We went to the Luchas last night… Normally in the Coliseo de Jalisco they don’t let you take cameras in. In the F Bolko they were much more forgiving, I only wish I’d brought more lenses and an external flash. The camera’s beside the point though because it was another fantastic evening of flying masked men, beers and shouting nonsense.
Read More “Luchador – Victoria!”
We’re being treated like royalty here in Guadalajara by Mario and Ange, and all we seem to need to do to repay the favour is take the occasional photo of the very photogenic Bolo the Beagle… Read More “Bolo”
I have to admit I’d been scared of the NY idea for quite a while. It seemed a bit too much like London- an enormous place full of people sucking money out of your pockets while you dithered about with a map trying to get from one tourist trap to another without getting mugged. After two days here I reckon that while there are definitely parts of the island just like that, we’ve lucked out and are in a great location where everything’s walkable, people seem friendly and there are proper, normal, shops and restaurants. Hellz, there’s even a Trader Joe’s about 10 blocks away. Just a question of training Atticus to understand the command ‘Charles Shaw’ to get him to retrieve the occasional bottle of 2-buck Chuck.
The apartment seems bigger than when we viewed it a month ago and with all our familiar charity shop/ikea furniture and knicknacks in place I’m really looking forward to living/ working here… This was the 1st time we had professional movers do it (because it’s a prohibitively expensive process). Basically on Monday two Ecuadorian blokes turned up with a huge lorry and more cardboard boxes, sellotape and packing materials than I’ve seen during our last 10 moves combined. They methodically swept through the house wrapping, stuffing and carting all our stuff into the van til about 6 hours later nothing was left except for us two, our suitcase and 10 months worth of schipperke fur. We did a final clean of the place, then headed round a friend’s house who made one of the best paella’s I’ve ever had for a farewell meal… next morning, we drove to Portland, left the car in storage, taxi’d it to the airport, flew to La Guardia, then ‘supershuttled’ it to our new quarters where the Ecuador dream team were already unloading our boxes.
It’s the 18th floor (the 17th floor in real money). Out of 30 or so. But the lift is very fast. The view is impressive… There’s a Picasso sculpture out side the entrance… we’re between Greenwich Village and Soho. Everyone seems to have a dog, and they all seem a bit better trained than ‘Cus for urban living. That’ll be a project.
Brunswick had more unsecured wi-fi networks than this area mind. I thought that at least one of the 40 odd available networks in this here skyscraper would connect us to the tubes. Mais non. So I’m typing this in a text editor and shall copy and paste it onto the webs when I get to Think Coffee, the nearest caffeine and wifi emporium. No point in getting internet installed before we bugger off to Guadalajara for a month and half tomorrow is there. That said, with no internet, no dog and no telly, productivity is through the roof.
Highlights this week:
Farewell to Maine and Maine-based peeps
NY Restaurants: Dojo, Tartine, and that Indian one.
The Lomography shop
Rediscovering NPR
Pain-free move
Translating this Oaxacan knicknack would require too much explanation of the ins and outs of Mexican wrestling, but I loves it. “Work hard, play hard” would be near it but doesn’t capture even a fraction of the colour…
Anyroad, just a note to say that any minute now the internets are getting cut off to this here house and we’re moving to NYC, then on Friday, Guadalajara for 6 weeks or so, then L.A. for a week, then back to NY, NY… shall be something of an adventure. My new zip code resolution (to coin a phrase, nay, a tradition) is to update this blog a bit more often. So let’s see how that goes. If you don’t already subscribe by RSS, and would like to be emailed whenever new ramblings find their way to this site, please sign up for email updates here:
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Maine’s been grand. I’m going to miss the folks and the ample, accessible, countryside and coast. We’ll be back… A bientot, folks.
It took a while, but I just got sent a copy of the book where some of my photos are being used. Chuffed is what I am.
Takes me back to the last time I used one of these machines 5 years ago… Wish they were transparent so you could see what’s going on inside.
A parade of vintage vehicles preceded the Memorial Day parade in Brunswick yesterday. I know nothing about cars. I can barely remember the make and model of our car when I take it for an oil change… I think it’s green. Anyroad, I wanted them to be a background element lending atmosphere to the shot rather than being centre stage.
Someone had a birthday… I took all the lovely messages from DrSita’s facebook page and fed them into Wordle and put them over this here diptych of Atticus doing his thing. Here’s the result… Click here for the massive version.
One of the last Maine Photography Meetups for me today down by Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. Read More “Dawn Chorus”
I haven’t uploaded a Through The Viewfinder shot for a while, so here you go… This is from a while back, the first week of ‘spring’ on a phototour Portland, ME. Because of the way Maine’s coastline works incoming ships couldn’t be seen from the harbour so they built this here observatory (not a lighthouse) on the hill so they could see when boats were on their way into the port and sound the horn/ raise the flags to tell the dockers to get on it. Read More “Portland Observatory TTV”
Loved this graffito in Oaxaca (I want to write something but I don’t know what). I want to post it everywhere as it captures a feeling I regularly get.
Today we might finally sit down with a calendar and work out how this summer is going to happen. There’s a lot to sort out, and I keep getting asked for dates for everything. Hopefully we’ll sort it out today so I can give more useful answers.
Read More “Quiero escribir algo pero no sé qué”
What with us moving to New York in the near future, here’s a shot from our garden while we still have one. Matey here is crawling across a solar-powered light that we have in the tree there. A lot easier to photograph than butterflies…
I could understand if it was called Lion’s Mane or something similar, but lion’s teeth always seems like a stretch.
Anyroad… I found out today that by affixing my fisheye lens (x 0.25) onto my manual 28-75mm (f3.5-22) it does a very passable impression of a macro lens. And I know flowers are right up there with sunsets for photographic clichés, but it’s spring innit. Hope you’ll bear with me while I’m going through this phase. I take requests by the way…
Yesterday Brunswick was treated to about 5 seasons in one day. Bright sunshine, gales, snow, hail, rain, cold then heat.
I wanted to get a shot of some of the blossom that has sprung up everywhere of late but with a sense of the elements too. This is a 2 second exposure with a tiny aperture and the polariser in full effect to get the flowers in motion. It took quite a few attempts but this is the best one I managed.
There was an art collective in Oaxaca stencilling (Banksy-style) creations all over the town. We managed to get to the official opening of a gallery exhibit- Disociales. I’m fairly sure this is by the same folks- it was in a little boutique with “no photography allowed” signs. Made to be broken, etc…
In other news, I’ve made a few tweaks to this site, a prize if you can spot them… nothing major but you might like to try out the Random Image Slideshow (beta)
In brief:
Look it: 25 random images from my photoblog slideshow
Mind you:
It doesn’t work in Chrome or Safari (and probably others…), some images will break (cos they’re too big to be resized), some are pixelated (cos they were too small), some aren’t cropped well (cos they’re square or portrait), and the idea is you have a fairly large monitor to see them properly in the first place.
Techyish stuff
Not sure if this is of interest to anyone at all but I thought I’d post it anyway… I’m coming up to the 300th photo on my photoblog (and just hit 13,500 on Flickr…) I’d have more on there but it takes 10 minutes or so for each new post and I’ve been wondering for a while if there’s a way to do it with the tim-thumb.php script rather than using WordPress’ in-built resizing tool and custom fields. Anyway, that’s an issue for another day which, using what I learnt today, should be fairly simple.
So I wanted it to slide from one post to the next rather than load a whole new page. I’ve made inroads today.
It uses:
And that is what passes for excitement during the week in Brunswick, Maine.
Incoming storm clouds provided perfect lightbox conditions for this one. And to the left there was a mezcal factory so this was a full-on sensory overload.
From an unseasonal cloudburst in the town of Oaxaca.
