Well, I finally made it.  After three tries, I went to Spectacle Island.  I had seen it from afar.  Today I saw it up close.

It was worth the wait.  And I was there with my aforementioned two new cameras.  Needless to say I was delighted.

Let’s start with my new favorite thing.  The fake tilt shift effect on my Olympus mini.  The results, if I don’t say so myself, were pretty spectacular:

And a couple with the normal camera.  In a few of these I try to reasonably imitate Ansel Adams.  Perhaps I pale in comparison:

And that’s it.  Until I become the caretaker of the island of course.

I photograph a lot of people.  Nobody ever says anything to me about it because I am an invisible photography ninja.  Its the truth.

Yesterday however, I forgot to be invisible and was seen by a man.  This man was playing an erhu, which I am told is an old Chinese instrument.  I’ve seen this guy before and taken his photo before but this time was different.  This time he wanted me to sit down next to him and show him the photo.  Actually he kind of hissed at me to come over, so I assumed that he was unhappy about the photo taking.  He wasn’t.  He didn’t even really want my money.  Nice.

Here he is:

I am giddy like a little girl.  Seriously.  I mean this is ski season, a Pawn Star premiere, Alexander Skarsgaard and Mint Milano cookies all rolled into one.  Yes friends, I have two new cameras.  I love just writing that.

Coming into possession of the first one came with relatively little fanfare.  My trusty Canon D10 faded away like an old warrior.  Actually I banged it on the side of a ski lift and after that it was never the same.  That and about 100 other things I did to it.  So I purchased an extra tough Olympus mini, thinking that it was going to just serve as my underwater and everyday camera.  Little did I know it was so much more.

I got bored one day and started pressing all the buttons on it.  I discovered that it has 10 different “magic” settings.  That is what they are called.  “Magic.”  I thought “oh, this is going to be like that Instagram scourge that is gripping society at large” but these effects turned out to be really cool.  And gave me a lot of new things to learn.  There is fish eye, dramatic and miniaturize.  Miniaturize is also known as tilt shift.  A tilt shift lens currently costs $2000.  Yeah, using a digital effect is cheating, but I have ALWAYS wanted to do tilt shift.  It was like a dream.  Like this dream I would probably next get because of the cost of the thing.

Well, digital to the rescue and I got to do some tilt shifting.  Like the fish eye, I will need a bit of practice with this before it is perfect, but who cares?  I get to play with camera endlessly and take lots of new photos.  The best part is that I get to re-shoot places I have been before with the new effects.

First up, the Museum of Fine Arts, where I go monthly.  No, not boring, but I had thought that I had exhausted all the photographic opportunities that place had available.  I was wrong.  A little tilt shift with your evening sherry?  Here you go:

And of course, Downtown Crossing.  What else was I going to photograph?:

And my good buddies, the samurai:

This is just the beginning.  My love affair with the tilt shift has just started.

I guess in a way lightning has struck in my life, camera wise.  Recently, I have gotten not one but two new cameras.  More about both of them in an upcoming entry.

I spent part of the day mess around with one of them when this scene opened up in front of me:

 

That pure and utter luck.  I was photographing the school bus beforehand and had gotten some standard shots out of it.  But this one I think is quite remarkable.

A lot of photographers have their trademark.  Their muse.  The place that inspires them creatively.  Ansel Adams had the unspoiled wonders of the American West.  Margaret Bourke White had industrialized America.  Edward Weston captured the essence of sun scorched Mexico.

I have the Macy’s in Downtown Crossing.  I realized recently that I have photographed that store nearly everyday for the past three, almost four years.  I’ve gotten mannequins.  Store displays.  Reflections.  Thing is the store isn’t even that interesting.  Sorry Macy’s.  I love shopping there but it isn’t Bergdorf Goodman.  In a way that is good.  I see that store at its worst and at its best.

I particularly love the mannequins.  They line they up behind barriers sometimes.  Other times you see (behind barriers) piles of arms and legs and feet.  And I stick a camera back there and photograph it because I am bad to the bone!

A couple of days ago, I saw something worthy of my chronicle of Macy’s.  A couple of the mannequins have fallen and were facing the glass.  I assumed they had gotten into a fight while no one was looking.  Probably knowing that their store would appear on this blog, the store blocked up the windows a little while later.  But not before I got a few shots:

 

Well, a kind of a rainstorm effect on the 14 year old dancer:

Before I got really serious about the photography, I pored over tons of photography books.  Before I was able to come up with a style all my own, I copied other people.  I had photographs in my head that I needed to do.  I needed to get them accomplished.  It was like a check list.

One of those photographs from the checklist is one of a girl putting a goldfish in a pond in front of a large castle.  Black and white.  Realistic looking, taken in Sweden with this giant gray looking castle in the background.  I have searched high and low for that photo and have tried to reproduce it from memory, but no dice yet.

That doesn’t mean that I can’t use the same style in my photos.  Here for example.  These are some more pictures from the weekend trip to Philadelphia of the American Philosophical Society.  That I made look vaguely Scandinavian looking:

 

 

 

 

On this blog, I regularly pledge my undying love for Boston.  I call it my adopted hometown.  Second home of the weird.  The city that doesn’t care if you love it.

But sometimes I stray.  Sometimes I go other places.

Over the weekend Philadelphia and I had a fling.  Nothing serious.  I’ll never give up Boston.  It is my “home” after all, but I had to give Philadelphia a shot.  See something a bit different.

Now to be serious about things, the cities are quite similar.  Both played a huge role in the founding of this country.  Both are centers of education and the arts.  But it is so funny now when I go to other places.  I turn a corner and I think “oh, yeah, they don’t do it like that in Boston” and at that moment, the spell is broken.  I need to go to back to Boston.

Philly, it was fun, but you always go back to your first love.

A few photos commemorating my weekend fling with Philly:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe you can tell him?  Or her??:

 

Or her??:

Well, sometimes in life you must let things go.  In my case, it was my Canon XSI that has served me very well through the years.  We had a good five year run together and yesterday the shutter got stuck.  I went to the camera shop and found out that getting a new camera would cost the same as fixing it, so I got a new one.  It was weird parting with the camera.  I remembered the good times we had together, but also that the camera reminded me of a bad time in my life, so maybe letting go of it wasn’t a bad thing after all.

Here’s the last shot from the camera before it conked out completely: