Of course, it's hard not to be worried about driving over bridges these days. We have long known in Massachusetts that there are a lot of deficient bridges - the government will report this stuff even if they don't do anything about it. Today's Boston Globe brings the story that the Longfellow Bridge that crosses the Charles River in Boston is a deficient structure that is scheduled to be fixed in 2010.

 

 

Coincidentally, I was out shooting the Longfellow Bridge just a few weeks ago, so you can see what we're talking about here. In addition to the car traffic, by the way, there is a Red Line subway track on the bridge. These are from the Boston side of the bridge. The shot above is looking west down the Esplanade. The shot below is looking out over the river towards Cambridge.

 

 

By the way, it seems like $188 billion is a pretty expensive price tag to fix all these bridges, but then, have you seen what the war in Iraq is costing us?

OK, sorry about the meaningless title. It just means that I've been very busy and whilst I have a number of interesting and cool stories I am working on, I have also been thrown into disarray by a move. Oh yeah, and my dye-sub printer is down, broken. I can probably fix it but it requires precious time.

 

Anyway, I have been very active though, so I thought I'd share three recent photos. But first, a minor news update. I talked recently about the lead paint recall for certain Thomas the Tank Engine products. Pull up a chair, because Mattel just recalled a million toys (including Dora and Diego: ¡Ah mi Dios!, Boots, maybe there's something in backpack that can help - say, 'backpack', etc.) and I'm just waiting to see who's next and when or if the gummint decides to get involved.

 

OK, anyway, on to the pictures. You know, I get the occasional compliment on my tan. I wish I could tell you that Kara and I sipped umbrella drinks on the deck every day in our bathing suits, but the reality is that it is mostly the result of running around after the kids in the sun. And that takes us back to Sandy Beach in Winchester. For some reason, I brought my camera with me. I should explain that if it is just me and the kids, I don't bring it. It's too expensive and distracting. It's more than enough to keep both of them out of trouble without worrying about the camera or taking pictures. And inevitably, if you end up taking a picture of, say, Katherine, Alex will make a break for the parking lot. He's only two and a half, but he's fast, man. Believe it.

 

Anyway, I think the whole family was there and so I felt comfortable bringing it. But I didn't really pull it out until after I took the kids for a walk along the perimeter of the beach in the deep water (not much more than a meter, really, maybe four or four and a half feet). Here, 'walk' is defined as me carrying one on each waist and jumping and bouncing around, but I digress. The side boundary was cool for two reasons - the first, that lots of bird and duck feathers get swept against this lane marker and it just looks kind of fun. The second is that there are these small carmely brown dragonflies that love to fly around the orange floats on the lane marker.

 

 

But now I'm getting ahead of myself, because I didn't really finish the story. The point is that Katherine, Alex and I were talking about this stuff and I am just crazy enough to say: hmm, let me come back out after they are done swimming with my camera and take some pictures. The fact that I would have to carry this camera over water and I didn't have a strap occurred to me, but I dismissed it. I mean, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've dropped this camera. There is always a little spot of awareness in my brain about how I am carrying it - you sort of train yourself on this stuff when you work with it for awhile.

 

So there I am, four feet deep in the water, shooting away. Crouching down to get foreground perspective and generally making an ass of myself. It was a lot of fun :^).

 

My next adventure a few days later was at the lower Mystic Lake in Medford. I brought only my 100mm macro lens, intending to shoot a lot of close-ups. And I did, but at one point I looked across the lake and the sun was backlighting the lawn on this beautiful home. I couldn't resist talking a shot just because the lawn was so nice, frankly.

 

And it came out alright too, although that one probably needs a hair of horizon adjustment. I sort of remember ducking into the shade of a tree to take the shot, worried that I'd get glare from the sun and humidity and so forth. This lens is great for longer shots and portraits, but I did come out to do macro shooting.

 

The interesting things about shooting macro is that you really don't have to stray very far to find subject matter. I mean, for this lens to really show off you need to be within a half-meter of the subject, preferably within a foot. It won't focus much closer than that, but it is more than adequate to create wild photos from really trivial objects. So you are not off looking for scenic vistas. The best thing to do is to find an interesting looking spot with lots of small detail, sit down, and just look around for five minutes without even pulling out the camera. You have to get used to looking for really small interesting things. Fortunately, they are all around.

 

 

 

 

I worked this shot hard, from many angles. I have no idea what these things are. They look like ragged pieces of a wig or something. But I believe they are actually the skeletal remains of some mossy fauna that used to grow atop this sawed-off tree stump. My recollection is that the smaller one (on the left) is slight larger than a pea.