Today was probably my last visit to the New York Botanical Gardens for a while. My passes expire at the end of the month and I have used the heck out of them including six visits to the Gardens proper and usage of their reciprocal services in five other states. I missed the lotus bloom this year. I missed the magnolia bloom this year. I missed the cherry bloom this year. I missed the rose bloom this year. Maybe I should get another set of passes.

A byproduct of Max’s medication is that he drinks a lot more. He’s not quite fast enough to go outside when he needs to pee so our kitchen has been graced with various patches of doggy tinkle. Sometimes the patches were in the living room or dining room but never on a portion with a rug or carpet. Good dog.

I took today to pound out Chris Sollars’ nee Lutz’s wedding photos and experienced a rare drive to finish them. I did three passes and realized I didn’t know who some people were. I called Chris, not there. I called Stephen, not there. I cried a little. I very strongly wanting this chore off my to do list. Stephen called back, hooray! During his lunch break, he walked me through who each person was. This doesn’t seem too impressive until I realized he was doing this over the phone as follows:

Me: Stephen, who’s the person next to your aunt in this picture?
Him: Is she wearing purple?
Me: Yes.
Him: That’s my aunt Gene.
Me: And on the other side.
Him: Is he making a stupid face?
Me: Yes.
Him: That’s Mark.

HIs memories of his wedding were clear enough to remember the order that people were standing during seven person group shots.

Chris Lutz is rare among my friends in that I have no memory of us meeting. Not that we’ve known each other since some time immemorial but just that there was a time when I didn’t know him then there was a time when I did and I’m not sure what event separated the two.

Today he was getting married in DC to his partner and I was asked to serve as the photographer. I arrived only a few minutes before the service started but I had two cameras thanks to Joe Naylor and I looked like several tourists combined or in my head, a total bad ass. The pastor approached me before hand:

Pastor: So, you’re the photographer.
Me: *looks at cameras* Yep.
Pastor: Ok, you’re welcome to take all the pictures you want.
Me: Thank you.
Pastor: I’m not done, you’re welcome to take all the pictures you want from anywhere you want before the service but once the service begins there are some restrictions.
Me: Like?
Pastor: Please don’t stand in the center aisle, do not stand behind us at all, don’t stand in front of any of the guests, and don’t make noise during the important parts of the ceremony.

Is that all?

The ceremony went off without incident and the reception afterward was a study in smooth operation. I took some more pictures and headed out to meet a friend of mine my high school I hadn’t seen in about seven years.

Me: Sorry I’m late. I stayed a little longer than I thought I would at the wedding I was shooting.
Her: Oh, are you a photographer?
Me: Nah, nothing so fancy.

There are few people with whom the contrast of knowing me vs. knowing my life is so strong. I know many people who know my life but not me and the reverse was novel.

Tomorrow I was going to be the photographer at Chris Lutz’s wedding followed by meeting up with a high school friend. Sunday I was scheduled to run in the Broad Street Run and take in 10 miles of prime Philadelphia pavement. I was already beat from work and as I lie in bed not able to sleep I Googled “how to take wedding photos”. The wedding was ten hours away in time and three hours away in distance so I was probably behind on doing this. Every list I found started with “get there early”. I guess I know which tip I’m skipping.

I’ve only known Peter and Audrey for less than three years but it feels longer.  I’ve only known Suzie for 18 months but it feels longer.  Tonight, the four of us had dinner at Deca, the restaurant for the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago.  It felt like we’d done this a dozen times before despite this being our first. The food and company were delicious.

From 2012-02-18, 19 Chicago

I like French food, and would probably enjoy it more were it not so pricey but this evening was a treat. Peter covered dinner for Suzie and I in exchange for a pair of SSDs I had conjured up for him to put in he and his wife’s MacBooks.

After dinner, I had fun with my new Apollo softbox that I still have no idea how to use but taking pictures of attractive people certainly reduces the amount of work I need to make someone look good to around 0.

Here’s Audrey

From 2012-02-18, 19 Chicago

And Suzie

From 2012-02-18, 19 Chicago

One thing I learned immediately is that I’m terrible at giving directions to people that are simply modeling and not showing an action. At work, I sometimes take pictures of people showcasing test methods and I can spout off commands of where to stand how to hold one’s arms and such but for just taking someone’s picture I’m clueless. Maybe that’s where my love of candids comes from, I don’t need to do anything besides wait and I can prove to be very patient. I made a few other mistakes like not pulling the piano bench further from the window. While the cityscape behind is nicely en-bokeh-ed, the horizontal bar of the window is hideous and takes away from the shot. I should have had a reflector on the other side as you want a one or two stop difference not four of five.

After pictures, I met two of Peter and Audrey’s male friends and took to them quickly. They are philosophy majors at the University of Chicago and that’s a topic I enjoy. We discussed qualia, underdetermination, and empirical sufficiency and I was having a ball. The guests and I embraced at the end of the evening and shortly after their departure Peter began laughing. One of the guests had texted Peter asking if I were gay and available and I was terribly flattered. The other was also interested and I politely declined. Audrey replied with “how do you know? You haven’t even tried”. This event tickled me for two reasons:

1) For once the boys were interested in me, not Suzie
2) I get to cross “get hit on” off my “Reasons I don’t want to be fat” list. This wasn’t how I had thought it’d happen, but I wasn’t specific.

I’ve made the drive from Feasterville to Florence a number of times and it consists of three distinct segments:

My driveway to New Staunton – I’ve driven this segment so many times that I don’t really have any good benchmarks. I get gas at approximately the same place every time and take breakfast at the same Wawa.

New Stanton to the Centennial Barn – PA, WV, and Ohio progress in a 200 mile blur of unremarkable America. The area around 70 and 270 is invariably a clusterfuck unless it’s before 6 AM or after 8 PM. Here regionality between Appalachia, the High South, Coalville, and Rusttown blend varying strips of the forgotten with the forgettable.

Centennial Barn to Florence – The Centennial Barn is about 75 miles out from Cincinnati and is painted to commemorate the bicentennial of Ohio. It’s my “Almost there” mark and near there I stop for lunch at McDonalds. I’ve never passed it in the rain and I’m unsure of why I always notice this.

The above is a little over 600 miles and I usually have it done by shortly after lunch.

This time I met up with Suzie and Brad and we went to the Cincinnati Union Terminal.
Cincinnati Union Terminal

The Cincinnati Terminal is bathed in golden light at dusk diffused through a Brobdenagian American flag and soft boxed by murals.

Museum Center Flag

It is bright without being garish and the empty fountain outside waits more than being victim to disuse. I’m curious if it acquires a sense of bustle at some point and what it feels like.

Dinner was at The Melting Pot, a fondue place that was a bit costly but still tasty. One chooses a dish selection and a number of people to serve and the server provides instruction, refills consumables, and proffers light banter. The three of us ate for around $100 and I’d say a 1/3 of that cost was because it was “neat”. While there is some value to a showy presentation like the flaming column below, I guess I find it underwhelming as someone who regularly uses a blow torch in the kitchen.

Notes on Melting Pot

  • The three course set for two will serve three people who aren’t incredibly hungry.
  • Oil fondue is not for the neophyte but will probably produce better results along most spectra of taste.
  • Potatoes take a month to cook.
  • Some items receive free refills.  Slam on those like a 10 year-old playing Street Fighter II.
  • Each course has a set up so plan on more time between courses than at a regular restaurant.  Where I saw this apply was with tables that purchased alcohol.  I’m used to someone going through 2-3 drinks in an evening, here 4+ seemed to be common.
  • Overcome the pronunciation barrier.  While listening to other tables order, I felt that people were shying away from foreign terms.  Caribbean jerk is good, but the real home of veal is bechamel sauce.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Brad.  He seems like a sharp fellow and is nearing graduation and lacked a concise answer to “what do you value”.  He doesn’t need one, as I think we’re entitled to a quality quarter century before one needs an answer.  He seems about 10% unsure of himself at almost all times and this can be a useful attribute in the hands of the considerate.  I look forward to (possibly) seeing him again.

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OSR asks me to produce a promo video each year promotes the camp.  The first year I did this, Gary Marosy provided me with thousands of nice pictures of every area of camp and the program staff provided me with more pictures that campers had taken.  Each year it has dwindled until last year I receive 1600 pictures of either night volleyball or kids in tubes.

This year’s video was an exercise in austerity as I received no pictures of Ecology, any involving a bicycle, and only pictures of sailing containing people that had been fired.  On the plus side, I have a wonderful pictures of Todd Warner angrily pointing at a white board as children look on in rapt amazement.

When I make a print of a picture I’ve taken, I put it up in my office at work.  I take these down and put them up at home at the end of each year so today I took down all my pictures.  I sent out an email to my coworkers saying they were welcome to any they wished from the stack next to my desk.  No one took any pictures while I was there but when I went to get a drink or work in the lab, I’d return to find that one or two pictures had been taken.  I felt like I was being robbed by gypsies.

I asked a coworker if he wanted a print he always thought was nice and he declined.  Later in that day he came up to me with that print that he’d taken from the stack while I was at lunch and asked me to sign it.  I felt tickled.

The New York Botanical Garden train show is the highlight of that institution’s winter season.  Their main greenhouse is outfitted with several train displays and reconstructions of NYC landmarks.  The exhibit is quite popular and even though we arrived at opening, we had to wait 3 hours for an available slot.  In the meantime, Tee Jay and I went through the rest of the Gardens.

Most of the Gardens were somewhat barren but the larger elements still came out.

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Big Butterfly

This was a large butterfly in the Children’s Garden.  Around this butterfly were showcases about how plants and animals interact in that delightful prose marking children’s education.  Plants aren’t eaten they’re “consumed” and deer don’t shit out seeds they “transport them”.

The indoor part of the exhibit had binocular microscopes.  Fact: everything looks cool under a 50x binocular microscope.  Teejay and I spent 20 minutes or so hogging them as we just looked at stuff we had on us.  Here, Teejay is absorbed with how dirty his glasses are:

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Tiny World

We still had some time to kill and walked the periphery of the east end of the Gardens.  This boulevard was lined with trees decorated by public school classes and the differences between them were stark.

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Income Disparity Tree

The tree to the right is decorated with plastic ornaments, the tree to the left is decorated with pizza box cut outs.  The pizza box ornaments each had a wish on the back.

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Heart in the Right Place

We made our way to the Haupt Conservatory which had an enclosed staging area with a train theme.  There was a conductor on stilts who had a watch that showed the season instead of the hour.  Periodically she’d yell things like “all aboard, it’s almost 10 of spring!” I wish I could summon such whimsy on command.

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Conductor Kicks

I had seen a few macro shots of the event but the expanse was impressive.

This area:

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Tanjou

Was transformed to this:

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Waiting to Enter

Suspended to the left is something Tee Jay called the “ewok copter” or “wookiee copter”.  I laughed far too loudly at this.  Here it is in detail.

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Ewok Copter

All of the constructs were made of natural materials like twigs, bark, needles, boughs, berries, nuts, and roots.  The cathedral of St. John the Divine was almost five feet tall.

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Sense of Scale

Before going to a venue, I try to determine three to five shots I want.  One was a low angle shot of a train with a distinction sense of “rushing” to it.  Tee Jay politely suffered through my numerous attempts at getting this in several parts.  I forgot my basics and failed to consider using shutter priority to catch movement and instead got mediocre shots like this with no sense of motion:

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Close Call

Only  later did I accidentally get what I wanted but without the sense of size:

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Bridge Blur

Tee Jay and I were both decked out with nice cameras and I had my pocket notebook and we were asked by event staff if we were press.  We said no, but I’m curious what would have happened if I had answered otherwise.

One technique I used during the day was holding up my camera on my monopod with a wide angle lens on it.  The changed perspective made up for my other photographic shortcomings.

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Another High Angle Shot

Sadly, the lights on Yankee Stadium are not trapped fireflies.

The exhibits were a parade of beauty and detail set in idyllic surroundings.  I’ve rarely photographed something I’d call calming and even the frenetic pace of the trains didn’t break the tranquility.  There was very little shoving and all the children were well-behaved.

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Close Splash

Tee Jay and I spent a good bit of time during the day failing to take shots and sharing our photographic inadequacies.  I hope to do it again sometime, maybe when the lily pond returns.

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My visit to Cincinnati started as most of my trips involving Suzie seem to; going to her house to pick her up and then going away from there.  There are probably other things in Covington, Kentucky, but to me, it consists of a gas station, a Red Robin, and a driveway next to a brick house that a friend of mine sometimes sleeps in (the house not the driveway).  Another friend of mine had gotten us an obscenely cheap room at a hotel in downtown Cincinnati and after depositing our things Suzie and I went to the top of the Carew Tower, the second highest building in Cincinnati to, well, see things.   The tower itself is a standard steel skyscraper with brick facing built during the inter-war years in a not-terribly-ballsy style of Art Deco that was gimped by the Great Depression.  I imagine I would have loved the building the tower could have been but the brass accents and mail drops in the elevator banks remind one of what could have been.

After a brief breakdown of arithmetic from the cashier at the observation deck, the cityscape was ours.

Cinci Towards the River

I think Cincinnati is at its best when it remembers that its heritage is as a 19th century boomtown and the city relives that boom every half-century or so.  Right now, it’s coming out of another such swing in development that saw billions dumped into developing the downtown area but in a way that the city isn’t aware of itself.  Since structures are changing, buildings don’t know what’s next to them and there hasn’t been enough time between revamps for an organic patina of similarity to develop.  The buildings could be picked up and re-arranged and you’d have the same city in a way that’d never fly in Chicago or even Tampa.

The Land of Rust and Packman

Rust and packman.

While on the observation deck, Chris Dodds informed me that he had started fasterthanterry.com.  Suzie caught my reaction:

With friends like Chris who needs enemies?

Downtown is captivating from street-level and tiny splotches of modernity abut the wealth of development.  The city has a history but one that it needs to remind the resident of rather than one that is obvious.  Each element feels ad-hoc and I think that confusion stems partly from geography.

Blessed Ice Skating Rink

And like any city of reasonable size, Cincinnati has its juxtapositions.

Wedding Cropping

Our evening adventure was visiting the light displays at the Cincinnati Zoo.  These were neither the displays I am used to at Shady Brook Farms nor the accent pieces I’m used to from the Philadelphia Zoo but simply a lot of lights.  1/2 of the displays were open and the Zoo seemed quite busy.  I wanted to get a shot of the main tree and only through a combination of patience and giving people with smart phones the stink eye did I get a clear shot.  A non-HDR shot with which I am happy.

Tree!

The night was warm and we were moving quickly so it didn’t feel terribly holiday-ey, but still, there were illuminated candy canes, outlines of animals, and golden bamboo.

Path to China

After doing a lap of the park we tried to leave and somehow failed to find the exit after two full rounds.  I feel like someone should cut a corner off my Orienteering merit badge card.  On the penultimate round we stopped by the elephant hut where I took no pictures.  I have little compunction about photographing animals but am rarely happy with pictures of elephants as I can never convey what I consider their intrinsic dignity.  With the loss of the Pleistocene megafauna, the animal kingdom only has a handful of land animals that break a ton.  Of these, only the elephant breaks 10 tons and represents to me the idea of “this is what land-based animal life can be”.  The eye of an elephant is only about a cm larger than a humans despite two orders of magnitude difference in size.  I tend to stare at eyes and hands in people and I wonder if this relatively small ocular size gap misregisters their mass to me.

We finally made a right at the correct Santa and made it past the Winter Post Station and into the baffle of ropes back to the main street.  After dinner and soft serve we retired back to the hotel room and in defiance of all our previous interactions we were both a sleep before 11 PM.  Good day.

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