Had never traveled a business Interstate before…
9 minute read
July 24, 2016, 8:55 PM
…and now I have. Elyse and I made an impromptu road trip to York, Pennsylvania on Thursday, July 14. We got together in Ellicott City, but didn’t know quite what we wanted to do, and so we ended up doing that.
However, our first stop was a completely unplanned one, in Catonsville. There, the McDonald’s in 40 West Plaza recently closed, and was in the process of being vacated. At the time that we came by, they had started roofing over the McDonald’s-style mansard, and removed the signage, and were packing stuff up inside.
Continue reading…Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Fire alarms, Roads, York
A look back on an old photo shoot…
5 minute read
July 7, 2016, 11:06 AM
July 7, 2001 was something of a milestone date for me. It was my first full-on photo shoot in DC. The result of that photo shoot was a Photography set called “The Schumin Web Salutes America”. I pulled the set during the WordPress conversion in 2012 because it was somewhat low quality, but you can still find it in the Internet Archive. Looking back on the set, it was clear that I didn’t know what I was doing, both in the photography itself as well as the post-production, but it was a start.
The set really embodied the way the Photography set started out, which was more like the modern Life and Times, but more subject-based. Photography didn’t take on its current form until 2008. In that, it started out showing my coming up to the area, traveling in on the Metro, it showed the things that I observed on that trip, and also showed a few landmarks in between.
Looking back on this day, fifteen years ago today, it’s funny to see how much has changed since this set was made. I was 20 years old. The camera was a Sony Mavica FD-73 – that means that I was toting a box of 3½” floppy disks around DC to save my photos. Buildings are now here that weren’t in 2001. Some buildings are gone now. This was also my first time riding past Smithsonian on the Blue and Orange Line, and my first time transferring to the Yellow Line, at L’Enfant Plaza, and going over the bridge. So here we go…
Categories: Arlington, Fire alarms, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC, WMATA
Good to see our old house looking better than it has in quite some time…
5 minute read
June 30, 2016, 6:15 PM
Back on June 9, Elyse and I took a one-day road trip to Philadelphia. From the outset, this was to be something of a transit adventure, with a visit to the SEPTA gift shop as one of the main priorities. On the way up, Elyse even got annoyed with me for a few restroom stops (hey, when nature calls…) because she didn’t want to miss the SEPTA store. But then as we were heading up I-295 towards Lindenwold station to get PATCO, I commented as we were approaching the exit for US 322 that this was the exit that you would take to go see my old house in Glassboro. Her response was an enthusiastic “Let’s go!” Looks like someone just gave up their right to complain about the time.
That said, we went over to Glassboro, and over to 304 Cornell Road. I was surprised to see how nice the place looked:
A trip through Schumin Web’s “attic”…
8 minute read
June 28, 2016, 5:06 PM
First of all, for those of you who were not aware, Schumin Web recently moved to a more robust hosting plan with the same hosting company, after it had become painfully obvious that I had outgrown my existing hosting plan. This new arrangement will provide higher page load speeds for you, and more growth potential for me.
With that, I thought it would be interesting to look at what I’ll call “past futures”. I recently went digging around the folder where I keep a bunch of old graphics and such that I made for the website at some point or other, and was thoroughly amused by them. Some of this stuff actually did make it to the website but is now long gone, some of it was seriously intended for production use but wasn’t used, and some of it was more exploratory in nature with no real intent of actual use.
I currently have an online licensing portfolio through Pixels.com. That was not my first foray into photo licensing. In 2003, I made efforts to license my photo work for third-party usage as well, but with far less success. In that instance, I tried to go it alone, operating an independent stock photography website. I called that effort “Almond Street”. If I recall correctly, the name came from a thought back to the streets that I remembered from our time in Rogers, Arkansas. Many streets in Rogers were named for trees, so I thought of tree types that might sound nice as a brand name, and decided that “almond” sounded the best. What’s amusing in hindsight, however, is the logo:
Categories: Schumin Web meta
A principal has egg on her face…
6 minute read
June 14, 2016, 6:10 AM
As someone who was on the receiving end of some pretty unfair punishments in school, and having witnessed school officials blatantly flout the rules on a number of occasions, it’s good to see someone get called out for a punishment that’s out of step with policy. This was the culmination of a controversy regarding several students’ drinking alcohol on prom night at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School‘s senior prom, and the reversal of a decision that would have prevented them from attending their high school graduation.
The situation, as I understand it based on a Bethesda Magazine article and a Washington Post article, began with a policy set at the school level regarding consequences for students’ showing up for prom while impaired by alcohol or other various substances, or becoming impaired by the same over the course of the evening, encompassing the prom itself as well as the official after-prom party. The school’s policy was that anyone who either was caught drinking at prom-related activities, or showed up to same already drunk, would not be allowed to walk at the school’s June 1 graduation at DAR Constitution Hall. This is supported by a prom guest application document from the school’s website, where the relevant section, near the bottom of the second page, reads:
Students and/or guests who are suspected of being under the influence of alcohol, inhalants, illegal drugs or controlled substances will not be admitted to Prom or After Prom. Students attending Prom or After Prom who show signs of being under the influence of such substances, or who are found to be in possession of such substances during either event, will be subjected to the consequences set forth in the B-CC Student Handbook, and their parents will be notified. If the student is part of an athletic team or other school-sponsored activity, the coach/sponsor will be notified as well. Note that any senior who is determined to be under the influence or in possession of such substances when arriving at or during the course of Prom or After Prom will not participate in the on-stage distribution of diplomas at B-CC’s graduation ceremony.
Categories: DC area local news, Events, Montgomery County, School
Nobody knows how to tweak you like your mother…
2 minute read
May 31, 2016, 9:32 PM
So yesterday was my 35th birthday. And sometimes people really get one on you. Case in point with my mother this year. We were talking on the phone on my way home from work on Saturday (a nice long ride, as I’m working out of a facility in Alexandria this week), and amongst discussions of Hefty bags (don’t ask, but I was laughing so hard that I was in tears), my mother asked if I’d seen the birthday card from her yet. I hadn’t. My mother insisted that I check the mailbox to fish the card out while we were on the phone. I was thinking, it can’t be that exciting, now, and then I saw it:
New couch!
9 minute read
May 29, 2016, 6:30 PM
Sometimes, you just have to go out with the old. After fifteen years, I finally got rid of my old futon from college. In other words, this:
“Wait, isn’t that…?”
4 minute read
May 12, 2016, 1:01 PM
Imagine my surprise to sit down at my computer this morning to check Facebook, and be greeted by this image from ABC affiliate WJLA:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Weather, Wikipedia
Time to redefine my look…
7 minute read
May 11, 2016, 8:59 PM
…and by that, I mean it’s time for new glasses. I’ve worn glasses since January 2001, and I’ve had four pairs of glasses since then. The first pair, which I had from 2001 to 2005, had wire frames and more or less round lenses. Then the second pair, from 2005 to 2008, had squarer lenses with really round corners. I had my next pair for only two years, 2008 to 2010. Those continued the squaring trend, with corners less round than before, but still a bit of curve in them. My current pair, since 2010, is another evolution in the same vein, with fewer curves and more squareness, plus more definition on the sides. It’s funny, though – with that last pair, I picked the antique finish on the frames. However, after almost six years of use, I think it’s now closer to a silver finish than antique. So even though my prescription barely changed, it was time for new glasses.
I had actually been looking forward to my eye exam last week for quite some time, because I was tired of my existing glasses. Therefore, I had taken plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do on my next pair. I figured that if I didn’t do something significantly different, then I would probably do another evolution on what I was doing now. However, the latter would essentially be an admission of defeat for a new style, and I didn’t want to do that. So with a new prescription in hand, I went and tried out a bunch of different glasses to see what I liked.
My first stop was Lenscrafters, and my first test was this pair:
Categories: Glasses
A few more thoughts about “Scott’s House”…
3 minute read
April 24, 2016, 8:05 PM
Today, I released the “Scott’s House” set in Photography, which covers the visit that Elyse and I made to the former home of Scott Alan Bauer back in March. While the photo set gave a somewhat dry presentation of what Elyse and I found in the house, the preparation of that set raised a lot of questions that I will likely never get answers to, mostly revolving around the mystery of what exactly happened to this family.
From what I could tell, the house, in its final form, was home to only one person: Scott Bauer himself. Only the master bedroom contained a bed, one bedroom had no furniture in it to speak of, and the third bedroom had clearly been converted to an office at some point. In the bedroom-turned-office, some of the paperwork made me think that this home, leading up to its abandonment in late 2002, was not as happy as it once was. One of the documents was a statement from Howard County social services regarding past due child support. So it would appear that a divorce had occurred, and things had not been going well since. Likewise, on an MVA notice, Bauer had insurance and emissions violations regarding his truck. Makes me wonder if he had major financial problems in his final years at the house.
In any case, what caused Bauer to ultimately abandon the house and all of his belongings, as well as what happened to him afterward, remains a mystery.
Categories: Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
A visit to JMU…
18 minute read
April 12, 2016, 10:36 AM
Recall that on March 30 and 31, my friend Elyse and I went on a road trip to Stuarts Draft and such. On the 30th, we visited Afton Mountain, my ex-store in Waynesboro, and Staunton Mall, among other things. On the 31st, we visited JMU, as the plan was to show off a bunch of vintage elevators and fire alarm systems on campus. Plus JMU was planning to build a new dining hall to replace the current one, so a final visit to D-Hall was a must.
The first order of business on our trip to JMU was a visit to Zane Showker Hall. I took many classes in that building over the course of my college career. We came to Showker to update a very well-known photo in higher resolution with my Nikon SLR. Specifically, this one:
Categories: Elyse, Family, Fire alarms, JMU
The only constant is change…
8 minute read
April 5, 2016, 6:06 PM
On March 30 and 31, I went on a road trip down to Stuarts Draft with Elyse, where I showed her a whole bunch of stuff. I showed her the mountain, we visited my ex-store, we went to Staunton Mall, and we saw JMU. All in all, a fun trip. The lesson to be learned from this trip, however, is that change is inevitable, as many things that I had hoped to show Elyse had changed, and other things were going to change.
Coming down from Maryland via US 29, we visited Afton Mountain. I have photographed this area many, many, many times before. So I more or less know what’s there. I did spot a few new things in the process of going about things, like this vintage television:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Family, Fire alarms, Stuarts Draft, Urban exploration, Walmart, Waynesboro
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.
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