Boston photowalk

I went into Boston on Sunday for a photowalk. I walked along the Harborwalk, through the North End, Fanieul Hall, and the Custom House tower.

Self portrait


The second oldest cemetery in Boston, also the place where the British Army shelled Bunker Hill from.








The grave stone of the man who raised the two lamps in the Old North Church steeple as a signal to Paul Revere.


The seal in the middle of this dome was added in the '60's. It's one of five buildings in the country with the presidential seal. The other four are in Washington DC.

The first blast furnace and Hall Cemetery

The site of the first iron blast furnace in the country, built in 1640.




This is a memorial to Solomon Willard, designer of the Bunker Hill Monument, and father of the granite industry in Quincy, MA.

Merry Christmas!

We have my wife's parents over for Christmas Eve to open gifts every year.

This year, I finally did what my wife always asks me to do during events, and I took pictures. Granted, I wanted to try out lighting the room with a flash, but both purposes were served.

Boston night photowalk

I went out on a night time photowalk with a couple local Flickrites.

Central Cemetery

I'm getting the hang of using a strobe to create drama instead of rather plain cemetery shots that I normally do.

Pond Street Cemetery

I took a couple of test shots with off-camera flash. It's going to take some work to find what works best with flash outdoors for me. I'm not a huge fan of the heavily vignetted look, but I can see why it works to separate the subject from the background.

Oakland Cemetery

Flash work

These are a couple shots that I took to try out using two flashes. Unfortunately, I'll need some more gear to be able to use more than one flash at a time.

They were taken on a sheet of glass with a piece of black paper underneath, with a couple white cards to bounce the light from the one flash that I was using.

Kitchen Scene

I put my flash on my monopod to take some test shots for a party at a friend's house tonight.

Fort Point Channel, Boston

I had a meeting in Boston today, so I got a couple pictures before it started.

Abandoned Armstrong Factory

I got my wireless flash trigger on Saturday, so I went back to the abandoned factory to try out some off camera flash shots.

New York City mini-vacation

My wife and I went to NYC on Sunday to hang out and see some sights.

We took the NBC studio tour at 30 Rock (no pictures allowed), very cool. Conan O'Brien's set is incredibly tiny, maybe 50 feet wide. It's very interesting what they do with wide angle lenses and small furniture.

We took a carriage ride through Central Park. It's wicked expensive for the time you get, but we were being tourists. While we were sitting taking a rest, a couple park workers came over to lower the flag to half staff for a firefighter that died on Sunday.



We crashed at the hotel after that from all the walking we did (Times Square to 30 Rock, up 5th to Central Park, back to Times Square).

The next day, we went over to Macy's for some shopping. It wasn't open yet, so we went to the Empire State Building.



Luckily, we hit it just right and we were up at the top 5 minutes later. When I went up this time last year, I waited over an hour.



This was pretty cool. I was standing right next to the low wall this pigeon was standing on, and I wanted to get an up close picture of him. I reached into my bag to get the lens, and he was watching me thinking I had food. He hopped right onto my arm, then a second one right behind him. A nice fellow tourist took this picture for me. Really the highlight of the trip, for me.



After that, we went to Macy's for some shoes. The store is very large, a full city block. We were supposed to stay another day, but we left right after Macy's since we had pretty much seen what we wanted to for this trip.