Front and back

Some sanps out of the front 4th floor windows and on the 4th floor porch this AM.  All treated with faux Ektachrome 100VS via Alien Skin's Exposure 3.

Flag atop Hamstead HillPratt Street Frieze

Pratt Street Turret

Fronting Paterson Park

Harbor East

Fells and Locust Points

Up on the roof top...

whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.  No not St. Nick but maybe prepping for his arrival.  A new roof 50 yards away - Patterson Park Avenue. On Tuesday the 20th. Safeway smokestack in Canton and the Key Bridge in the background.  7D with 100 - 400L @300 to 400mm.

Looking for excitement?

Releasing the adhesive

Releasing the adhesive - detail

Prepping for St. Nick

Celtic Solstice

Was at the race this morning, lots and lots of snaps — ~2,400. Will put a few up here and will link to a smugmug gallery or two for the ones that make the cut, as I get through them. All RAWS of course so it takes a while to get them selected, processed and uploaded. All of the snaps (~825) are uploaded click here or on any of the snaps below to jet off to smugmug. 

These images will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Which means you can use them for yourself for non-commercial purposes.  There are full size downloads available on smugmug by double-clicking on the large image on the right and choosing O(riginal) from the menu on the top.

BTW, my approach to shooting races is to seek isloated, interesting faces, so I shoot with a long lens and a wide aperture, creating a very narrow depth of field — one thing (usually a face) in focus and everthing else out-of-focus and blurred. For those who care, all the snaps here were taken with a Canon 7D with a 70-200 f/2.8L lens, some were taken with a 1.4 extender in-place.  The exif information is available for the snaps posted on smugmug. 

This snap was early, before the race and they are the only people who got the blog URL. I wonder if they remember. They were hot to get snapped until I told them I wasn't an official photographer, they hemmed and hawed, then they said what the hell — earning themselves the top slot.

The equivolcal subjects

The leaders at about 1 3/4 miles

The leaders at the 3 mile mark

Flying

Thematic

Kristen Kringle and elf escort

Why drive to Cherry Hill

when M Street NW is so convenient.  Especially if you have to gas up here with a $1.20 per gallon premium. Not only not Cherry Hill but also not at 3:00AM either.  Corner of M and 22nd Streets NW at about 5:15PM. X100, f/2.0 ISO 640. Shutter speeds between 1/40 and 1/60.

A little different appraoach up M toward Georgetown.

DCFD Truck #2

Miracle on 34th Street...

Baltimore style.  A sucessful visit to Hampden tonite.  A few posted here along with a gallery to follow and maybe a smug mug gallery if there are enough.  Need to make a return trip with a wider angle lens, 24mm isn't quite enough to take this all in.  Hah!

Have long heard about this street but didn't know where it was until we tripped acrossed it going to the art museum and missing the expressway exit. Strange bedfellows.

All with then 5D Mk II and the 24-70 f/2.8L

Corner of W. 34th Street and Keswick Avenue

Spotted by SO

Make it a Maryland Christmas

Focus? Who needs focus — you get the picture.

Klassy Kandy Kane Kristmas

Return with me now to those great days of yesteryear...

No not the Lone Ranger but the Erie Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken. Ferry rides to Manhattan in the 50's and early 60's. Commuting with NJ Transit and PATH in the 70's and 80's. Haven't been in the place since at least 1988. Been redone, maybe a couple of times, not completely devoid of patina, but still very diferent. The Rail Head Bar, purveyors of fine hot dogs and Balentine Ale is still there minus more than a few layers of grit, grunge and grease and alas no more Bally Ale. Yesterday's dogs wern't bad and as another customer said, the mustard packs a bit of a punch.  

Spent a lot of time in this place especially after the all too often just missing the 7:00PM Boonton Line local and having to hang around for the 8:20 or missing the 8:20 and waiting for the 10:00PM.  

"8:20 Boonton Line local making all stops between Rowe Street and Lincoln Park, Allllll Abooooord".  Seems like only yesterday.

E-L Hoboken Terminal - Ticket Windows

Other than the trains themselves the most import parts of the terminal — the excuse lines and the beer recycling facility.

E-L Terminal - Mission Critical Facilities

Apparently still an important way point on the party circuit!

Track 12 - The powers to be think they are clever, libertarians unite.Seen from the High-Line

E-L Hoboken Terminal - From the High-Line in mid-Manhattan

4:35PM... 20 minutes ago!

The sun was heading down into a clearing sky after a days worth of rain.  Spectactular. Butcher's Hill, Locust Point, Fells Point, Domino Sugars.

Baltimore Harbor — November 29, 2011 at 4:31PM

 And around to the west five minutes later. Butcher's Hill, Fells Point, Domino Sugars, Harbor East.

Baltimore Harbor — November 29, 2011 at 4:36PM

Black Friday

So it is Black Friday '11 and another trip to Manhattan. Travelled light with only the X100 and some extra cards and batteries.  First real zone focusing experience — some good results and some misses. Anyway easier and much more stealthy than a DSLR.

Below is first snap posted — although it was among the very last snapped. Many more to follow, plus some more additions to the woodturning gallery from last weekend still to come. The first thiry or so of what will probably be about 150 or so are up in the the first gallery. Click here or on the snap below to zoom off to the gallery.

Thirty Forth Street side of Macy's

Clearing

well maybe.  A clouple of days with heavy rain and dense clouds.  The sun broke through for a while around lunch time. Time enough for a quick couple of snaps with the X100 — prepping for the second annual Black Friday excursion to Manhattan.  Still hoping to be able to pull that off dispite some achilles tendonitis.

The tall building in the middle of shot is Silo Point, a rehabbed B&O grain elevator that is now apartments and as of yesterday the other end of my 5GHz uWave internet access link.  Was pointed at downtown but they needed to upgrade the antenna and along with it came a different route.

X100 then smashed to smithereens with a a half dozen plus of Flypaper's Textures.

100 bowls

Off to event today for/by the woodturning Supiks.  Mark's brother Ed bought a live christmas tree in 1984 and after christmas planted it in his yard.  By 2009 the tree was 60' high, 30" around and encroaching on the house. Down it came and became the stimulus for a project by Mark to turn 100 bowls.  Mark turned some but most were turned by amatuers.  Ninety-nine bowls were on display at the Schiavonne Gallery in Highlandtown today and Mark was there to turn the last — number 100. I was there to grab some snaps. Those will get posted along the way tonite and tomorrow but... I decided to capture the bowl turning on video. Fortunately I had the 7D with me, which has an easy to understand movie button, I have no idea where it is on the 5D Mk II, should probably look that up.  I also left the tripod in the car, so this my first real attempt at at video has some shaky parts, visually shaky, the whole thing is artitically shaky. Anyway in for a dime — in for a dollar, stuck the 85 f1/2L on the front, dialed the aperture to, what else, f/1.2 of course, why pay for if you ain't going to use it. Great receipe, no experience, no support system and a razor thin DOF. Post processed with a trial version of Final Cut Pro and uploaded to a virgin Vimeo account. Don't know squat about them either.

Here we go....

Different ship, different time of day

Domino's again.  Same camera, a little longer focal length, techniques just early in the evening on a clear, finally getting cool night. The ship from the other night now high in the water and empty sailed around 2PM today.By 5PM there was a new low in the water, loaded ship in its place.

Pretty good color, 30 second exposure this time, figured out that the Vari-ND can be rotated to get the the exposure where you want it at the shutter speed you want it at — neat.

Domino Sugar — at twilight

Big numbers...

Long focal length: 310mm, Long exposure: 485 seconds, Decent sized aperture: F/8.0, ISO: 100, with a Singh-Ray Vari-ND on the pointing end of the 100-400. Vari-ND turned as dark as it would go — that is supposed to be about eight stops.  A little over four minute exposure, the little over is due to multi-tasking, was surfing the web on the treadmill, while the 5D Mk II was making the image — took a while to from the treadmill to the camera.

Domino Sugar with a ship at the dock.  Was looking for more cloud movement need to work on that.

Offloading at Domino's