A Unique Opportunity

 Whenever I come back to Long Island, crossing the Throg's Neck Bridge, I always take a quick glance or two to the west to look at this scene - the Whitestone Bridge which is about 2 miles away.  I have even tried photographing this scene while driving (wait, wait wait, here me out...) by holding my camera out at arms length over the passenger seat, pointed out the window.  BUT I NEVER LOOK, I just hold the camera and shoot blindly.  Those photographs invariably have some of the blurred suspension cables between me and the Whitestone Bridge.  BUT... on this day, Kathy was driving and I was a passenger in the right seat and I could concentrate on shooting quickly and anticipating when a space between the suspension cables was clear.  And that's how I finally got this shot!  Safe and sound!  An amazing scene, right?

An Old Tree Stump

I haven't shot anything around here in a couple of days, so I was looking for some other photographs that I have done that I haven't posted.  This tree stump was photographed when I was at the Stellafane Convention in Vermont. I am guessing the top of this tree has been gone for years.  It is difficult to explain what attracts me to this, but I just loved the different shades of green on this old stump. And the different textures as well.  I will be interested to hear if others like this as much as I do.

 

An Amazing Little Camera

This is a photograph I took in my hotel room early one morning, in Boulder, Colorado, in 1983.  I was using a new "Point-and-Shoot" camera made by Nikon, called an L35 AF for "autofocus."  Around this time a number of manufactures had started producing point-and-shoot cameras, and then this Nikon model came out and was immediately adopted by a number of professional photographers!  It had a 35mm f/2.8 lens that was really sharp and it was a joy to shoot with.  Just point and shoot!  It used 35mm film.  By today's standards it was a bit bulky, but compared to regular Nikon Single Lens Reflex cameras, it was small and light.  I carried it in a pouch on my belt and it was so much fun to shoot with.  After a while I bought one of these cameras for my mom and she loved it!  Eventually much smaller point-and-shoots came out and I upgraded.  But I used this camera for a number of years.

Here are a couple of photographs of the camera I grabbed online.  I hung on to my camera for years after I stopped using it, and then, painfully tossed it because it was no longer working, but I hated to part with it, because it had been such a faithful companion.

The Other Gift that Keeps on Giving

I was on my way to my astronomy meeting tonight, and I brought my toy camera just in case.  Although I always have my smaller Canon T7i camera with me.  I had no idea what I was going to post tonight, until I pulled into a parking spot down by the planetarium.  I get to use a spot close, because of all I have to carry into the meeting - two computers, one for me, one for the presenter, and a bag with my wireless audio equipment, and a tripod and a wooden table top for my computer.  Whew!  Anyhow one glimpse at this Rose garden at dusk which I have photographed before, and I knew I had something.  Whew!  My little "toy" camera does an astounding job, doesn't it?  Please be sure and click on this to see it larger.

 

The Japanese Maple at Night

So here is the Japanese maple as you have never seen it before, I think.  It was a happy accident!  Kathy still sees maybe one or two clients at night.  They show up at 7:30 when it is light but as the days get shorter, it is completely dark when they leave.  Kathy was worried about someone not being able to see in the dark as they walk back down the driveway,  so I said I would figure something out.  So I got one of my small tungsten spotlights and put it on a light stand, which I stuck in the garden, and was able to nicely illuminate the driveway.  After the couple left, I walked down to the street and looked back up at the Japanese maple and realized it looked so different at night with my spotlight on it!  So here you are, a different look to my favorite tree!

 

Snyder's Garage, Nederland, Colorado

This is the strangest story. I am cleaning up and trying to throw out all kinds of things I have been saving.  A lot of it was put back in the darkroom after the oil tank was taken out.  I fount his 5x7 print with a white cut mat around it, buried with other photographs.  I *thought* that I remembered passing this old garage when I was in Scottsdale, AZ on the way to Tonto National Monument, which is a site with ancient cliff dwellings.   On the mat it said: "Snyder's Garage, Nederland, Colorado, 1985."  Only when I looked up Nederland, it was no where near Scottsdale.  It is 800 miles away.  I also thought I remembered driving through the mountains on a two lane road, and finding this all by itself, not near any town.  Well that was wrong too.  Now I am thinking it was an assignment in Boulder, Colorado where I photographed the man who started "Soldier of Fortune" magazine.  I think I arrived in Boulder really early, and then drove on to Nederland just to see what was there.  And the garage is in the middle of town!  Man oh man, my brain is full!  Anyhow here it is, and it was famous in this town and is a beloved piece of Nederland history but lay derelict for years.  Sad to say, it was just demolished.  Well, this is what it looked like 40 years ago!

Paint and Light

Our house is over one hundred years old.  Heck, we've been in it for 53 years already!  We have the old fashioned double hung windows.  That means there are two separate "window sashes" one above the other and they both move up and down.  They stay in place because there are ropes made of clothesline   that go from each sash, up over pulleys and the ropes are connected to hidden iron window weights which counterbalance each sash.  Of course, in the time we have lived here, every once in a while a rope breaks and so gradually I have replaced most of the ropes with a special chain. Anyhow, the tracks the sashes travel in on the sides of the window frame and the windowsill get dirty because the weather brings dirt and grime in through the screens.  So it was time to paint the sides and the windowsill in a number of our windows. This morning it was sunny and I backed away from the work I was doing for some reason, and loved the way the light reflected, and for some reason, seeing the paint brush on the tin can with some paint in it, seemed worthy of a photograph.  It's all about the light, I think.

 

Vivian's Fish

I was looking through some older photographs, some that I had set aside for one reason or another.  When I saw this, I couldn't remember why I didn't post it after I shot it.  This is so cute!  Vivian actually found this dead fish lying on the sandbar after the tide went out, and she was fascinated by it.  I have never seen a fish this long and this thin, and I wonder what kind of fish it is.

 

Poof! Gone!

On Monday, I drove by this house on my bike ride.  I have been passing it for about 18 years now.  It is in an upscale neighborhood.  On Monday there was a temporary chain link fence around the property and inside the fence there were stakes and orange tape.  There were two giant dumpsters in the driveway.  Uh oh...  That didn't look good.  This is one of my stops on my route where I write down my times.  So I decided to take a couple of photographs with my iPhone, shooting through the chain link fence.  I should have done one photograph showing the chain link fence, but I didn't.

Here is a close up of the front of the house.  It looks fairly modern, and attractive with the stone facade.  Well, guess what.  It is ALL GONE now in just a few days!

When I drove by today I was stunned that everything was gone, and so quickly!  The dump truck is in the way, but you can see some debris on the foundation in between the truck and the dumpster.  That's all that's left.

And here's another photograph showing where the garage and the dumpsters were. Here's the crazy thing, I looked up the value of this house and property, and it was $1,900.000!  There is a lot of land here, so I expect to see a McMansion here soon.  So stay tuned and I will show you what I see.  As I think about this area that I ride through, I have seen at least 5 or 6 houses, just offhand that were torn down and new mansions built,  in the last ten years, just in this small neighborhood.  It is the way of the future.

 

Our New Street!

                               

Our street is Done!  And it's beautiful!  We went out for some errands and returned home at about 12:30 and there were small trucks on the lower end of our street.  We also saw larger trucks at the top of the street.  We pulled into the driveway, and thought "We're not going anywhere now!"   I should say that this first photograph is the best of all, with the worker close to me and the steaming paving machine with all the men on it, in the background.  It's really the best photo and the only one I need.  Please click on this because I posted a larger size than normal so you can see more detail.

The next sign we saw were these huge trailer trucks which are filled with asphalt paving material.  There is a lot of material in each truck, and it was amazing how quickly the tracked asphalt paver emptied each truck.  

This machine is really complex in all that it does, and with great precision.  The asphalt truck backs up to the paver and starts emptying the hot asphalt into the hopper on the front of the paver, as the paver slowly crawls along the street.  The worker on the street who is holding on to the paver, is making minor adjustments on the height, or depth of the asphalt the paver puts down on the street on his side, and another worker is adjusting the other side.

Right after the paver passes, what I used to call a "steam roller" as a kid, but is now called, get this, a "Caterpillar Smooth Double Drum Vibratory Ride On Roller."  Not only do these compress the asphalt which has been put down, but both drums have vibrators inside them that help compact the asphalt!  Look how big this thing is!

This is the back end of the paver and it's a busy place.  The driver is up on top, and the men on the left and right are carefully monitoring the thickness of the asphalt, while the man in the center checks the depth of the asphalt with a metal rod and a round disk on it.

This other road roller follows right after the paver and compacts the asphalt in the more central part of the road, and the other roller, shown in a previous photo, carefully rolls the asphalt right up against the curb.  The way the whole crew worked in a practiced method was wonderful to watch.   It really didn't take all that much time to pave the street because everything was really efficiently done.  I also need to tell you how friendly all the workers were!  A few asked why I was photographing and I said that I was really a 12-year old kid who loved big machinery, and when I said that a couple of times, they broke out in big grins, because they know the fascination.  They were so good in answering all my questions of how everything works as well.  It was such a really nice experience photographing all of this and talking to the crew!  A fun day for this 12-year old!

And last but not least, here is our beautiful new road!  And we are all happy about that!

At The Telescope

At our astronomy meeting tonight, the program was a professional astronomer and professor from the University of Wisconsin who spoke on the subject of "Supermassive Black Holes and Quasars." After the meeting, the director of the planetarium opened up the observatory because the night was clear and there were things to see!  Toward the end of observing one member had his laptop and an astronomical camera, so he was trying to take a photograph of a nebula, just to see if it was possible.  As I looked on, I said "wait, don't move!"  Because I was desperate for a blog post tonight, and this was it!

 

Fun With The Wind

It's Tuesday so we had coffee at the beach, of course.  The wind was really blowing today. As we were leaving we saw this small sailboat sailing by us, tacking as they headed out of the harbor.  What was interesting was that there were three people aboard!  This is usually a single-handed boat, and it will carry two if you want to sail with a friend.  So three is a crowd, but the wind was really blowing and these kids were having a really fun time!

The great thing is that all of them were wearing life jackets, which is really important.  You can see how large the waves are, because in this shot you can't see the hull of the boat.  I have sailed our Sunfish in high winds, and it is one of the most fun things an avid sailor can do!  It made me feel good to see these kids having such a great time!

 

Disaster!

After milling our street, the next day a crew came in and added thin layers of blacktop to areas to level them out, in preparation for the giant coating machine to come.  Then something unfortunate happened.  We had heavy thunderstorms both Saturday night and Sunday night.  So much water came out of a large pipe at the top of the hill, that the street was trashed!  There were large holes on the sides of the road some a foot wide and a foot deep and some 3 feet long, and water flowed under the blacktop, lifting it up and carrying some of it away!  I couldn't believe the mess.

What was absolutely amazing today was that a relatively small crew arrived and worked most of the day, and when they were done, the street looked as if nothing had happened.  I couldn't believe how quickly they fixed all the problems.  Now we await the giant paving machine which will put the final coat of blacktop down and our street will be in better condition that I can remember.

 

The Monster on our Street

I was in the basement the other day and heard a loud engine and some kind of grinding noise.  I thought it was a street sweeper but it didn't seem to be moving closer in any kind of hurry, so I came up out of the basement and saw this road milling machine.  It has a giant drum underneath it, with huge carbide teeth and they grind down the top surface of the road and then the ground up blacktop goes up a conveyor on the front and dumps into the dump truck that leads it!  Oh man, what an incredible machine.  So I grabbed a camera and started shooting.

Its first pass was down the street on the side where the worker is standing.  You can see that the road is lower there.

The reason I heard the machine was that it has a monster engine in it that makes it go and that runs the grinder.  I looked it up and the engine is 800 horsepower!

And this thing is big!  It dwarfs all the other equipment that comes along with it, like the dump trucks and the front end loader that cleans up some of the left over debris from the milling.

This is what the milled street looks like after a few inches of blacktop has been ground off.

Want to hear a funny story?  As I ran down the driveway to get a better photograph of the machine, heading downhill, it was followed by an empty dump truck which would take the place of the full one.   The driver passed me and hollered out his window, asking if I knew who owned the car, on the left in this photo.  I said I did and ran up the stairs of the neighbor's house, but no one answered the door.  So I grabbed my cell phone and called the neighbor's cell phone.  He said he was at work and I quickly explained about the road milling machine and he said he would try and reach the driver who was their nanny.  The milling machine by then had turned around and was headed back up the street.  It paused for a bit and I talked to the foreman and told him what I did.  He said it would be OK, they would just drive around the car while milling!  Well, they did that, but the passed pretty close, don't you think?

Here is the result of their close pass!  The foreman said it would be OK, they would just do that spot after the car was moved.  He said there was no parking and that we had gotten flyers in our mailboxes letting us know we couldn't park on the street during this period.  I said that we had not received any notice.  He said he would call his office and let them know.

This is hysterical.  Late in the afternoon, we all found flyers in our mail boxes, and we found these bright yellow signs on all the telephone poles on the street!  Just a bit late, I would say!  The woman did move her car, and they were able to finish this part of our street by the end of the day.  A bit of excitement for a usually quiet street.

 

Cirque du Soleil !!!

Kathy wanted to see Cirque du Soleil because she had seen a documentary on TV about them and their struggle to get through the pandemic and survive, and what it took for all the practice performers had to go through get back in peak condition.  I bet it has been five years or more since we have seen any kind of show or performance at all.  They were performing at the brand new UBS Arena which is not far from Kennedy airport, so we were curious to see the new facility.  The  Cirque du Soleil performance was astounding and beautiful and funny!  What a night!  This is one performer doing a one-hand handstand on top of a metal structure.  All of these performances were physically demanding, if course, but the extra part was how absolutely beautiful their movements were.  PLEASE be sure and click on each photograph to see all the details in a larger sized image.

The theme this year was insects, and these costumes were brilliant.  These green men had extra parts of Praying Mantis-like legs on the backs of their legs and when they walked, it was such a strange and amazing thing to see!

I decided to bring my little SONY "toy camera" as I call it and I hoped I would be allowed to bring it in to the arena.  Good thing I brought that camera.  There was a list of things you could not bring into the venue, and one of them was "No professional cameras with interchangeable lenses."  Whew!  Dodged a bullet on that one.  I was astounded at what I was able to do with my little SONY.  I was amazed to see that I got the exact millisecond when the man on the top had flipped his partner around in a circle and was about to catch her hands after she complete a complete rotation!  And this is up in the air with no safety net!

This was both beautiful and amazing...  This woman is up in the air being connected to a steel cable from above, which was connected to all of her hair!  Just unimaginable, and yet so beautiful.  Oh, and get this!  Remember the part about no cameras with extra lenses, like a telephoto lens that would bring you closer to the performers?.  Part way through the evening, I decided to try something.  I had brought my Nikon 10x40 binoculars.  I experimented with holding up the lens of my little camera to one side of the binoculars, and I ended up with something like a 200mm telephoto lens!  It was not perfect, but it got me this photograph!

Near the end of the evening a whole bunch of guys in these green suits were up on the top of the tan curving wall you see, and suddenly two of them just leaned back and fell down toward the floor.  We all gasped and then suddenly we could see them hit a trampoline and disappear down into it, only to re-emerge flying upward with enough speed to go all the way back to the top!  Here some are falling, and some are on the way back to the top from a rebound from the trampoline.  It was unbelievable!

Two women performers holding on to heavy bands of material perform together.  There was something about this performance of these two women, that was so incredibly beautiful, it brought tears to our eyes from the grace of their movement.

This is one of the curtain calls, and you can see the some of the amazing variety of costumes that were on the performers during the night's show.

And as we left this amazing show, I turned and did a quick shot of the entrance to the arena.  

 

What Ruin is This?

What an amazing scene this is!  I looks like the leftovers from some strange crucifixion, doesn't it?  We saw this from the grounds of the new UBS Arena in Queens, this evening.  More on that in another post.  This is the remains of the old "clubhouse" of Belmont Racetrack.  The clubhouse includes the grandstands where people watch the races from.  This is the old one, and a new one will be built, and I think it will be on the opposite side of the racetrack itself and it will look very modern according to the renditions I have seen.

 

To Brighten Your Day

I still have some things "left over" from Mass MoCA, and this is one of them.  The museum refurbished a complete four story building, just so they could install an enormous number of Sol LeWitt paintings.  The exhibition is overwhelming in its size and an joy to explore.  There are so many different types and colors of painting it would take me a month to just give you a hint of the variety of his work.  In total he did 1,350 "wall drawings" which are permanently painted on a wall, rather than on canvas.  It was a gray day and raining by the time we arrived at this building, and this was one of the first paintings I saw.  It is called "Wall Drawing 915, Arcs, circle, and irregular bands."  Doesn't this just brighten your day!  Imagine a whole room - a whole floor - of bright paintings like this!  I found a website with a great explanation of his work an a number of his other designs.  You can find that website HERE.

 

This is Sobering

This is sobering!  When we were having our Dunkin' Donuts day at the beach, I took my camera and walked down to the edge of the water to look at something.  At the hight tide line, where was this collection of seaweed and sticks and other stuff that had washed up at high tide. Then I saw this!  I couldn't believe my eyes, but of course I knew what it was right away.  I was just stunned to find it at our beach.  Of course it could have floated all the way across the sound.  It was still a shock.

 

Along My Walk

A week ago, my car went in for its New York State inspection.  It wasn't ready until late in the afternoon, and Kathy had started seeing clients, so she couldn't drive me over.  So I decided to walk the two miles to the shop.  I always enjoy these walks.  I have done this walk so many times, since I like driving over to drop the car, and then walking home.  I always bring a camera - now there's a surprise!  So this is a Rose of Sharron bush I saw along the way and stopped to photograph.  It's not a great photo, but it is something for the blog when I am desperate...

 

Glowing Lights in the Dark

I went out the other night to take a quick look at the sky with my binoculars for a few minutes.  When I turned around to come back in to the house, I saw these windows in the new back room glowing in the dark because I left the lights on.  Normally I turn all the lights off so that I won't have stray light lighting up the back yard and ruining my night vision.  I thought the light made it an interesting photograph.  And of course, I needed a blog post!