Trying my hand at planespotting…
5 minute read
November 18, 2016, 11:02 AM
On Tuesday, November 16, Elyse and I went down to Gravelly Point in Arlington and photographed airplanes taking off from National Airport. In the past, I had photographed airplanes casually, usually when I’m over in Rosslyn, i.e. near the airport, while doing other things (the raw photo set for Urban Demolition II is peppered with random airplane and transit photos, if that tells you anything). However, this was my first dedicated outing for planespotting.
So I put the big lens on my camera and took it out for a spin, putting the camera in sports mode and going to town with it. My first takeoff, however, left something to be desired:
Continue reading…Categories: Airplanes, Arlington, Elyse, Photography
Painting pottery…
4 minute read
November 16, 2016, 12:21 AM
The day before Elyse and I went to Pittsburgh, we got together with our friend Dave, whom we know through transit-enthusiast circles, and we went over to Color Me Mine in Rockville. This is one of those places where they have premade pieces of pottery for customers to paint in the store, and then they glaze and fire it all afterward, and you pick it up a week or so later.
Going in, Elyse and Dave both picked train-shaped coin banks for painting. I got a big plate, because I felt more like drawing, and thus I got myself a nice, blank canvas to paint.
But first, here are Elyse and Dave at the table:
Categories: Elyse, Fire alarms, Friends, Rockville, SEPTA
That wasn’t at all what I expected to happen…
11 minute read
November 14, 2016, 10:30 AM
So like much of America, I watched the television on the night of November 8, 2016 in stunned silence as the news media called the race for Donald Trump. I started watching around 7 PM, when the first polls closed, and kept the television on until 2 AM, when I finally had to go to bed. Considering the way I wrote about the election around a month ago, I expected that this would be an early night. I figured that I would watch the returns come in until 11:00, and then once the polls closed in California, they would project California for Hillary Clinton, and then call the race for Hillary Clinton. Then I would turn the television off and do something else until bedtime. But that was not the case, as many states were too close to call. Then I watched as Hillary Clinton’s path to victory narrowed, and it started to become apparent that we were not going to elect the first woman president on this election night. Once they called Ohio for Trump, I knew that it didn’t look good for Hillary. After all, Ohio picks the president, because almost no one wins the White House without Ohio. Then as the night wore on, I ran a few scenarios through an electoral college calculator, and realized that in order for Hillary Clinton to win, she would have had to take every single remaining state that was still in play. That seemed highly unlikely. I went to bed kind of stunned, because this was most definitely not how I expected election night to go. When I woke up the next morning, I checked Reddit, and found out that yes, Donald Trump had, in fact, actually won the election. Whoa. I definitely did not expect to have to eat my words about this election.
In hindsight, however, I can’t say that I’m very surprised about this result.
Before even getting into factors specific to this election, in the last 60 years or so since the 22nd Amendment, which formally limits the president to two terms, took effect, the White House has tended to switch parties every eight years. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, served two terms, and he was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, a Democrat. Then after eight years of a Democratic administration, we got Republican Richard Nixon. The only exceptions to this have been Democrat Jimmy Carter, who was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 after only a single term, and Republican George Bush, who was elected president in 1988 after eight years of Reagan. After Bush’s electoral defeat in 1992, the eight-on-eight-off cycle resumed. Thus after eight years of the Democratic Obama administration, history indicated that it was time for the party to flip again.
Categories: National politics
I’ve seen Christmas lighting, Halloween lighting, but never election lighting…
< 1 minute read
November 8, 2016, 12:00 AM
So Elyse and I were driving down 16th Street in DC last night, and we spotted a house near the intersection of 16th and Corcoran Streets NW with red and blue lighting in the front yard. Hmm. So we turned around and took a look:
Categories: National politics, Washington DC
A “lost” photo set of sorts…
9 minute read
November 6, 2016, 10:10 AM
In doing the writing for an upcoming photo set for Life and Times about a trip that Elyse and I recently made to Pittsburgh [update: photo set published in January 2017], I quickly realized that much of the discussion about the trip up builds on a photo set that I shot in May 2006 with the intention of publishing in Photography, but that I ultimately never completed.
In this case, the subject of the “lost” photo set was Breezewood, Pennsylvania. For those not familiar, when one travels to Pittsburgh from the DC area, one of the places that you go through is Breezewood, a settlement best known for a quarter-mile stretch of US 30 that carries Interstate 70 traffic to the Pennsylvania Turnpike – a stretch of road that is loaded with gas stations and motels and restaurants. I first traveled through Breezewood in 2003 during the LPCM trip to Pittsburgh, and it piqued my interest – even more so when I later learned that there was an abandoned stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike nearby, including two tunnels. I discussed a potential trip to Breezewood for a photo shoot in 2005, and then made a trip from Stuarts Draft to Breezewood – a three-hour drive each way – on May 2, 2006. About the only bit of evidence of the trip on here was five photo features showing Breezewood, a short Journal entry with no photos, plus a few things here and there on Wikipedia and Panoramio, as was my practice at the time. The intended Photography set, with the working title “Town of Motels”, was never made. Kind of a shame that, for a trip that was that far away and entirely dedicated to photography, so little was actually published from it.
I’m pretty sure that I never published the set because I didn’t feel like the photos were up to par, even for the (lower) standards that I operated under at the time, and thus couldn’t find the inspiration to complete it. Most of the photos had a yellow cast over them, and I clearly didn’t take enough time in composing my shots. In hindsight, while I had fun doing the shoot, the idea was something of a loser. After all, it was, for the most part, just a clustering of chain businesses along a unique stretch of highway. The road configuration, created due to regulations in place at the time that precluded the use of federal funds to build direct connections to toll facilities, was what was unique, but that wasn’t the focus of my photography. I focused mostly on the chain businesses themselves, which weren’t particularly unique. The chain businesses looked a lot like “Anytown USA”, i.e. they were much the same as you would find anywhere.
Categories: Breezewood, Photography, Roads, Schumin Web meta