You go away.  You can’t be with the other pandas.  Bad, bad, bad panda:

From now on, I will always photograph the long hallways in airports:

Where I go where people are just too much for me to face:

For a while I got away from wildly making over my photos.  Mostly out of laziness because usually I am on my way to bed when I upload the photos.  But now I have a little extra time, so I have decided to go a bit wild and redo these.

The first one isn’t that bad.  Just an old postcard kind of treatment:

The other one I went completely buck wild with.  This one I shot through a window at the University of Massachusetts cafeteria.  Like I said in a previous blog post, Canaletto had the Grande Canal.  I have hunger, lunch and the need to take photos.  Find your muse where you may.

Anyway, my little camera was saying it wanted flash, so I broke the cardinal rule of photography.  I bounced the flash off of the glass and the result was kind of interesting.  Then I went nut on the thing:

Yeah, now it has a mistaken weird negative thing going on.  Go me.

See new places, go to new places.  See the city from another place.  And also change your perspective on other things:

As a part of my job as a teacher, I take the students on activities.  I take photos of the students on these activities and the places we go as well.  We visit a lot of the same things over and over again.  I hear the same tours over and over and I myself sometimes give the tours when there are no tour guides around.  I simplify the tours as well.

But back to the pictures.  Since I visit these places so many times I get the chance to get the photos I really want.  The ones that have that extra special something that takes them from good to great.

So the photos up here are from a visit to the Massachusetts State House, where I have gone many times.  I love the place.  A missing cod, the brother of a known mob boss in a portrait on the wall, the tureagle, Silent Cal and the red ribbons the legislation.  Old school.  Ancient.  Perfect for photos.

Not to mention I have wanted to photograph a place like this since I saw a photo essay on the United Nations in Vanity Fair in 1999.  I’ve made SO MANY attempts over the years to reproduce what was in that essay.  First on film, then digital.  NONE of it ever worked out.

But now here we are.  And I am finally happy with the photos.  Fourteen years.  I am a masochist.

Let’s celebrate that with some photos:

\

Others choose to be inspired by a place filled with singing homeless people and Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts franchises: