A walk around Dorchester, and a steamroller! The kid in me was happy, my wife had to be explained (mansplained?) what a steam roller was and its function as opposed to a grader or a dump truck (geez - chicks! :-) I liked the braked detail….

A rusty ball!

Dead rat, experimental shot on the iPhone, wife was not impressed. I dunno, meat is meat, texture is texture??? Black and white treatment makes it classy, right? Actually, it was the long shadow in the golden hour light that attracted my eye. I like how in B&W the rats shadow and what is the shadow of my shoelace and shin are long extrusions on the concrete.

During a recent visit to friends in May 2020, we walked from Kendall Sq MBTA to Medford Tufts. Lot of stuff appealed to Dominique but not to me…..I am in a photo-phunk…..

Another attempt using a different aperture

One of two angles on the Webster / Newton Ave RR Bridge in Somerville. Each was done trying a different aperture to manipulate the depth of field.

I dunno, it appealed to me! I like the depth of field as it came off the camera, nice focus on the subject, light blurring of the bakery windows. I like the stickers, shape, the ancient tech aspect of it. It is a fire call box, which is not an uncommon site in the Boston Area, after our fire in 19th century Boston area become home to many new types of fire protection and detection now used as standards worldwide - SImplex (sprinklers), Gamewell (call and masterboxes like this one) and the NFPA.

Heavily edited and masked to bring out the Hancock buildings glorious blue, the glowering sky, tweaked the lamps, and pushed the railing down (it was too bright). Taken from the Francis Appleton Bridge.

Dad on lookup, mom sheltering a baby, larger, voracious goslings in the foreground venturing away from momma.

He watches eternally from his post in the center of the cemetery, on a watering post of some kind. I hope the shimmering quality of his glossy finish comes through on the smaller screens.

Lots of old colonial era headstones in Cobb’s Hill cemetery, I had the wrong light and wrong lens and running out of time to get really good shots….

Looking from the center of ancient Cobb’s Hill cemetery with it’s headstones from the 1700s (and maybe earlier) out past the 19th brick towards the 21st century towers rising, construction halted for now…

I took this low shot from the stair leading up into the cemetery. I though it would be an easy pleasing shot but it did not come off the camera as expected……….Composition is ok, perspective but color and light proved to be very challenging…..

Detail under the Lechmere Viaduct in Boston, which carries the Green Line (last of the trolley lines except the Mattapan High Speed Line) in Boston. It is the last elevated rapid transit train line - I remember the ones on Causeway Street at North Station and the Orange Line running above Washington Street in the 70s…...All disappeared over the 80s….

One of two rivet details. This one is focussed on the middle, blurring the foreground rivets. Too bad I moved the camera between shots but I was kind of handing off a narrow guard rail….

Rivet shot of the Longfellow Bridge, close in focus.

Detail of a Longfellow Bridge truss, glorious steel and rivets and bolts and stone.

No, they are not really salt and pepper shakers….but I did have some fun with them…..beautifully restored Longfellow Bridge, except for the lack of the old iron lampposts because two government employees sold them for scrap, illegally of course…..

Not a great shot, mainly for context.

Underside shot of the Francis Appleton Pedestrian Bridge, quite beautiful and modern without being too garish. Relatively newly opened.

A street scene of Boston’s North End, as we walked the relatively empty city.

Still there, over 70 years after the destruction of the West End. Someday I need to visit the museum inside and get a better shot of the exterior.

A shot straight in the middle of Causeway Street, neglible traffic. The Hub construction site that is enveloping the TD Garden (the horrible replacement to the original) is looking pretty good and I like the large street level windows. Hopefully they will reflect and transmit the light and the life of a renewed City, unlike the disgusting 70s and 80s monstrosities nearby of the O’Neil Federal building that give nothing back to the life of the street for their squatting like cold stone and windowless street facades, ignoring and ignorant of the urban lifestream on the street, separate. Separate is not living, it is existence but it is not sharing, intermingling. I despise that building for it’s rejection of any joy at being part of a bustling city with interplay/interchange. The buildings are not meant to be boundaries or containers, walls separated by the city, they need to be permeable, light filled conduits for the human spirit.

Attempt to focus through the trees and capture the Bunker Hill Monument lined up between the towers of the Craigie Bridge.

These gents were rolling like it was 2019….

I liked the metal…….

Ancient abode of my paternal ancestors after coming from Italy via New York and maybe Philedelphia….- my Aunt Phil said they lived here around 1917-1919 on the second floor, seeing as she was born 1917 I believe. It is the building with the external fire escape. The small one story building in the foreground is supposedly the home of JFK Jr grandfather. From here they moved out to the suburbs of Watertown and then Readville and eventually Hyde Park where I met, as a very young child in the early 70s, my great grandmother….who would have live in this house here. Shot taken from the edge of the Cobb’s Hill Cemetery.

Tight crop, with a lot of processing. Lowered contrast of base layer and brushed in a sharpened, lightened, and color processed layer for the figures. Fuji with fixed lens

A nice day for a walk, I thought the curve of the street looked interesting. Heavily post processed in CaptureOne, really bring the sky back and played with the midtones for that popping color of the cars and trees.

Front detail, the iron isn’t popping but the objective of this shot was to manual focus on the church. Keystoning and HDR cleanup to bring the sky back…

Another attempt at this shot, CaptureOne helped rescue the sky with its HDR sliders. Other than that, minimal processing beyond raw development and lens corrections.

We have taken this shot frequently on our walks to Boston (this day we were headed from our Dorchester home to Formaggio in the South End). We both love the aerial lifts, she has tried a few times to get sunset shot through the lifts….today I was happy to spot the mirror in the puddle. HDR processing to bring the sky down and some masks to boost the puddle reflection.

This is the old industrial Dorchester, I guess one of factories and engineering buildings, replaced later by garages and used car lots as the jobs went away. These old remants of the industrial, along with the used car lots and garages are being mowed under in a renewal to massive housing developments for the upper middle class. Well, at least that was happening pre-Covid19 crash. This building sits across from the ever coming DOT Block - and the land underneath it is owned by the same billionaire who owns most of Harvard Sq and who purchased the DOT Block project from its original developer. Interesting to reflect, these industrial buildings themselves are there because probably the older Dorchester railroads were there, and before that, the wharfs of Freeport when Dorchester was a port to avoid taxes heading into Boston. There is a lovely little set of streets I will photograph that evoke the sinuosity and density of other seaside areas like Rockport and Scituate not far from this building - Church St that goes from Dorchester and Freeport intersection upto the First Parish Church on Meetinghouse Hill.

A late day shot of one of the gallery buildings on Harrison Ave in “SOWA”. Another example of an area built up and renewed and reused and repurposed over the centuries Boston as an urban locale.

I liked the giant glass opening (well proportioned) frame in brick, showcasing the iron/steel staircase and those sexy rivets….

All because the light was amazing. Side note, Gaslight Brasserie is in there, and they had a massive water leak, you could see the various cleanup and pump vehicles behind the building…..

Very dark, I used a steep gamma tone curve. On my macbook retina screen, the darks are much subtler than here…and this is rendered using sRGB color space, which is more compatible but covers less of the gamut than say the retina monitors or the Adobe RGB color space….check out V2….too bad I had to lighten it…

Raised the exposure in the main part….too bright but V1 came out too dark. Also, this is using Adobe RGB, V1 was rendered using sRGB (a more limited gamut)

I would dearly love to get my hands on the few remaining signs, this is on an old auto body shop outside Codman Square in Dorchester.

Tricky lighting kind of messed me up. A tighter crop would make the comp more balanced but the lovely late winter afternoon light above the garage door would be discarded…..boosted the green….maybe took much????

Yawn, another (back)sunlit, in monochrome….cheap shot.

Heavy color boost, gamma curve and other nefarious edits….

More nefarious edits to color contrast and gamma curve…

I dunno, I liked the depth of the blue sky at night and the stacking of the signage with the R R lights above…..not bad for a night shot on the fly using my slow lens (F2.8), no tripod and pretty much as we were walking from Needham Heights station to my mothers…

Marsh reeds have been a challenging subject to capture and I still struggle with depth of field and focus. This shot was one that I think worked - good focus, tight depth of field with nice bokeh and some good winter light. Neponset River in Dorchester, MA

Off NH 113, google says this is Alvin J Coleman & Sons….

She was not expecting a shot, of course, she never lets anyone snap a photo of her!!!

Stopped off VT100 with Dominique for some photos at a waterfall in the Granville Gulf area. We circled the road a few times! This is a composite of three exposure levels using darktable HDR. I was very happy using the new tripod for AE bracket shots. However, the blue of the ice had to be enhanced in post processing…..maybe a bit much but in BW (see my black and white page) it is stunning…..

Lines up just right, the perspective and the grid lines. Light treatment in contrast and color. 

Throw away butt shot that I decided to manipulate. Thoughts? Should I continue or please make it stop?

2 image HDR in darktable, not as brightened as I thought and without a tripod, three+ image HDRs came out horrible.

One of the older buildings, the light was hitting it nicely at the end of our walk to and from Sulmona’s in the North End.

I wanted a sunset illuminating the metal silos or a night shot with the industrial lighting….but I will have to settle (for now) for this and hope I can get another chance at the sunset shot….4pm winter sun through clouds streaming between the Back Bar and South End buildings……maybe in January?

Rivets and steel are personal obessions.

A chance quick shot at Sulmona’s, a butcher in the North End (I think the last).

December 2019, only the courthouse in the foreground was standing five or so years ago. Now we have a collection of glass boxes at Chrismast time. Joy to the World :-)

Experimental shot trying to compose the criss crossing of the stone ramp walkway fringed with melting snow. Rowes Wharf. December 2019.

Again, a 2 image HDR composition in Darktable.

Hmmm….does it work as a shot? Let me know.

Detail taken in pomfret vt

Recycled metal sculpture housed in an ancient human to human communications hut. 

Where the Lachine Canal hits a lock before the port of Montreal. Straightened and color corrected. Fuji X-E3 with XF35MM F2 R lens. May 2019

Farine Five Roses in the port of Montreal. Detail of the grain elevator’s open web truss vertical support, casting a star shadow onto the concrete silo. May 2019

Like Me Mom and Morgantaler wrote “Shive Space Machine”, this giant boring machine, like Shiva, is a destroyer and a creator, part leveler of the past and builder of the future. The lower grey stone two and three story buildings on the Main are being razed, and with machines likes this, developers are raising 10 and 20 story luxury condo buildings and hotels.

Large scale demolition and new construction along The Main between Sherbrooke down to Rene Levesque, this is near corner of Ontario and St Laurent in May 2019.

Large scale industrial piping and fittings in the tunnels under the Deer Island WWTP. Captured on iphone 7.

Machine shop, on Dorchester/Broadway, across from Grand Ten and Golds Gym. The entire area of glass shops, construction rentals and old industrial space is being squeezed by the unrelenting development coming from South Boston side, Andrew Square and Broadway….

Off the DOT, back of the knitting place.

Queen Victoria gets a bath outside the music faculty at McGill in May 2019.

St Laurent is changed and changing fast from the seedy, run down strip clubs, dives and squats of the 80s to hypercommecialized, sanitized, packaged chunks of metal/punk/street grunge. Oh well.

St Laurent is changed and changing fast from the seedy, run down strip clubs, dives and squats of the 80s to hypercommecialized, sanitized, packaged chunks of metal/punk/street grunge. Oh well.

St Laurent is changed and changing fast from the seedy, run down strip clubs, dives and squats of the 80s to hypercommecialized, sanitized, packaged chunks of metal/punk/street grunge. Oh well.

The Main was seedy ,dumpy, yet a vibrant shopping district….it ranged from the edge of Old Montreal, up through Chinatown, past shitty dive bars and strip joints, to the older, commercial Jewish/latest immigrants up into the Plateau with the working class Quebecois shifting to students protohipsters aging out hippies refugees looking for cheap housing, up past Miles End and into above the trackers running down and defunct manufacturing sweatshops……This sign is one of the last electronics stores, indeed, retail of any kind down below Sherbrooke……

Edited RAW image, compressed to JPG 8bit (Squarespace doesn’t ilke JPG2000 and 16 bit PNG exceeds the 20MB limited)…….

Lightly edited JPG as it came off the Fuji.

I took this because the light was shining on the boulder. I didn’t notice until postprocessing the frozen grimace of the rock creature!

I love the texture of this. I wish I could get more focus (up close a lot of the fine detail is not perfectly focussed.) Is it my lens? I was shooting with my pancake Fuji lens - super handy and transportable but I find not crisp……

Black and white version of the root bundle from Blue Hills

Boring shot…..

Old John Hancock Building, lion detail, pedestal of large lamp fixture, Boston, MA

Wollaston Beach, Quincy, detail of rippled sand and shells

First attempt at using the Fuji on the tripod and a remote shutter via the iphone App. Not happy with the focus, can’t tell if its my zoom (not the best) or my manual focus……

This guy was dormant or dead on my front door.

The sky and cloud and glass all with a perfect angled sun combined to make the clouds flow through the glass of the New Hancock, now 200 Clarendon, tower one spring day in Boston.

A tight shot, semi successful, getting the foreground tightly focussed on the plants and blurring out the background.

Continuing my on and off love of fire hydrants, I think the focus and the color are striking on this one. Using my Fuji X-E3 and my favorite lens X35mmF2.

Could not find my continuous shooting mode trying to shoot all the birds….and then I found my Drive button….which looks dangerous on Fuji since it also has a Trash Can on it! Was able to follow this seagull right into landing, next time, I will use a tripod and a bulb to shoot steady…I made the shots line up with lots of editing in software…..discarded the rest…..

Another foreground focus, this time at the Dock Creek off Dewey Ave.

I have tried to get this stone portico a few times, very hard to capture. My friend Peter finally explained what bokeh was - not the blurring of the background that I thought but the luminous artifacts created by interaction of incoming light with the various elements of the lens. So, I tried real hard to get the light of the low sun to hit the top of my lens and bring the little bokeh flare into focus….and it worked!