Where has the time gone?
6 minute read
March 23, 2016, 10:00 AM
So today, March 23, 2016, marks Schumin Web’s twentieth anniversary. Twenty years ago, the Internet first got to know Ben Schumin. I was 14 years old, and a freshman in high school. This was the photo that I used to introduce myself to the world:
This photo was taken of 13-year-old me at my old middle school in 1995, about a year prior to my starting the website. We took it with a Connectix QuickCam. Back then, after all, getting photos on the computer was a little harder to do. Digital cameras were expensive, so were webcams, and so were scanners. And the resolution was kind of low on all of them. After all, it was the nineties.
Continue reading…Categories: High school, Schumin Web meta
Exploring an abandoned house…
6 minute read
March 20, 2016, 7:21 PM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I explored an abandoned house in the Elkridge area of Howard County. This was my first “real” venture into urban exploration, and also the first “operational” photo shoot with the new Nikon SLR. I have had at least a casual interest in urban exploration for a long time, but never did a full-on exploration before. The closest things to urban exploration that I had done prior to this were visiting the buildings on Afton Mountain on several different occasions (but not penetrating them very much, if at all, on any of these occasions), and also that relatively brief visit to Lorton Reformatory last year. Elyse, on the other hand, has a good bit of experience over a number of years with urban exploration. So I was in good hands here. After all, Elyse clearly looked and acted like she knew what she was doing in Lorton, while I was more the clueless sidekick, as I didn’t know what I was doing, and was more or less unprepared for that one.
This time, I was ready. I had a headlamp like Elyse had at Lorton along with a few other flashlights, plus, remembering the strong smell of mold at Afton Mountain, I brought a respirator that I used to carry in my backpack to protests back in my activism days, but never used in that context. I also brought some rubber gloves so that I wouldn’t have to actually touch anything with my bare hands. I didn’t know what had been growing on anything at that house, so the gloves gave me more freedom to actually touch things that I wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do.
We had to do a short, but mostly uphill, hike to get to the house, and here it is:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
So I rode the DC Streetcar on Thursday…
2 minute read
March 5, 2016, 3:30 PM
I took my first ride on the DC Streetcar this past Thursday, with Elyse. We took Metro down to NoMa, and then walked from there to the Hopscotch Bridge, where the Streetcar’s western terminus is located. We boarded one of the US-built United Streetcar vehicles (202), and rode it down to the western terminus at Oklahoma Avenue.
And here are some of my photos from the ride:
The end of the track on the Hopscotch Bridge, viewing the streetcar head-on.
Categories: Transit, Washington DC