Pirate Patina

A gold-painted "pirate?" crosses the street in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston after a long, hot day's work.

These street performers paint themselves (and their costumes) and stand completely still - living statues. In NYC, you'll see a lot of Statues of Liberty, for example. In Boston, they tend to be colonial-era and 19th century.

Myself, I find them a bit creepy, but to each his own.

Community Boating

Community Boating is a non-profit organization that makes sailboats, kayaks, and windsurfers available to the public at low cost. Their boathouse in on the Charles River just upstream from the Boston end of Longfellow Bridge.

Photogenic Boston

The weekend before last, we were in Boston for the wedding of one of the sons of dear friends of ours. Aside from the happy occassion, I was delighted to be in Boston after an absence of more than 30 years.

Arriving in Boston by car, I got that same rush of endorphins that I experience every time I'm on that long, sweeping curve of Lincoln Tunnel ramp in Weehauken that gives you your first close-up look at the Manhattan skyline.

Boston is a beautiful city filled with compelling architecture, from colonial to postmodern. Spending every workday as I do in architecturally-challenged Baltimore, being here was quite a treat.

The morning after the wedding, I was out of my hotel room by 6:30 AM, I walked past the Boston Public Library, a Beaux-Arts beauty by McKim, Mead and White, Trinity Church, and the Hancock Tower, the worthy skyscraper-regnant of the Back Bay skyline. Then just a few blocks east to Boston Garden and the famous Swan Boats, which I'd never seen in real life.

The clear day and the early hour made for beautiful morning sidelighting and nice reflections. I haven't gotten out this early to photograph in quite a while, but it really paid off.

On the way back to the hotel, looped back around the other side of the Hancock Tower for some more photos. One I had in mind was an image of the older 1947 John Hancock Building, "Little John", with the newer tower, "Big John", in the background. Here's the result - as it was still before 8AM, the western sky behind Big John was still a deep blue - no polarizer needed! I really like the contrast between the blocky, robust, all-granite design of John the Elder and the slender, pane-of-glass look of John Junior.

I remember the growing pains that the Hancock Tower went through in the mid- to late-70's. Most dramatic, even frightening, was the problem with entire windowpanes popping out and plunging, all forty-four square feet of them, hundreds of feet to the pavement below. Years went by with many empty windows replaced with plywood panels, and some took to calling the skyscraper "Plywood Palace." Another problem was a pronounced and nauseating sway of upper floors in high winds.

More than 30 years later, all of these problems have been solved, and I was able to enjoy Big John and its relationship to its surroundings in peace and confidence.

I wouldn't want to live there (I've become a complete cold-weather wimp in my old age,) but it's sure a nice place to visit. Good-looking people, great food, eye-pleasing architecture. If you haven't been there yet, I hope you get an opportunity to go - and bring your camera.

My New 28 Megapixel Superwide Camera...

I don't know why I haven't tried this before... here's a panorama of the Charles River from the Back Bay in Boston.

This 180-degree photo is actually made up of five "normal" images I took with my 18-55mm zoom at it's widest setting. Equivalent to a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera, it's not a superwide by any means. But coupled with the PhotoStitch software that came with my Canon DSLR, I was able to create this panorama in a few minutes. The resulting image was 13,530 x 2142 pixels, or about 28.6 megapixels.

I did this on the spur of the moment last weekend while in Boston for a wedding, without giving it much thought, but here is a good article by Ken Rockwell on using PhotoStitch. Ken notes that even the least expensive Canon digicams made in the last two years, come with this software. The digicams even come with a special "stitch assist" mode to make life easier still.

I see this as a good technique for making some dramatic panoramas in Annapolis and Baltimore. Look for some soon.