Port Jefferson

This is Betsey and Joan, and Joan's daughter Jenny.  Betsey and Joan are my sisters, and you always see their comments on the blog.  They took the ferry over from Connecticut to spend the day in Port Jefferson, and so I went out to see them and have lunch.  We had a nice time hanging out, and met some interesting people that we stopped to talk with.  This is a portrait I did outside of this yoga store because it looked as if they were in the jungle.

 

And this is the Grand Republic, one of the ferries that travels between Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Port Jefferson.  I always like to photograph the ferries coming and going when I am around them.  The boat is docking, and it is being controlled by the captain, out on the platform to the left, where he has controls for both the engine and the rudder and the underwater thrusters.  This is a big boat, as the photograph below shows.

I really love the "jungle" picture above, but thought I would post this photograph below, of all of us together.  I saw a family trying to take a picture, and asked if I could do it for them, so that everyone could be included.  Then when I was done, I asked if one of them could do this photo of us.  Turnabout is fair play!

Looking for Mercury

I went down to the harbor this evening at sunset.  I wanted to find the planet Mercury.  You have to wait until the sky darkens perhaps a half hour after sunset.  The problem is that the longer you wait for darker skies, the lower Mercury gets to the horizon, and to the haze which can begin to obscure it.  I was using big binoculars - 16x70 Fujinons, and I looked for 40 minutes, but never found the planet. But the afterglow of sunset was pretty nice, so I made this photograph of the sky and the water in-between looking for Mercury, so it wasn't a total loss.

"a beckoning: we are not who we think we are."

I saw this amazing work of art in one of the large galleries at Mass MoCA.  It is a passageway slightly longer than one hundred feet.  You can get some idea of its size from the person at the far end.  It is a tunnel, lined with canvas and fabric, and then painted with vinyl.  And you walk right on the vinyl paint which covers the floor.  I was reluctant to enter the tunnel because I would be stepping on the paint, but I watched others walk right in. At the opening end, the colors are shades of blue, almost as if you are underwater.

As you get past the half way mark, the colors start to change to green and brown.  The feeling becomes creepy - it is amazing how color can affect our emotions.  I kept coming back to this as I spent time in the museum. I would go away, see some other exhibits, and then come back.  It is a really unusual work of art, in my experience and it was more powerful than I first expected.  The last photograph is a view from the second floor at the end of the gallery looking toward the front of the piece.  The artist is Rodney McMillian, and the piece is titled ""a beckoning: we are not who we think we are."

At Breakfast

I stay at a wonderful bed and breakfast in Vermont, called the Henry Farm Inn.  It is a wonderful old farmhouse with an addition that was added to the back of it a long time ago.  All the rooms have wide pine planks for floorboards, and wonderful old doors everywhere.  I was sitting alone at breakfast the first day I was there and my plate of eggs and sausage had just been put in front of me, when I noticed the sunlight on this door and this beautiful doorknob.  I jumped up, got my camera off my belt and started photographing.  Pat, who had just served me breakfast could not imagine what I was doing, instead of eating my breakfast.  Of course all of you could explain to her that I am a crazy person when it comes to photographing the world around me!

Brattleboro Hinsdale Bridge

So after I photographed the railroad tracks with weeds growing, I continued on to this bridge over the Connecticut River.  It is a beautiful piece of engineering, known as a "Pennsylvania Truss Bridge."  It was built in 1920 by the American Bridge Company.  One source I read said that bridges here have "been carried away, by floods and ice, on the average of once in every ten years."  Wow, that is amazing, but of course this bridge has lasted almost a hundred years.  Here's the thing, these bridges are expensive to maintain.  Way back in my blog you can find a photograph of a bridge, in a post on Sunday, August 17, 2008, near Owego, NY.  That truss bridge has been torn down and replaced by a concrete bridge and that is the fate of so many of these engineering marvels.  I love the delicate appearance of the truss work as seen from a distance.

Amy Arrives!

Yeaaaaaa!  Amy came to visit!  She took the red-eye out of Los Angeles last night, and then when she got to JFK she got on the air train and took it to Jamaica, and then a LIRR train to Glen Head.  That means I only had to drive for ten minutes to pick her up.  Beats  a 90 minute round trip to JFK and back!  And it is fun to just hang out and catch up.

No Trains Been Through Here For Some Time Now...

I stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont on the way up to the convention.  I stop there because there is this amazing outdoor store called "Sam's."  It is in a huge,  multi-story building, and it is so much fun to wander around just to see what's there.  After wandering in the store, I decided to wander down to the Connecticut river to see what I could see.  On the way I crossed over these railroad tracks, and was taken by how tall the weeds were. And then my next thought was that there haven't been any trains through here in a long time.