Its almost 11 at night, the sun is just going down, H&M is in the foreground and there is church in the background.
Author: nataliar77
My detente with the NYC subway
Call it my Ostpolitik with the subway. I no longer want to fly into a rage when I enter the thing. I do not hate the people on the subway. They experience all the same joys along with me, but somehow I’ve managed to get over it.
I no longer find this kind of thing confusing:
Where are we? What station is this? Where is the train coming from? Is this an uptown or a downtown train? I got to where I needed to be, so my rage subsided, a little.
For every good ride, there is always the interior of the subway. Check out this slice of the city so nice, they named it twice:
Absolutely disgusting. This is actually the platform for the next train to Hades:
And believe me, it smelled just as good as it looked. This is actually these are the passageways to the train to Hades:
But, here’s where my detente, ostpolitik comes in:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen your eyes do not deceive you. Color. In this vast gray expanse. Color! You have to get people used to these things, so you can’t just splash tons of color at people, but those do appear to actually be colors.
This next little photo series involves no color, but is really clever. This reminds me a little of the Borf character who was wandering Washington, injecting life and personality into that dried up expanse of boredom. Here is some Borf. Alas, I did not take this picture:
But I took these and they are this daily reminder of the drudgery of going to work. You have to look in the upper left hand corner to see the signs on the beams:
Someone else has a sense of humor on the subway:
Ok, subway, you don’t drive me into a rage anymore. But I don’t now and will never love you.
I love Scandinavia
Four words: full frontal male nudity.
In America, they would put some statue of the 10 commandments in front of this thing.
The strangest photo of the Brooklyn Bridge you have ever seen….
Why would I photograph the Brooklyn Bridge like this?
I could, but I’m not going to. No, while I was walking across the bridge and I noticed this:
A big bolt. And, another peach of a bolt:
Down below:
Oh and New York City, good luck with that campaign of yours:
I had to ask this nice Italian boy to move so I could take this picture. He also probably didn’t get why I had to take the picture.
And of course, because after all, they do hold this whole thing up:
So, I thought, I’m going to take this photo:
To, you know, keep it strange. I love keeping it strange.
Which Harvard is the real Harvard?
Is it this one?
Or is it here?
Or here?
In The Education of Henry Adams, he writes Harvard College “taught little and that little ill.” Maybe the hair products would provide more education than the university? Just a thought.
The Great Cornholio
The TV will have you believe that high school is all cheerleaders, homecoming queens and smiles. Not where I went to high school. It was all complete and utter misery for me.
Ok, just kidding. God, that sounds so negative. For me high school was two things. Number one — counting down the minutes, seconds and hours until it was over and watching Beavis and Butthead. I loved how incredibly stupid those two were and how they managed to get control of every single situation.
One of my favorite episodes is called simply “The Great Cornholio.” Beavis eats too much sugar and becomes the Great Cornholio, which involves a lot of running around and saying he needs “TP for his bunghole.”
Imagine my surprise when walking through Salem, Massachusetts, I see this:
Bunghole. Bunghole. Bunghole. We all have a little Beavis in us.
White Clouds Drifting in the Sky
I have this cd called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Upbeat all the way. Anyway, it is all of these old songs on this disk, including one called “Clouds.”
The singer sounds like he is at some dark night club in Paris, in the 1920s. The lyrics, to me, are very evocative:
Clouds floating through the night while the silver stars above lend their tender light.
Clouds drifting through the sky while I wonder why my love ever said goodbye.
Clouds floating through the night speaking of a love that was heavenly, a love that could never be mine.
Ok, this is only a snippet of the lyrics, the one including the cloud parts, but you get the picture. Clouds, love, etc.
He’s obviously singing about lost love, something I know nothing at all about.
All right, all these lines about the clouds and you, my minuscule readership were expecting some photos, eh?
Well, there is going to be a little more writing before that. Clouds, other than drifting through the night, are hard to photograph. I don’t mean “point camera upward, click shutter.” I mean properly. I’ve seen some of the greats take photos of the clouds and those pictures transcend the “camera upward, click shutter” thing.
I’ve been trying since I starting pointing camera forwards to properly photograph clouds. Usually, the results were my parents yelling at me for making them pay for an entire roll of film with just clouds on them.
But the wonders of modern technology have made my long held ambition of taking better photos of clouds possible. These pictures are not those, yet, but hopefully, the start towards my genius photos of clouds and eventual world domination. Well, ok, let’s stick to the clouds first:
And, some more cloud pictures. George Emerson in A Room With a View, says the the most perfect view is the sky above our heads. George Emerson is played by my fantasy husband, Julian Sands, so to me the most perfect view in the world is Mr. Julian Sands. But, until he comes striding in here to take me off to my life of complete and utter bliss, more clouds:
Some fun with the contrast and black and white settings on the old iPhoto:
Black and blue blurry fun:
And this last one, totally unrelated:
I took this last one because it reminded me of being in gym class in high school. Usually, we would be playing some awful sport, like softball and I would be so out in left field that I was practically no longer on the field and I would look up at the sky and see planes above and think to my self “Gee, look at thing. Its probably going to London or Paris or Hong Kong. So many other places I could be right now, rather than here, praying for that damn ball to come no where near me.” Jesus Chris, if the plane were going to Poughkeepsie, it would be more interesting than that gym class.
More to cloud photos are sure to follow, until George Emerson takes me into “A Room With a View” and kisses me with Florence in the background. In other words, we’ll probably be here. For a while.
The Olympics of the photo manipulation
I used to not alter my photos because, well, they were always perfect. Yeah. Right. I had neither a computer, a digital camera or the patience to do all of that. But now that I have some time on my hands and a little more patience, I’ve decided to post several versions of the same photo for me to see which one I like best and of course, which one my HUGE reading public likes. By HUGE I mean all three of you.
This is a picture I took on the T, public transportation in Boston. I know, right? Natalia on public transportation, but stranger things have happened.
Anyway, here goes:
I think its a nice photo, but its missing that extra special something. Ok, here it is cropped:
Cropped more and in sepia, an old favorite of mine:
Cropped even more, black and white:
Cropped even more, in sepia:
To all you haters out there, I can take pictures, see?
Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein?
It just hit me when I took these pictures. I could be left anywhere doing anything and if I have my camera in my hand, it will turn into some kind of picture take exercise. I went to Walmart and photographed the place for a little while and if I had been left alone, I would have probably done up the whole place.
These things here. Well, I was on the train (huge surprise) and I was sitting next to this ad for some tv show. I have no interest in this tv show, but the light was hitting the ad in a way that I found interesting. Of course, with my handy-dandy camera, I started shooting away.
The ads are half-tone, which is the printing method used for newspapers. I used to be fascinated by it, all the dots and how the dots kind of come together for an image from far away. Anyway, I took these, downloaded them and sort of realized that they look kind of like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein. That was completely not my intent. All I wanted was to photograph the little dot things.
You have to click on the photos to get the full effect. Otherwise, they are a bit flat, I know, I realize that.
Anyway, three paragraphs of explanation for these things:
This reminded me of one of those old ads from the 1950s. The thing to the right by the way is a man in a collared shirt.
The eye, singular:
The lesson is that I cannot be left alone with a camera anywhere ever. But I feel creative again and that was the point of this exercise.
Governor’s Island
Ok, so I’m editing this entry to reflect some commentary on it. These pictures weren’t meant to be art. I’m was throwing them out there because I was afraid of picking up my camera again for fear the results would be below my standards. But, as it turns out, I found out that I can still take pictures with a real camera.
So, the one who put the haterade out there and you know who you are, well, I turned the haterade into gatorade. Man, that was terrible rhyme, but the point is the haterade made me realize that I can take real photos again.
So, bring on the haterade. Go ahead. I can take it.
And away with the original entry:
There are places in New York that you go many times that are just blah. Times Square. Disney-fied.
We always had to take Circle Line when people would come to our house. Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty and the many bridges. Ok, that’s nice. But, we would always pass by this place with these college campus looking buildings and I would wonder about the place. It seemed abandoned. I am a bit of a cheeseball, and I liked imaging who lived there and what life was like on this uninhabited island off the coast of Manhattan.
I am sitting at work on Friday and my co-worker tells me that the island is open and there is a ferry that runs there. It meant taking the subway, my well documented enemy, but I endured it.
And, I am glad I did because going there was really worth it.
Governor’s Island is an old military base that was occupied by the Army and Coast Guard over the years. It closed in 1996.
Check out this place:
This is the old governor’s house on the island.
Some more views:
And yet more:
Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore. Case in point:
Love the accent canons. Gives it a special something you just don’t find everywhere.
Here are some of the old barracks:
An entry way to one of them:
Thank god for that manual setting on the camera.
These just made me happy. I loved how the girl’s dresses contrasted against the gray of the city. I couldn’t pick one, so I just took all three:
And one altered, cropped, you know, whatever, but something to make the photos “less touristy” and most “arty.”
