Shadow Dancer

This little shadow dancer was doing her thing as us adults watched a group of Peruvian musicians performing at Harborplace.

Now that Spring is well along and the days are much longer, there's free entertainment every evening at the little amphitheater, and I like to walk along the Inner Harbor on my way to the Light Rail to check things out. This group of three musicians did a very good job of playing guitar and bamboo flutes (the style is sort of like the flute bridge in El Condor Pasa.) Last Friday, I saw a very good juggler/comedian.

I took the little shadow dancer photo with a Canon A620.

Wachovia Tower

Here's another photo from a long-overdue walkaround during lunch the other day.

The Wachovia Tower sits at Baltimore and St. Paul Streets in downtown baltimore, and it's alternating bands of granite and glass make for a nice reflecting surface. Depending on where you stand, you'll see different buildings reflected. Of course, timing is critical, and the morning, especially early morning is best for a lot of reasons.

I took this particular shot a little after noon, but I'll be heading back to shoot this facade from several angles much earlier in the morning. Stay tuned.

Joe McNally

What are you going to do tonight? You can waste an hour watching Rock Star Supernova on CBS, or you could learn something.

How about spending 70 minutes with a YouTube video? The time will go by really fast, and what you see and learn will make a much bigger and more important impression on you than anything you could possibly see on network or cable tv tonight.



This video of Joe McNally is part of the Authors@Google series. Google invites authors to visit and speak at their Mountainview, CA campus for the benefit of their employees. In this case, McNally, a top-flight photographer for more than 30 years, had just released a new book, The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters.

I hadn't heard of McNally before tonight, but it turns out that he's a charming and engaging speaker. Moreover, his photos do live up to his billing. He seems to have a very good sense of humor, which shows up in a lot of his photos.

Check him out by clicking on the YouTube video above. If you aren't hooked in the first five minutes enough to stay for the whole video, I'll be surprised.

Custom House

Baltimore has very little in the way of modern buildings that please the eye, but we do have quite a few very nice older buildings.

This one is the United States Custom House, a classical-style building completed in 1907. Baltimore has a number of handsome old buildings built in a similar style. In fact, enough of them that director Len Wiseman chose this part of Baltimore as a stand-in for Washington DC in his 2007 film Live Free or Die Hard. Wiseman gave us a birds-eye glimpse of the Custom House, but from the other side - you can see that side in the link above.