The photos of Elf Land, a neighborhood space in a to-be developed lot in Somerville, I have seen tended to be at human level and not elf level. As such they didn’t do Elf Land justice. Before the big storm in January I set out to change that. Here is the result:
You can find all of the photos at this album:
The Boston branch of the Party of Socialism and Liberation held a pro-Choice rally Friday. My wife and I joined it. It was well attended:
The signs were great:
Some interesting photographic opportunities presented themselves:
You can find the rest at this album:
My son and I attended this year’s Art Beat. It was lovely to be out after a year of lockdowns and event cancellations. Here are some of the photos I took.
More in this album:
I had the Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens so I found other uses for it. It was probably excessive to use it photographing birds in the backyard …
… but I got many good photographs of the moon that I hope to try focus stacking. In retrospect, since I used a tripod, I should have used a slower shutter speed. One unfocus stacked image:
Over the summer I planned to head up to Bath, Maine to photograph the USS Lyndon B. Johnson. I planned to take the Maine Maritime Museum’s Shipyards & Lighthouses Cruise just as I had when photographing the USS Monsoor.
Due to the pandemic that was not possible, so I instead rented the Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens from Hunt’s Photo Video. My son and I drove up and tried finding locations to photograph from. The land across from the Kennebec River is filled with private houses and offered no outlet from which to photograph the USS LBJ. We ended up starting on the US Route 1 bridge and traveling down to the Doubling Point Lighthouse:
The Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens is a very heavy lens. Hand holding it seemed a recipe for blurry photos so I put it on a sturdy tripod. It worked well though the walkway to the Doubling Point Lighthouse vibrated when people walked on it.
From the US Route 1 bridge:
From the Doubling Point Lighthouse:
From where on the Doubling Point Lighthouse I photographed the LBJ. Taken while on a previous boat cruise.
Back in October I walked around Worcester mapping surveillance cameras at a Pirate Party outing. Got a chance to photograph some of the murals and other sights in downtown Worcester.
Finally got around to posting some new photos I took during the summer.
I was particularly fond of the following photograph, though a flash would have helped.
Whether the patient fly stuck around with a flash going off repeatedly is an open question.
A few flowers and such from the neighborhood.
To see a higher resolution version of the one above:
Visited the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln recently. It was a nice day to get out and walk around with the family. Here is a selection of the art we saw:
Some of the art wasn’t:
You can cycle through all of the pictures:
In July, my sons and I went to Danehy Park in Cambridge to see Comet NEOWISE. We got there before sunset to find a good position on the hill in the park.
It wasn’t the best location, even besides the mosquitos that came out after dusk, but it was a good opportunity to try time lapse/astro photography.
It wasn’t easy to find Comet NEOWISE with the naked eye, so I pointed my camera in the right direction, took a long exposure photograph, then checked if the comet was in the photograph. Whether it was there or not, I repositioned the camera to either find it or get a better picture of it.
It was an iterative process.
I played with the duration of the photographs experiencing that long durations at high focal lengths result in star trails. Some had a good balance.
The next day, clad in bug spray and long pants, my son and I tried photographing the comet from the top of the Alewife MBTA stop garage in Cambridge. The combination of the clouds and the bright garage lights hindered my efforts to get decent pictures. It was a good scouting opportunity. Unfortunately, the weather since hasn’t been great so it was good we went out the earlier night.
