Just playing with the foreground and the background a little bit, that’s all:

I guess a museum cannot actually be a home.  People don’t live in museums, but to the extent that one can have a home, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in some strange way, has been that for me.

I’ve visited the museum more times than I have been to any other museum and still think that it is hands down, the best museum of any kind I have ever visited.  I go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a lot, but it does not even hold a candle to the Met.  Sorry in that way, New York has Boston beat.

The greatest thing about the Met is that despite its very elite reputation, it is actually a museum for the masses.  You can get in there for any amount of money you want.  Admission is simply a suggested contribution.  That makes it kind of egalitarian.

I spent last Sunday in what can only be described as my old backyard (and what a backyard it is).  I particularly enjoyed the Greek and Roman sculptures.  Amusing, beautiful, scary and never boring.  I mean the statues, not me:

Help!!!:

(No actual men were harmed in the writing of this blog entry)

So, over the weekend I had the unique privilege of taking some photos with my camera, Rick.  Like I said, I have three cameras — Rick, Chumlee and the Old Man.  Chumlee and Little Chumlee are my everyday cameras and I can use Rick sometimes.  Getting Rick involves an extensive interview process and background check.

When I do pass the background check, Rick gets to be mine for a couple of days.  So, on my weekend sojourn to New York, I took a lot of photos with Rick, including this one:

So how do clothes make the man in this picture?  Well, they don’t because you can only see his hand, but what the title means is that the optical quality of a photo make is yet more interesting.  This photo could have been very average, if it hadn’t been taken the optical wonder known as Rick, the camera.  I wonder if it would be as interesting if the raindrops had been less sharply rendered.  I guess clothes did make the man this time.

Summer is winding down.  Pretty soon, the leaves with change and then fall.

Last summer was loaded with activity, but was kind of happy, but this summer had more of a melancholy air to it.  This summer started with a bang.  Well, more of an explosion and continued to be kind of trying.  Growing pains, if you will.  Then it took a while to get everything back on track and eventually there were flashes of the brilliant summers I have grown used to having.

Now we’re in the dog days of it.  I’m not really relieved that it is over because summer is about as close as I come to having an actual vacation.  But I’m hoping that next summer will have considerably fewer explosions:

 

Well, I have emerged from the mud and decided to go and explore the interiors of Boston.

Take a look at what I saw:

You never know what you are capable of doing until you do it.  Somewhere along the way someone must have said this to me, but I didn’t listen.  Well, while completing my first Tough Mudder obstacle race, I learned the true meaning of that phrase.

I did an obstacle race in May called Warrior Dash.  That was just a warm up for what happened yesterday.  Tough Mudder absolutely lives up to its title.  It was extremely tough.  And muddy.  Well, that part I didn’t mind and the toughness I didn’t really mind either.  Ten miles of obstacles, 20 obstacles total and lots of time to think in between.

There was a lot of walking and running through the woods of Maine yesterday.  During that time, I had a lot of time to contemplate exactly how I got to where I ended up.  A couple of years ago, I was kind of a couch potato.  I mean I did more than the average person, but sometimes I was satisfied with just spending an entire day on the couch.  That suited me just fine.  Of course I loved taking photos and that involved a certain amount of effort and walking, but mostly I was sedentary.  And that’s how I would stay.  Or so I thought.

How had I ended up crawling through mud on my heads and knees and doing the activities I will describe in this blog entry?  Well, some kind of long dormant athlete awoke in me.  I realized that after a very long break that I enjoyed athletics and that I didn’t need to care what other people thought.  I was doing this for me and that was fine.

What?  We’re this far and no photos?  Well, there won’t be one of mine for a long while because I didn’t take photos of what I did because I was busy doing it and there wasn’t really a way to take any photos of it.  You’ll just have to take my word for it.  At the end, there will be a photo I took.  The photos I am posting are pictures of the obstacles I did that were the most challenging.

Here’s the first one called Walking the Plank.  Isn’t that a friendly sounding name for an obstacle?  Here’s a photo of it:

Yeah.  That looks sorta scary.  What was funny about it was that I really wanted to do it and didn’t even think for a second about any kind of fear until I got to the very edge.  I looked down and got scared.  Not a paralyzing fear, more of a “um, so that looks like a great distance down.”  I guess not fear, more realization.  Realization.

I wanted to remember what the feeling on the way down was and honestly it was like flying through the air very slowly until I quickly hit the water.  I submerged myself as deep as I could for some reason.  I thought that would be safe and then floated back up and swam out as soon as possible.  I have to admit.  It wasn’t just fun.  It was insanely fun.  I would totally do that again.

But then we get to an obstacle called Everest.  This was pure insanity.

Here’s a photo of that one (that I did not take)

It looks crazy and it so totally is.  When I saw this thing I nearly just bypassed it.  It looked impossible.  Completely and totally impossible.  It is a greased half pipe made from slippery material.  You run as fast as you can up the side and get caught by people on the top who take you over.  Sound easy?  Well, it isn’t at all easy.  Not in the least bit.  You do this obstacle at mile 9.5 of a 10 mile course, when you are so exhausted after 15 or 16 other obstacles.  You have no idea how you are even going to get up there.

I had to do it four times because I got up there.  Either people caught you and dragged you over, or down you went, hitting and scraping your knees on the way down.  I did this three times.  But the people up on top helped me and that was really special.  Really really really special because it made me believe that somewhere out in this world where most people couldn’t care less about their fellow human being, people care enough to help you over this thing.  I ran up a fourth time and got to the top.  Yeah, I have two massive bruises on my arms to show for it and a couple of others on my knees but I made it to the top.  And I thought I would never make it up there.  I guess you never know what you are capable of until you actually do it.

Well, here is finally a photo taken by me:

After all of that, all I got was a lousy t-shirt and headband.  No, I’m totally kidding.  This is hanging on my wall at home, headband and shirt.  I guess I’ll treat it like the yellow jersey from the Tour de France.

At the beginning of the race, I was standing in a big crowd getting ready to go.  They had a man getting us ready by telling jokes but also a few serious things.  He made us take a knee and make a pledge.  I thought to myself that a couple of years ago, I never would have done anything like that.  I would have thought it was so corny and stupid and why would I ever want to be associated with anything that stupid?  But there I was in the middle of it, feeling at home.

I’m glad I got off that couch.

Its the light that is left on when I come to New York:

When I was shooting the photos of my paintball playing charges, I realized that I have been doing the same photojournalistic style for years and I learned that style very early on.

Since I was a very little kid, I loved images and I started taking pictures very early.  Most of the time, they weren’t very good, but I still kept the love of them.  When I decided to get seriously into it, I joined the yearbook at my college and learned all about proper photography from them.  Honestly, I learned more in that photo service office than I learned in college and it was the most valuable experience.

I learned how to use pictures to tell a story.  Look for natural expressions.  Stand way.  Keep situations natural.  Don’t intrude into situations, so they suddenly change.  Get action shots, but also behind the scenes shots, where things are happening related to the main event.  Always watch the lines of the photo.  Make sure they are plenty of horizontal and diagonal lines in the portraits.

Well, I guess here is more of the same:

 

I saw these two and I really wanted to photograph them.  Now I do this all the time, photograph strangers, but for some reason that day, I lost the nerve.  Strange.  But I thought I had to photograph them, so I took the camera out and pretended to fiddle with it.  I had the camera on the double image setting and snapped what seemed like a photo of my knees.  Clever trick.

Photography ninja: