for the same material than cubes without any pores.[10]
This was taken on the side of a building, at the intersection of Varick and King Street -- down in the SoHo district of New York.
The photograph was taken over the weekend, but I firs uploaded on Memorial Day Monday. And now a full month has passed since I took the photo, so I've decided to do a little more tweaking/editing, and upload it again...
I'm not sure this is something to be proud of ... but it is another expression from a certain subset of New Yorkers. We're not all slackers here ... nor are we all wackos, winos, hippies, bums, or party animals.
But maybe we do work too hard ... at least some of us do. Some of the time. Especially on Mondays ...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
(more comments later, as time permits)
**********************************
This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2014 (shown here), 2013 (shown here)
2012 (shown here), 2011 (shown here), 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.
I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, sometimes coming down Broadway to enter the park at 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.
You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists (from New Jersey and from all four corners of the globe), office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day, which always makes me smile — even though I never go up to them and introduce myself.
If I focus on the people coming south on Broadway, and entering the park at 73rd Street, and then continuing to walk southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.
While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the overwhelming majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.
Typically, only about 1-2% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 5-10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb -- but in general, what you're seeing it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...
This was taken on Broadway & 125th St, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan
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This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
I present to the world, the Frankensteintax. See my previous flower images to see the results of this collision.
[read this: Some other people have tried this. You absolutely need a camera which has the lens on a track, and not a flip up mechanism!]
It is simply what you see here, nothing more. I have used simple elastics and some basswood to achieve this with a 1917 Series III Kodak 127 camera. I am planning a more permanent design with a proper Pentax adapter ring. There's absolutely no reason to do this but simply to take over the world.
How is this even possible:
The Pentax is run in manual mode and takes care of the shutter and film speed while the aperture is controlled by the antique lens. The antique lens, thankfully, is not moldy, and has a full shutter open mode called T which is kept open while shooting.
The position of the antique lens on the track pictured here is excellent for Macro since the sensor is a subset of the original projection. Fully unfolded, the lens is about 140-160mm literal (originally 120). For landscapes, the lens needs to be moved back on its track to about 35-50mm, which brings it back closer to it's prime, where a larger subset of the projection is cast onto the sensor. Once the lens is placed about where the subject matter wants it, the old focus spinner still functions. I need to take a field notebook out and also mark findings along the bellows track with tick marks.
If you really want the nerdy explanation (you've been warned about the nerdyness) go here.
The old view finder still works. You can hold the camera against your chest to look down into it and snap the photo. It's really very fun.
Neither camera was harmed and lightning bolts were not used. I believe it may be also be a time machine.
The Rogues Gallery, or just Rogues for short, are a subset of Flash-villains who formed an informal union and alliance consisting of Dmane, President Thawne, White Lightning, Plunder, & Johnny Quick
The Cloncurry River was named by the explorer Robert O'Hara Burke on New Years Day 1861 during his disastrous expedition. It was after a friend from Ireland, Lady Cloncurry.
A gauging station was installed at Cloncurry to measure flow rates and river heights in 1969.
The headwaters of the river rise west of Mount Boorama near Mount Tracey in the Selwyn Range and initially flows north west then turns north travelling more or less parallel with the Cloncurry-Dajarra road before crossing the Flinders Highway near the town of Cloncurry. The river continues north westward flowing under Mount Marathon past Fort Constantine and crossing the Wills Developmental Road. Continuing northward the river is a series of braided channel running parallel with the Burke Developmental Road across the mostly uninhabited plains with many tributaries entering then across Simpson Plain before discharging into the Flinders River of which it is a tributary near Wondoola in Stokes.
The riverbed is composed of Silt with clay and sand, sand and gravel and gravel with cobble.
The river has a length of about 900 kilometres (560 mi) and has a drainage basin of about 47,344 square kilometres (18,280 sq mi).
The watershed south of the town of Cloncurry occupies an area of 5,975 square kilometres (2,307 sq mi).
Source: Bonzle, Queensland Place Names (Queensland Government), Queensland Globe, "Terrestrial invertebrates of dry river beds are not simply subsets of riparian assemblages" by Alisha Steward, & "Hydrological changes and ecological impacts associated with water resource development in large floodplain rivers in the Australian tropics" by Catherine Leigh and Fran Sheldon.
This was taken at the north end of the "East Helmsley Walk", near Grand Central Terminal
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for Nov 16, 2015.
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This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
al molí petit, sant joan de les abadesses, dos arbres que es fan companyia l'un a l'altre, una nit de març de 2011
nova web: tofercu.260mb.com
Tell my haters, They can suck 'em!
"In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, and began hauling customers outside. Tensions quickly escalated as patrons resisted arrest and a growing crowd of bystanders threw bottles and coins at the officers. New York's gay community, fed up after years of harassment by authorities, erupted in neighborhood riots that went on for three days.
The uprising became a catalyst for an emerging gay rights movement as organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance were formed, modeled after the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. Members held protests, met with political leaders and interrupted public meetings to hold those leaders accountable. A year after the Stonewall riots, the nation's first Gay Pride marches were held.
In 2016 the area around the Stonewall Inn, still a popular nightspot today, was designated a national monument.
In 1978, artist and designer Gilbert Baker was commissioned by San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk -- one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US -- to make a flag for the city's upcoming Pride celebrations. Baker, a prominent gay rights activist, gave a nod to the stripes of the American flag but drew inspiration from the rainbow to reflect the many groups within the gay community.
A subset of flags represent other sexualities on the spectrum, such as bisexual, pansexual and asexual."
(more details later, as time permits)
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Another year has elapsed since I last photographed the tango dancers gathering on Pier 45 (where Christopher Street runs into the Hudson River in New York City's West Village), on the weekend before Labor Day, late-August 2014. But the sun was shining one weekend in early June of 2015, and I decided to venture down to Greenwich Village once again...
As I've mentioned in other Flickr sets, I have now met a few of the dancers at previous tango event over the past several; years, and I used to make a point of introducing myself to some of them, handing out business cards with my Flickr address so that people would be able to find these pictures without too much difficulty. But the dancers have good reason to be more interested in the music, and the movement of their partners, than a guy on the sideline with a camera -- so most of them have simply ignored me…
Altogether, I've now taken a dozen sets of tango-related photos, and you can see a thumbnail overview of them in this Flickr collection. And if you'd like to watch some other examples NYC tango dancing, check out Richard Lipkin's Guide to Argentine Tango in New York City.
Even though the dancers seem fresh and enthusiastic each time I come down here to Pier 45, I have a definite sense of deja vu: arguably, I’ve seen it all, I’ve photographed it all, I’ve heard all the tango music several times before. So I decided to do something different this time: I took all of the photos with my iPhone6+ camera. I used the “burst mode” feature on the camera-phone, so even though I took some 4,000 separate images, there were only about 400 “bursts,” and the iPhone hardware was kind enough to tell me which one or two images were reasonably sharp in each burst. From that smaller subset, I was eventually able to whittle things down to 50 images that I thought were okay for uploading to Flickr; that’s what you’ll see here.
Actually, the reason I was motivated to do all of this was not Flickr, but Instagram: for reasons that I can only assume are a stubborn testament to the “culture” of its community, Instagram insists on a “square” format, rather than the 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio favored by most DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras. Even worse, it insists that the photos be uploaded one-at-a-time from a mobile device. Ironically, this last restriction may prove to be too much; I’m uploading the photos to Flickr from my desktop Mac, but I don’t know if I’ll have the patience to upload them individually to Instagram…
Aside from that, I’ve concluded that the iPhone6+ is a handy little device for casual, ad hoc photos and videos; but it really doesn’t have the features I’ve come to depend on for the photos I want to publish. I won’t go into all of the technical details; chances are that you either don’t know, or don’t care, about those details. And if you do, chances are that you’ve made up your mind one way or another. As for me, I will definitely keep using the iPhone for some of my photos — especially the ones that really are casual, unplanned, ad hoc photos when I’ve got no other equipment that I can use. But with sophisticated little “pocket cameras” like the Sony RX-100 and Canon G7X, those moments are pretty rare for me … still, it was an interesting experiment.
As I've also pointed out in some previous Flickr albums, you can see a video version of the tango dancers from 2011, complete with music (which isn’t really tango music, but that’s okay), on my YouTube page; it’s here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqmnTQuwn54&list=UUUXim5Er2O4...
Honey bees (or honeybees) are a subset of bees in the genus Apis, primarily distinguished by the production and storage of honey and the construction of perennial, colonial nests out of wax. Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis. Currently, there are only seven recognized species of honey bee with a total of 44 subspecies (Engel, 1999) though historically, anywhere from six to eleven species have been recognized. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees.
This was taken on Mulberry between Prince & Spring, in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
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This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
Aerial photograph of Oakland, Alameda County, California. Included in this view to the north-northeast are Lake Merritt, and Highway 880. This image is a subset (a clip) of an image that I posted earlier. I present this image to show the resolution of the newish Nikon D850 camera (I’ve had mine for about a year now). Wow, what a great joy it is to use such a terrific camera—and this comment includes more than simply the resolving power.
This was taken at the interaction of 44th and Third Avenue.
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for Nov 15, 2015.
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This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This image of the Karavasta Lagoon in Albania is a subset from the first acquisition by Sentinel-2B on 15 March 2017.
Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017). Processed by ESA
Or, at least, a subset of them. An A4, A5 and A6 book here. Two full and one partly filled. Collecting them is part of the hobby, but filling them is even better fun.
Palomino Blackwing soft pencil
CassArt watercolour tubes
Seawhite sketch book
Oral CBD Prevented COVID-19 Infection in Real-World Patients, Study Suggests.
While not a substitute for vaccines, "CBD has the potential to prevent infections, such as breakthrough infections," the study's lead author said. Cannabidiol—the non-psychoactive cannabis compound better known as CBD—is a potent blocker of SARS-CoV-2 replication in human cells, new research shows. Not only that, but a survey of real-world patients taking prescribed CBD found a “significant” negative relationship between CBD consumption and COVID-19 infection.
As detailed in a paper published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances by a team of 33 researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Louisville, a survey of 1,212 U.S. patients taking prescribed CBD found that people taking 100 milligrams-per-milliliter oral doses of CBD returned positive COVID-19 tests at much lower rates than control groups with similar medical backgrounds who did not take CBD.
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According to the study, all of the patients were people who had seizure-related conditions, which CBD is often prescribed to treat. Of this group, 6.2 percent returned positive COVID-19 tests or a diagnosis, compared to 8.9 percent in the control group. Among a smaller subset of patients who were likely taking CBD on the dates of their first COVID-19 test, the effect was even more pronounced: Only 4.9 percent of people taking CBD became infected with COVID-19, compared to 9 percent in the control group.
"Our results suggest that CBD and its metabolite 7-OH-CBD can block SARS-CoV-2 infection at early and even later stages of infection,” the study states.
Besides looking at real-world data, the scientists conducted lab tests. Lead author Dr. Marsha Rosner, a professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research at the University of Chicago, and her team treated human lung cells for two hours with CBD before infecting them with SARS-CoV-2, and left them for 48 hours while monitoring them for the presence of the COVID spike protein. They found that CBD inhibits the replication of genes required for the growth and spread of the virus throughout the body. They performed the same tests on three COVID-19 variants and found the same result.
“As a bottom line, what this says is that CBD has the potential to prevent infections, such as breakthrough infections, which might be one of the most useful applications,” Rosner told Motherboard.
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The researchers strove to identify the mechanism through which CBD inhibited infection; while they found a negligible effect at the point at which viruses enter cells, they found CBD to be “very effective” at preventing protein expression in cells two and six hours after infection, and “partially effective” at doing so 15 hours after infection. They also found that CBD’s metabolite, 7-OH-CBD—the compound created in the body when CBD is processed in the liver and intestines—has similar antiviral effect and was non-toxic to cells.
The study offers strong evidence that CBD can treat and slow the transmission of COVID-19. It comes just one week after an initial revelation out of Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Sciences University that cannabis precursors (the acids that, when combusted, turn into CBD and THC) can halt the infection of cells by SARS-CoV-2 in lab tests.
Tech
A Q&A With the Scientist Who Discovered Cannabis Can Prevent COVID-19
AUDREY CARLETON
12.1.22
The authors of that study were careful to note that cannabis-derived products, while a potentially important public health intervention, are no substitute for vaccination campaigns. However, in the all-out fight to end the pandemic, they could end up becoming a much-needed supplement.
“Despite recent vaccine availability, SARS-CoV-2 is still spreading rapidly, highlighting the need for alternative treatments, especially for populations with limited inclination or access to vaccines,” the University of Chicago researchers write in their study.
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“What we don't want… is people just running out and thinking, ‘I can take CBD, and then I don't have to get vaccinated or I don't have to be masked,’” Rosner said. “This is what we really don't want to see.”
It seems like there’s a flood of scientific news about the promise of cannabis in preventing or treating COVID-19. Last week, a different group of researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, identified CBD as a primer to a process called apoptosis, or natural cell death—in the case of COVID-19, their research suggests that CBD spurs on the death of infected cells, stopping viral spread in its tracks and slowing the transmission to others.
The studies, in tandem, contribute to a growing body of research identifying cannabis as a tool in the global COVID-19 response arsenal. Rosner and her team first laid the ground for this work in March of 2021, when they identified cannabidiol as a potential treatment for COVID-19 for its ability to hamper viral replication in lung cells in a lab. As detailed in a pre-print, the team found that in quantities similar to those that are prescribed as treatment for epilepsy, CBD inhibits the replication of genes that are required for viruses to spread throughout the body.
Rosner and her team caution against conflating their findings with the suggestion to use recreational cannabis as a treatment for COVID-19: THC may inhibit CBD’s antiviral effects, the authors note, and smoking is bad for your lungs. Without clinical trials, they also can’t recommend that people go out and buy CBD at a dispensary.
“We strongly caution against the temptation to take CBD in presently available formulations including edibles, inhalants or topicals as a preventative or treatment therapy at this time,” the authors write. “Especially without the knowledge of a rigorous randomized clinical trial with this natural product.”
Rosner notes that it’s impossible to know what CBD dosage and formula will be most effective at treating COVID-19 infection until her research moves into clinical trials on humans. After all, Rosner said, “we can only do so much in mice; we really need to do this in people.”
“We think it has a potential, both to be a preventative—so for instance, you can imagine that I'm going traveling and CBD is something that, if we can make the right product accessible, it should be widely available, it should be something people could anticipate needing,” she said. “Or you go and get tested and immediately start taking it. The hope is that it would prevent more serious disease, but we don't know yet. And we would need a clinical trial.” Source: www.vice.com/en/article/bvn743/oral-cbd-prevented-covid-1...
pygmy marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea) - Cuyabeno wildlife refuge, Ecuador
The pygmy marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea) is the world's smallest monkey, but not the smallest primate as the a mouse lemur found across the world in Madagascar is smaller, nevertheless the most striking thing about these little marmosets is how tiny they are. They almost look like mice skittering through the trees. It is found in the Northern Amazon including Ecuador where this was taken. Their uniqueness doesn't end with their dimunitive size either, they are also gummivores. Gummivores are an unusual subset of herbivore that feeds on tree sap and gum although apparently occasional insects are also consumed. They have specialized incisor teeth which they use to chew holes through bark and then lap up the pooling sap. The marmoset social group picks a few trees and stays by them, poking numerous holes through the bark. Which you can actually see the results of in the photo. These are not the best photos as the conditions in the forest were dim and I really had to ramp my ISO up high to get anything, but they're such cool animals I couldn't resist sharing with you all. The dim conditions were exacerbated by the fact that they seemed to hang out in the mid canopy and atleast in the brief time we observed them avoided the brighter edges or top of trees, this makes sense considering how small they are and how many predators must see them as a tasty morsel. Best to stay hidden in the shadows. Hopefully, someday I get another chance to photograph them and can do a bit better.
A subset of the Sin of Bullying.
There is nothing I personally find infuriating is to see a man use his physical strength to intimidate a woman. I've literally gotten into fights over it.
Hybrid Stable Diffusion:Photoshop 25
Heliconia, from the Greek word helikonios, is a genus of about 100 to 200 species of flowering plants native to the tropical Americas and the Pacific Ocean islands west to Indonesia. Many species of Heliconia are found in rainforests or tropical wet forests of these regions. Common names for the genus include lobster-claws, wild plantains or false bird-of-paradise. The last term refers to their close similarity to the bird-of-paradise flowers (Strelitzia). Collectively, these plants are also simply referred to as heliconias.
The Heliconia are a monophyletic genus in the family Heliconiaceae, but was formerly included in the family Musaceae, which includes the bananas (e.g., Musa, Ensete; Judd et al., 2007). However, the APG system of 1998, and its successor, the APG II system of 2003, confirms the Heliconiaceae as distinct and places them in the order Zingiberales, in the commelinid clade of monocots.
These herbaceous plants range from 0.5 to nearly 4.5 meters (1.5–15 feet) tall depending on the species (Berry and Kress, 1991). The simple leaves of these plants are 15–300 cm (6 in-10 ft). They are characteristically long, oblong, alternate, or growing opposite one another on non-woody petioles often longer than the leaf, often forming large clumps with age. Their flowers are produced on long, erect or drooping panicles, and consist of brightly colored waxy bracts, with small true flowers peeping out from the bracts. The growth habit of heliconias is similar to Canna, Strelitzia, and bananas.The flowers can be hues of reds, oranges, yellows, and greens, and are subtended by brightly colored bracts. The plants typically flower during the wet season. The bracts protect the flowers. Floral shape often limits pollination to a subset of hummingbirds in the region.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami FL
This was taken on Canal Street, a couple blocks east of Varick. I noticed it when I was walking back to the Canal Street subway station ...
I have no idea what it means ... but it seems like an interesting "wish" for the 8 million residents of New York City...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
This was taken on Broadway between 117th and 118th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
I stumbled upon this scene at 44th Street and First Avenue, when I was looking for a nice view of the United Nations Building. I guess I wasn't the only one ...
It looks like the two people in the background were getting set up for some kind of news broadcast ... but I don't know what was going on with the guy in the foreground. Maybe he was carrying on a Skype/FaceTime video conversation -- but it sure did look like he was singing to his iPhone. Whether he was associated with the other two people, I never did figure out ...
If I had been willing to hang around for an hour or so, I probably could have spoken to them and found out what was happening. But I didn't have the patience. I took the shot and moved on ...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
"Petit espace vide entre les parties d'un tout"
les tissus urbains et ruraux se maillent, raccordent, rapiècent resserrent leur trames...
Ces espaces m'intéressent car ils sont synonyme de liberté, créent un flou paradoxalement engendré par une partie finie, un ensemble fermé.
"Small space between the parts of a whole"
urban and rural network over fabrics, connect, tightening their frames ...
These areas interest me because they are means freedom, paradoxically create a blur generated by a finite subset, a closed set.
(more details later, as time permits)
************************
A year ago, I uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr and admitted that while I had lived in New York City for 45 years — I had never previously attended, observed, photographed, or participated in the annual Halloween Parade that takes place in Greenwich Village. I won’t repeat the rest of the meandering blather that I wrote … if you would like to see it, and/or the photos that accompanied the notes, you can find them here on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/albums/72157646748393453
In any case, though, I decided to return to the parade again this year … and, like last year, I got off the subway at the Canal Street (express) station, and walked north to where the cops and the parade-floats, the bands and the professional photographers were gathering in anticipation of another year of festivity.
But I quickly discovered that, while last year’s parade started at 7 PM, when it was already cold and dark, this year’s parade was not scheduled to get started until 9 PM. I realize that 9 PM is quite an early hour for ghouls and vampires, not to mention teenagers, young adults, party-goers, and even the majority of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd who were presumably just getting in their trains and buses to make the trek from the wilderness regions of Long Island and New Jersey. But for those of us slightly (ahem) older than the age of 35, 9 PM is about the time when we turn on last night’s video-recording of Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah, and watch in a glassy-eyed stupor for a few minutes before we begin snoring …
So … I decided not to hang around the official starting position at Spring Street for two or three hours, and instead began wandering further north into the more crowded sections of the West Village — near West 4th Street. And I’m glad I did: while there were no bands or “fancy” displays, there was a lot more energy, and a lot of interesting costumes and people (or ghouls and vampires, depending on your preferences).
The only outcasts, far more confused and lost than the out-of-town tourists, were the cops. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands; and this was two weeks before the recent terrorist attacks, with nobody expecting any trouble more serious than an occasional happy drunkard falling over in the street. Most of the cops that I saw were somehow affiliated with a “Community Affairs” department (or division, or whatever); but what made it funny is that none of them seemed to have a clue where they were. At one point, I stood near a friendly, attentive police officer at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street — when a tourist (sounding like he was from Germany) wandered up and asked the cop for directions to 9th Street. The cop shrugged politely and said that he really didn’t know — despite the fact that the street sign for 9th Street was clearly visible, less than a block away. I got the impression that the cops had been brought in from such far-away areas as Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx; and while they could have navigated the neatly-rectangularized streets of mid-town Manhattan, they were utterly lost in Greenwich Village.
Oh, well, it didn’t matter. I watched one woman emerge from the subway, reassuring her clearly-terrified friend, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to New Jersey safely. I promise!” But she took one look at the wildly-costumed crowd around her, near the Waverly Theater, let out a loud “Woo hoo!” squeal, and left her friend behind….
In the midst of all this, I did manage to get some photos … and I’ve uploaded a small subset of them here to Flickr. Enjoy …
This was taken on Canal Street, a couple blocks east of Varick. I noticed it when I was walking back to the Canal Street subway station ...
I have no idea what it means ... but it seems like an interesting "wish" for the 8 million residents of New York City...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...
The Rogues Gallery, or just Rogues for short, are a subset of Flash-villains who formed an informal union and alliance consisting of Lady Flash, Godspeed, Razer, Chroma, & Murmur
Back Row: The Fiddler & Kid Zoom
"Petit espace vide entre les parties d'un tout"
les tissus urbains et ruraux se maillent, raccordent, rapiècent resserrent leur trames...
Ces espaces m'intéressent car ils sont synonyme de liberté, créent un flou paradoxalement engendré par une partie finie, un ensemble fermé.
"Small space between the parts of a whole"
urban and rural network over fabrics, connect, tightening their frames ...
These areas interest me because they are means freedom, paradoxically create a blur generated by a finite subset, a closed set.
This was taken on Thompson Street, just north of Canal.
I assume there is no doubt in anyone's mind that this is a couple ... at least for the moment. Let's hope it continues ...
***************
This set of photos is based on a very simple concept: walk every block of Manhattan with a camera, and see what happens. To avoid missing anything, walk both sides of the street.
That's all there is to it …
Of course, if you wanted to be more ambitious, you could also walk the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But that's more than I'm willing to commit to at this point, and I'll leave the remaining boroughs of New York City to other, more adventurous photographers.
Oh, actually, there's one more small detail: leave the photos alone for a month -- unedited, untouched, and unviewed. By the time I actually focus on the first of these "every-block" photos, I will have taken more than 8,000 images on the nearby streets of the Upper West Side -- plus another several thousand in Rome, Coney Island, and the various spots in NYC where I traditionally take photos. So I don't expect to be emotionally attached to any of the "every-block" photos, and hope that I'll be able to make an objective selection of the ones worth looking at.
As for the criteria that I've used to select the small subset of every-block photos that get uploaded to Flickr: there are three. First, I'll upload any photo that I think is "great," and where I hope the reaction of my Flickr-friends will be, "I have no idea when or where that photo was taken, but it's really a terrific picture!"
A second criterion has to do with place, and the third involves time. I'm hoping that I'll take some photos that clearly say, "This is New York!" to anyone who looks at it. Obviously, certain landscape icons like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty would satisfy that criterion; but I'm hoping that I'll find other, more unexpected examples. I hope that I'll be able to take some shots that will make a "local" viewer say, "Well, even if that's not recognizable to someone from another part of the country, or another part of the world, I know that that's New York!" And there might be some photos where a "non-local" viewer might say, "I had no idea that there was anyplace in New York City that was so interesting/beautiful/ugly/spectacular."
As for the sense of time: I remember wandering around my neighborhood in 2005, photographing various shops, stores, restaurants, and business establishments -- and then casually looking at the photos about five years later, and being stunned by how much had changed. Little by little, store by store, day by day, things change … and when you've been around as long as I have, it's even more amazing to go back and look at the photos you took thirty or forty years ago, and ask yourself, "Was it really like that back then? Seriously, did people really wear bell-bottom jeans?"
So, with the expectation that I'll be looking at these every-block photos five or ten years from now (and maybe you will be, too), I'm going to be doing my best to capture scenes that convey the sense that they were taken in the year 2013 … or at least sometime in the decade of the 2010's (I have no idea what we're calling this decade yet). Or maybe they'll just say to us, "This is what it was like a dozen years after 9-11".
Movie posters are a trivial example of such a time-specific image; I've already taken a bunch, and I don't know if I'll ultimately decide that they're worth uploading. Women's fashion/styles are another obvious example of a time-specific phenomenon; and even though I'm definitely not a fashion expert, I suspected that I'll be able to look at some images ten years from now and mutter to myself, "Did we really wear shirts like that? Did women really wear those weird skirts that are short in the front, and long in the back? Did everyone in New York have a tattoo?"
Another example: I'm fascinated by the interactions that people have with their cellphones out on the street. It seems that everyone has one, which certainly wasn't true a decade ago; and it seems that everyone walks down the street with their eyes and their entire conscious attention riveted on this little box-like gadget, utterly oblivious about anything else that might be going on (among other things, that makes it very easy for me to photograph them without their even noticing, particularly if they've also got earphones so they can listen to music or carry on a phone conversation). But I can't help wondering whether this kind of social behavior will seem bizarre a decade from now … especially if our cellphones have become so miniaturized that they're incorporated into the glasses we wear, or implanted directly into our eyeballs.
If you have any suggestions about places that I should definitely visit to get some good photos, or if you'd like me to photograph you in your little corner of New York City, please let me know. You can send me a Flickr-mail message, or you can email me directly at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com
Stay tuned as the photo-walk continues, block by block ...