A view of NYC
Click for larger image! Nikon D40 Tamron 18-270 (35mm@f/8 1/500 – 13 shots stitched)
I’m pretty tired. Both days we’ve gone out and done what has amounted to walking for 4 hours each time. The first time was in Manhattan; the second time, today, in Hoboken, NJ. I’ve so many stories to tell, indeed. It has been a fun time.
You’ll forgive my delay in getting photos posted. I am shooting film, after all, and the last thing that I want to do after a long day on my feet is stand up while developing film! 
As Trista was so kind in loaning her D40, I felt very much happy and obliged to use it. So, today when we went to Hoboken an opportunity presented itself. We went to the waterfront. The waterfront being the Hudson river. Across was the river was, you guessed it, NYC, both downtown and uptown.
The shot above is a stitch of 13 shots. I simply took some test shots, put the camera on manual, f/8 @1/500 and rotated from my waste from left to right. Then I loaded the photos into CS4 and let it do the work. After that I made some slight adjustments and ended up with this. It’s nothing original or even well post processed, but it was just really cool being there and being able to see this. I wanted to share it with you. This certainly looks a lot different than downtown Charleston, I can tell ya that! The outlook for today was for cloudy skies. Fortunately, the clouds parted for just a little bit, allowing us to get some nice shots. After we finished our shots, the clouds rolled back in and the blue skies were not seen again. Right place. Right time!
We had a great time, met some nice people, and had plenty of time to chat. I have a few portraits of Tom that he doesn’t know that I took, well, that is until he reads this blog entry, but those will have to wait into they get into the soup, film too, I’m afraid.
And yes, that big building near the middle is The Empire State Building, but King Kong was nowhere in sight!
Wheels up!
No skyscrapers here!
Heading off folks into the friendly skies, leaving the sun-soaked shores of Charleston, SC and heading to the rain-soaked boroughs of New York City. I’ve never been a big city kind of guy, but I am excited to see exactly what an area containing 1.5 million people looks like. That’s what the 2,000 census of Manhattan says, add in the rest of the boroughs and you get just over 8 million! Dang! And I think that the Charleston area can get a bit crowed sometimes with its 106,000 people! Hah!
Sure, I lived in Dallas with its 1,000,000+ population, but it was spread out over quite a bit of land … you know, Texas style, but it still got quite busy. Hopefully, I’ll get to ride on the subway and take in some of the local culture!
Of course, stay tuned. I’ll do my best to keep you informed!
Damn good folks
Look! Over there! Damn good folks!
I hear people say that there are few good people left and I just don’t really believe that. Sure, there are people who are caught up in their own drama, myself included, but there are some really good folks around. All you have to do is look for them, or in my case, they find me without me evening having to look!
A couple of years ago I remember writing a post about wanting to visit with a lot of my fellow bloggers. To date, I’ve met but a few. Tomorrow, in keeping with my desire to meet more, I’ll be flying to New Jersey to spend a few days with Tom, The Photo Father. He has been very gracious to open his home to me and take me on a photographic tour around the New York area. You should see how much he has planned. I doubt that we will be able to complete it all, have deep meaningful conversations, and eat if we do everything that he wants to show me. We’ve never met in person, but have traded e-mails frequently. I love these types of meets. I would do the same thing for my fellow bloggers!
The whole meetup started when Tom told me that I should come and visit him one day. I told him to be careful what he wished for because I’d do it. Again, he said, let’s do it. So, we started talking about dates and settled on Halloween weekend. Sweet!
More nice folks
On Sunday I received a phone call and an e-mail from my friend Earl offering to let me take his D300 to NY. Talk about generous. Unfortunately, by the time that I had gotten the message, I was about to head back to Charleston, but the generosity was something special. Thanks, Earl! Thanks so much!
Also, a special thanks to Trista. Trista is Dennis’s girlfriend. Dennis a friend of mine and a coworker. She was reading my blog the other day and saw that my D300 had bitten the dust. She then graciously offered to loan me her Nikon D40, which I’ll be taking with me! How about that?!
Maybe it’s just the blogging community, but I don’t think so. There are a number of kind and caring people out there!
A dogs life
Pedro and Hobbs
“A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.” – E B White, The Care and Training of a Dog
It’s a tough life, but someone has to live it. Hobbs had a number of cute poses this weekend, so with my faltering D300, I just had to capture one or two. My camera will be shipping out for repair early this week. 
I’ll be headed to NY and it will be headed to Illinois!
Imperfect timing!
On Wednesday, I travel to New Jersey to see my friend, Tom, The Photo Father. This morning, I got out my D300 and went out to take some pictures. After about 15 or so pictures, the camera refused to auto focus. I turned it off and back on, took the battery out, remove the lens and put it back on, but still no love. I figured that it might be a glitch with the lens and perhaps the contacts, so I cleaned the contacts. Still, no love. Well, no big deal, I can always manual focus. I’m used to it. It’s what I’ve been doing for months and months with the film cameras.
So, I focused manually and took a shot. Way too dark! I adjusted the shutter speed and aperture, still, way too dark. I noticed that the display said that the aperture was set at f/64! My lens doesn’t have an f/64. F/22 was the max. Uh oh! I went back to the car, grabbed another lens, same problem. How about another one? Same problem. Crap! I gave up and came home.
When I got home, I tried a few more things and camera started working again. I took a few photos of Hobbs, which turned out well, but then the camera started flaking out again with the f/64 business and way underexposed photos. Oh well, looks like it will be all film all the time in NY. I don’t have a digital backup and no time to get one here to rent. Sigh…
It’s odd that I was talking to my friend Dennis the other day and told him that I’d never had any problems with my Nikon equipment, which was true until today! Well, I was able to take a few photos of the fall foliage.
Creating mood
The above photo is of the Kapstone Paper and Packaging paper mill. When I first arrived in Charleston I didn’t know of its existence. That, however, was short lived. When I reported to work on my first day, some 14 1/2 months ago, I had to brave the assault to my nostrils of this malodorous, smoke-belching monstrosity. If you’ve never been near a paper mill, well, I cannot describe the smell. It is, to the least, pungent, tangy, sharp, and nasty all at the same time. There is no escape from it.
A few of my fellow employees say that they don’t even notice the smell anymore; however, I’m not one of those. I notice every time. Sometimes sooner than others, depending on which way the wind is blowing. As the crow flies (in a direct line), I live about 10 or 12 miles from the mill. If the wind is blowing into Summerville, SC from North Charleston, SC, I can smell it clearly. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen so often, but as I work within easy walking distance to it, I smell it most days.
So, as you can probably guess by now, I’m not a fan and seek to portray it in a bleak light. My own little political statement, if you will. The other morning I stopped and wanted to take a few pictures of it. I should have done it the day before because on that gray day the mill was producing lots of output and looked truly ominous, but on this day, the sun was shining and it looked less ominous, but smelled not better!
I messed with the photo a bit in Lightroom. I wanted to give it a sinister look, but I don’t quite think that I pulled it off. What might I do to make it look even worse? LOL! Just to show a comparison, have a look at how the newspaper portrayed it in this article. Quite a bit of difference, eh? Here it looks so nice, innocent, and look, it’s barely putting out any smoke!
Street Stories: Coco
Coco
This image has been hanging around in my camera for a couple of weeks now. I didn’t finish the roll until today. I’ve been wanting to tell her story, but wanted to wait until I had developed the picture. So, here it is:
This is Coco. She works for Bluegreen resorts, a timeshare seller, but not a very pushy one. She works in downtown Charleston at a place that was, I guess, formerly a camera store. It was called Kamera Korner. I was out shooting one day and noticed that my Leica’s battery had died. No light meter! Oh well, I’d have to wing it! I have since learned to place the shutter speed dial on “B” before placing the camera in the bag. If the shutter button is depressed, the light meter will not come on. Or, I could not cock the shutter, but I like to be ready!
I rounded a corner and happened to spy a store called Kamera Korner and figured that they would have batteries, but lo and behold, there was nothing there but the name, Coco, and lots of tourist information. Outside of the former store stood Coco. To say that Coco has personality would be, well, quite an understatement. Let us just say that she is vivacious and has much effervescence. She’s downright bubbly!
When I walked over she greeted me with a smile and we struck up a conversation. She was interested in my ‘old’ camera. While we talked, she continued to offer potential customers discount tickets, etc, as they were walking down the sidewalk. As I have noticed with most street vendors, or businesses, most people will give them a wide berth.
Coco told me that most people ignore her, some are very rude, others cross the street. She said that it didn’t bother her because she has a pretty thick skin and if someone was rude to her, she knew how to be rude back to them ‘in a nice way’.
While we were talking, a young man from Hyman’s Seafood Restaurant, a couple of doors down, came by. Coco stopped him and suggested that I try one of the free hushpuppies that he was giving out. I did and it was fantastic. Probably one of the best that I’ve ever had, honestly. She, as you can see, helped herself to two. She says that she probably eats at least a dozen every day that they give them out. She also made the guy give me a discount coupon to the restaurant, which I have in my wallet.
We had a great conversation and then just as quickly as she appeared, she disappeared, back into the Kamera Korner for a break or something. I went on about my business and continued to shoot without batteries.
Most of my shots were pretty spot on. I guess that I had a good idea about the light.