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Dogs on Bikes

Aug 3rd, 2007 2 Comments



I was dri­ving to work a cou­ple of days ago when I spot­ted these women car­ry­ing dogs on their bikes. I was amazed that the woman in front could carry three good-sized canines on a sin­gle bicy­cle. That is, until I passed her and saw that she was actu­ally car­ry­ing four dogs.
This of course raises all sorts of ques­tions. How do you train four dogs to calmly sit in wire bas­kets on your bicy­cle? Does she actu­ally ride with the dogs, or is the bicy­cle sim­ply eas­ier to man­age than a quadru­ple dog­gie stroller? Do the dogs leap into and out of the bas­kets them­selves, or does the woman have to man­u­ally install her canine bal­last? Per­haps the most impor­tant bit of infor­ma­tion — which dog gets to ride in the place of promi­nence on the han­dle­bars? Do they rotate? Is the sole for­ward pas­sen­ger sim­ply the eldest? Was it the best behaved on that par­tic­u­lar day? Or per­haps it’s the orig­i­nal, and the three in the back are all clones. And what about the poor dog stuck on the sec­ond bike all by itself?
Update: Thanks to Les­ley and her dad John for iden­ti­fy­ing the dogs as shel­ties. I guessed col­lies, but what do I know?

Blue Heron

Jul 3rd, 2007 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, Veron­ica and I spent the week­end at her grandmother’s in Neshkoro, WI. It was a nice relax­ing week­end — we read, hung out on and around a cou­ple of lakes, went canoing, and made s’mores two nights in a row. On Sat­ur­day after­noon, we took a neighbor’s pedal boat out on the lake. Those things are not built for any­one taller than about 5’6″. But, I digress. Soon after leav­ing shore, we spot­ted a great blue heron fish­ing for its lunch. We stalked it for awhile, and I took a bunch of pic­tures. Luck­ily, we were sta­ble enough for me to use a long lens. Three of my best pics are below, and there are a few more in the gallery.


More Folklife Pics

Jun 30th, 2007 Leave a comment
Tiny Oax­a­can
Dancer

My next batch of scanned pho­tos is from this year’s Folk­life Fes­ti­val in Seat­tle. I’ve added 33 pho­tos, which brings my total (includ­ing my first gallery of dig­i­tal pics) to 60. High­lights of this album include a retro-punk busker, a fam­ily that evi­dently got a dis­count on flo­ral cloth, a break­dancer, the adorable lit­tle girl seen at right, some soul­ful and well-dressed gospel singers, and my friend Jerin cap­ti­vat­ing the under-12 demo­graphic. Click the pic to see the entire gallery.

Zoo Pics

Jun 27th, 2007 Leave a comment

I’ve recently had a bunch of film devel­oped, some of it months old. I’ve also dis­cov­ered that one of the UW library com­puter labs has two fancy Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 slide/negative scan­ners. They take longer than my flatbed scan­ner, but scan­ning neg­a­tives pro­duces much sharper and richer images than you get scan­ning prints. So long story short (too late?), I’ll be post­ing a bunch of pic­tures over the next week or so. The first lit­tle batch comes from a trip to the zoo.

Polar Bear

The Henry Vilas Zoo in Madi­son is free and open year-round. In the win­ter though, I don’t imag­ine that many of the ani­mals are out­side, other than species like polar bears and pen­guins. Not hav­ing made it to the zoo in the fall, I had to wait through many months of win­ter for a chance to visit in decent weather. Veron­ica and I went dur­ing our spring break, which was at the begin­ning of April.

Capy­baras

The zoo is fairly small, as one might expect from an insti­tu­tion with no admis­sion charge (the National Zoo not with­stand­ing). The habi­tats seem small, which I thought might be a sign of their age. But, most of the zoo has appar­ently been redone in the last 20 years or so. Most of the ani­mals were out, but some (e.g.: giraffes and pen­guins) were nowhere to be seen. I think the area I liked the best was the aviary — not huge, but a nice walk-through facil­ity with lots of col­or­ful birds flit­ting around.

Hun­gry Ostrich

I’m hop­ing to get back to the zoo some­time this sum­mer to see (I hope) all of the ani­mals, and maybe shoot some more pics. The small size of the zoo lends itself to casual vis­its; you can make an entire cir­cuit in about an hour. It’s also nice to be able to drop by with­out hav­ing to shell out big bucks for admission.

Folklife Wrapup

Jun 2nd, 2007 Leave a comment
A Samba Dancer from The
Lions of Batucada

This year’s folk­life fes­ti­val went quite smoothly for those of us involved in pro­duc­tion. The crew was great, vet­er­ans and Folk­life rook­ies alike. In my par­tic­u­lar area, sig­nage, I had two very capa­ble assis­tants — Matthew and Tim. Matthew is the son of one of my mom’s long-time friends, and he and I haven’t seen each other for about six­teen years. It was nice to see him again and do a lit­tle catch­ing up. But, I digress. The nature of sig­nage is such that you rush around before the fes­ti­val putting signs and ban­ners up, but every­thing gen­er­ally calms down by the sec­ond morn­ing of the actual run. Matthew was only with us for a cou­ple of days before the fes­ti­val, but Tim was there through the whole run. As a result, Tim and I had alot of free time to go out and enjoy the fes­ti­val. With two good guys help­ing out and four fes­ti­vals already under my belt, this year was quite stress-free. From what I heard from other areas (pro­gram­ming, spon­sor­ship, etc.), it seems as though every­one had a pretty smooth run.

March Fourth Hula
Hooper

Despite the rel­a­tively low-key nature of this year’s fes­ti­val, it still wore me out. I was there usu­ally between seven and eight in the morn­ing, and never left before six, although some nights I was there con­sid­er­ably later. On Mon­day, Tues­day, and Wednes­day nights we par­tied too, first cel­e­brat­ing the end of the fes­ti­val proper, then var­i­ous stages of the take-down process. On Wednes­day night (the biggest cel­e­bra­tion), some of my co-workers started pes­ter­ing me to come back out to work at Bum­ber­shoot, an arts fes­ti­val that takes place over Labor Day week­end. I guess I won’t be in school yet then, but it’ll sort of depend on the pay and what I’m up to in Madison.

The Masses on Saturday

With all the free time I had, I was able to snap quite a few pic­tures. I’ve posted a num­ber of dig­i­tal shots, but I have a few rolls of film to develop and scan, as well. At the moment, my gallery con­sists largely of pics from two groups — March Fourth, a punk march­ing band with stilt-walkers and a hula-hooping anti-cheerleader, and The Lions of Batu­cada, a samba bate­ria from Port­land. There are also a few other pics show­ing var­i­ous other things, includ­ing the crowds, a herd of hurdy-gurdies, and some of the more provoca­tive pro­pa­ganda being car­ried around the fes­ti­val grounds. Any of the thumb­nails above will take you to the gallery.

My New Axe

May 17th, 2007 2 Comments

A cou­ple of months ago, I wrote about going to Min­neapo­lis to try out new bas­soons. I brought two back with me for longer trial peri­ods. Both were great instru­ments, and I had a tough time decid­ing which I liked bet­ter. After a lot of back-and-forth (and an exten­sion of my trial period), I picked one — a Püch­ner 5000C. It has a beau­ti­ful tone, and is much more respon­sive and pro­ject­ing than my old Fox. The fin­ish, which they call “Alta Welt” (“Old World”), is gor­geous. In addi­tion to the stan­dard keys, it’s got an A-flat/B-flat trill key and a D/E-flat trill key. It has a whis­per key lock for each thumb, and a whole bunch of rollers. Prob­a­bly the coolest thing is that the instru­ment is a com­pact model, what some com­pa­nies call the “Gentleman’s Cut.” That is, the bass joint and the bell are split in a dif­fer­ent place from on a stan­dard bas­soon. The bass joint is only as long as the wing joint — a dif­fer­ence of five or six inches. What this means is that you can use a case that’s five or six inches shorter than your stan­dard one. The instru­ment came with a case that I didn’t really like, but Püch­ner agreed to take it back, so Mid­west Musi­cal Imports gave me a siz­able dis­count. Using some of that dis­count, I bought a really nice case by Brazil­ian maker Mar­cus Bonna. It’s so com­pact that peo­ple tell me it looks like a dou­ble clar­inet case. Any­way, here are a few dig­i­tal pics I took yes­ter­day of my new bas­soon. Click any of them to go to a gallery with more pics.

Fotos de Brasil

Feb 26th, 2007 Leave a comment

Finally, my Brazil pic­tures are up. I man­aged to sort through them last night, and post them this after­noon. I have them some­what cat­e­go­rized. Under the main Brazil gallery, you’ll find gal­leries for Mas­ter­classes, Rehearsals and Con­certs, Trav­el­ing, Par­ty­ing, Jaraguá do Sul (the city in which the fes­ti­val was held), and Flo­ri­a­nop­o­lis (the island to which we took a day trip). Since there were so many, I didn’t take the time to enhance, crop, or really alter the pho­tos in any way. I may go back later and improve some of them. Also, I’m hop­ing to write a bit about the trip, which will serve to explain some of the pho­tos a lit­tle bet­ter. But for now, you can just check out the gal­leries linked above.

Folklife Festival

Jun 12th, 2006 1 Comment
Samba Olywa Parade

I finally man­aged to have my pho­tos from the Folk­life Fes­ti­val in Seat­tle devel­oped. I’ve posted a few of them, and I’ll take this oppor­tu­nity to do a fes­ti­val wrap-up post. I didn’t take as many pho­tos as in pre­vi­ous years. This was largely due to the fact that it rained three out of the four days of the fes­ti­val. It wasn’t pour­ing that whole time, but it was cloudy and dark, mak­ing the light pretty crappy for flash-free photography.

Signs Galore

I guess I’ll start with what I was actu­ally doing at the fes­ti­val. This was my fourth year work­ing as the festival’s Sig­nage Coor­di­na­tor. What that means is that I’m respon­si­ble for hang­ing signs and ban­ners all over the cam­pus of Seat­tle Cen­ter (where the Space Nee­dle is). The pic at the left shows most of the pre­ex­ist­ing signs — all the signs along the wall are stacked 4–8 deep. Every year, there are also a bunch of new signs and ban­ners (which hadn’t yet arrived when I took the pic­ture, to cover new and dif­fer­ent venues and spe­cial one-year events or appear­ances. The first two years, I was pretty much on my own. In each of the last two years, I’ve had good help from Tahoma and one other person.

Funky Gospel Bass

The nice thing about work­ing sig­nage is that most of my work is done by Sat­ur­day after­noon (the fes­ti­val always starts on the Fri­day before Memo­r­ial Day, and runs through the Mon­day hol­i­day). So, I get plenty of (paid) time to walk around and enjoy the fes­ti­val. I have to carry a radio in case some­one needs me, but it clips nicely to my cam­era bag.

Peru­vian Buskers

I caught parts of quite a few shows. I saw a num­ber of dance groups: tango, fla­menco, salsa, Zim­bab­wean, Irish, belly, samba, etc. A num­ber of these used canned music, but the few who used live musi­cians were the most inter­est­ing. I heard a wide vari­ety of music (in no par­tic­u­lar order): Taiko drum­ming, jazz, Irish tra­di­tional, punk, klezmer, rock­a­billy, gospel, Afro-pop, reg­gae, blue­grass, folk, etc. Some groups were quite good, some were ok, and some were just down­right weird. One such group was a polka band who played noth­ing but Johnny Cash cov­ers. I didn’t catch their name, which may be for the best.

Artis the Spoonman

Aside from what’s hap­pen­ing on the var­i­ous stages (21 of them this year), there are always lots of inter­est­ing buskers dis­trib­uted through­out the grounds. Since the fes­ti­val doesn’t pay the per­form­ers (there’s also no required admis­sion charge, just a sug­gested dona­tion), alot of groups will set up on the side­walk to make some money before or after their shows. There are also pro­fes­sional buskers who usu­ally work down­town Seat­tle, groups or bands who aren’t actu­ally play­ing at the fes­ti­val, and high school (and some­times younger) kids who want to make a few extra bucks. Most buskers are musi­cians, but there’s always a vari­ety of inter­est­ing and bizarre per­for­mance art — human stat­ues, human video games, acro­bats, worm-eating, etc.

Boe Odd­ysey

Folk­life offers really good people-watching oppor­tu­ni­ties, as well. It being a free fes­ti­val, peo­ple of all sorts show up. You see peo­ple of all ages, eth­nic­i­ties, reli­gions, socio-economic sta­tuses, sex­u­al­i­ties, and var­i­ous other lifestyle choices. When­ever I tire of walk­ing around, I’ll just stand or sit some­place and watch the crowd. That can pro­vide hours of enter­tain­ment. One per­son who stands out in the crowd every year is Boe. I don’t know Boe’s whole story, but he vol­un­teers for Folk­life (dur­ing fes­ti­val set-up) every year, and I think he did too much of some­thing in the 60s. He always wears a brightly col­ored skirt, pas­tel scarves, and a bell around his waist. He can be seen at out­door shows of all descrip­tions wav­ing around bunches of his scarves, which he bungee-cords to each wrist. He’s bizarre, but he seems to always be hav­ing fun.

Well, that prob­a­bly should have been split up into mul­ti­ple posts, but I had to make up for post­ing almost noth­ing when I was actu­ally in Seat­tle. Each of the pic­tures above links to a larger ver­sion of that par­tic­u­lar pic, but you can see all my pho­tos from this year’s fes­ti­val here. Also, check out my gal­leries from past years: Folk­life 2003 Folk­life 2005. I worked the fes­ti­val in 2004 also, but I got strep and mono part-way through and had to go home. So, no pic­tures from that year.

Deception Pass

May 20th, 2006 Leave a comment
Decep­tion Pass Bridge

After arriv­ing in Seat­tle on Thurs­day, I went down­town to meet my dad, who was there for a con­fer­ence. From there, we drove north to Mount Ver­non to stay with Becky, one of his Irish music cohorts. Yes­ter­day, we drove around a bit, explor­ing the town and the sur­round­ings. One place we went was Decep­tion Pass, a steep and nar­row pass sep­a­rat­ing two of the San Juan Islands — Whid­bey and Fidalgo. We parked first on Pass Island, which lies in the mid­dle of the pass, con­nected to each island by a bridge. We walked around there abit, then con­tin­ued across the sec­ond bridge and took a longer walk. We saw a cou­ple of bald eagles and one seal, but not a whole lot else in terms of wildlife. Click the pic for more shots of the bridge and the pass.

Fort Morgan in Widescreen

May 7th, 2006 Leave a comment

I whipped up a panoramic col­lage from my trip to Fort Mor­gan in Alabama. This view is from atop the south­east­ern bas­tion, look­ing back into the fort. The semi-circular objects in the fore­ground are parts of gun emplace­ments. The gun car­riages swiveled, with a small wheel tra­vers­ing these arcs. The dark con­crete struc­ture in the mid­dle of the pic­ture is Bat­tery Dupor­tail, one of the addi­tions made to the fort around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury.
Click the thumb­nail for a slightly larger ver­sion. From there, you can click the “View Full Size” link in the upper right-hand cor­ner to see a huge ver­sion, if you so desire.

Crab

Jan 11th, 2006 Leave a comment

Last time I was in Mobile I spent one morn­ing on Dauphin Island, one of the bar­rier islands at the mouth of Mobile Bay. My main objec­tive there was a bird sanc­tu­ary. The refuge isn’t huge, but it has a num­ber of walk­ing trails. The island sus­tained quite a bit of dam­age in last year’s hur­ri­canes, and the refuge was full of fallen trees. Either that has caused birds to bypass the island this year, or Decem­ber was sim­ply the wrong time to see birds there — I didnt see or hear a sin­gle bird with­ing the refuge. Walk­ing along the beach on the sea side of the island, I noticed a tiny crab. There’s noth­ing in the pho­tos for scale, but it was a lit­tle smaller than a quar­ter. Using a macro lens and a close-up adapter, I got in the crab’s face and man­aged to get a cou­ple of pretty good shots. It wasn’t the most coop­er­a­tive of sub­jects — I had to chase it around a lit­tle bit. Click the thumb­nail for a larger version.

Photos Aplenty

Sep 19th, 2005 Leave a comment

About three weeks ago, I finally got around to tak­ing my film from the sum­mer to be devel­oped. Then school started, and pick­ing up the pic­tures fell by the way­side. Last Fri­day, I finally had the time to retreive them. They’d been sit­ting at Tal­la­has­see Cam­era and Image Cen­ter for so long that they’d been moved out of the nor­mal print fil­ing area, and it took awhile for the clerk to locate them. I had a num­ber of rolls processed from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent places and events. I’ve added to some gal­leries in which I pre­vi­ously had only dig­i­tal pho­tos, and cre­ated one new gallery as well.

Starfish at Low Tide

First up are more pho­tos from my visit to Lummi Island in north­ern Wash­ing­ton. Lummi, which is access­able only by ferry, is one of the northen­most of the San Juan Islands. I’ve added pic­tures of more and more inter­est­ing starfish, a hum­ming­bird (which rep­re­sent a small por­tion of the abun­dant avian life that vis­its the very col­or­ful yard of my friends Mary and Jim), and some inter­est­ing beach views.

Fla­menco Dancers

I had posted a few dig­i­tal shots from this summer’s North­west Folk­life Fes­ti­val, but the bulk of my pho­to­graphic work there was done with film. I’ve added 35 more pho­tos of musi­cians, dancers, street per­form­ers, pro­test­ers, and oth­ers. Since I was work­ing at the fes­ti­val, I couldn’t see every act I wanted to. Also, I didn’t want to dis­turb per­form­ers at indoor venues by using a flash. For these rea­sons, my pho­tos are largely con­fined to out­door stages and sidewalks.

ASU Bas­soon Studio

After leav­ing Seat­tle, I flew to Austin, TX for the 2005 Inter­na­tional Dou­ble Reed Soci­ety Con­fer­ence. I spent most of my time there hang­ing out with the ASU bas­soon stu­dio, who were all there to per­form. Most of my pic­tures are of their con­cert with composer/pianist/ bas­soon­ist Bill Dou­glas. Again, I didn’t want to use flash, so I couldn’t make use of any long lenses.

Egret

The last of the new pho­tographs come from Wakulla Springs, just a few miles south of Tal­la­has­see. Wakulla Springs has a num­ber of claims to fame. Its boat tours offer views of plenty of wildlife, includ­ing birds, tur­tles, alli­ga­tors, and deer. When rain hasn’t coulded the water, glass-bottom boats lets vis­i­tors look over 100 feet down into the spring cave. Recent expe­di­tions have estab­lished this cave sys­tem as one of the largest aquatic cave sys­tems in the world. A num­ber of impor­tant archao­log­i­cal and pale­on­to­log­i­cal finds have also been made at the park. A large quan­tity of mastodon bones have been found, some of which still lie deep in the springs. Unfor­tu­nately, the water was cloudy and the glass-bottom boat tours were not run­ning. But, we took the reg­u­lar boat tour through the river and saw quite a bit.

New Pics

Jun 17th, 2005 Leave a comment

I’ve man­aged to post a few pic­tures from my recent trav­els. I’ve uploaded my dig­i­tal pho­tos (for me cur­rently, dig­i­tal = sim­ple point-and-shoot = not always very good) from the Folk­life Fes­ti­val, the bar crawl after fin­ish­ing work on the fes­ti­val, and the IDRS con­fer­ence. Even­tu­ally, I’ll get my film devel­oped and prints scanned. Also, I should have a ton more pics from the con­fer­ence to post once Julie sends me her dig­i­tal pho­tos. Oh, and I’m going to try to actu­ally post once in awhile.

St. Marks Wildlife Refuge

May 8th, 2005 Leave a comment

Last week­end, my dad and I took a day trip to St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. The refuge lies about 45 min­utes south of Tal­la­has­see, right on the coast. We saw quite a few birds, includ­ing egrets, a num­ber of herons, a loud group of nest­ing cor­morants, some nest­ing anhin­gas, and four or five bald eagles. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t get any good pics of the eagles, as they were quite far away. For non-avian fauna, we saw four or five alli­ga­tors and a bunch of small rodents of some kind. We also got the chance to try out my dad’s new huge 500mm lens. I’ve scanned pho­tos from my first roll, and will put up more as soon as I fin­ish the sec­ond roll.

Spring Break… finally

Mar 31st, 2005 Leave a comment
Inside Castillo de San Marcos

Our spring break was almost three weeks ago now, but I’m just now get­ting the time to scan my pho­tos and write about it. I spent a won­der­ful time in St. Augus­tine with my mom and her friend Caneta. We saw lots of neat stuff, like: Anas­ta­sia State Park, the Mis­sion of Nom­bre de Dios, the Castillo de San Mar­cos (“The Fort”), the Jack­sonville Zoo, Bulow Plan­ta­tion ruins, Fort Matan­zas, and the Anas­ta­sia Light­house. I’d con­sid­ered writ­ing up a whole account of the trip, but that would’ve been much longer than any­one would want to read. So, I’ve taken the dras­tic step of actu­ally label­ing (most of) the pho­tos from the trip. Click the pic­ture of the cozy bar­racks (not as nice as the beach condo we stayed in, but per­haps slightly larger) to see all of my spring break photos.

Pics from Last Weekend

Jan 15th, 2005 Leave a comment


While in Fort Myers last week­end, I was able to spend a cou­ple of after­noons on Estero and Sani­bel Islands pho­tograph­ing wildlife. This trip, I remem­bered my ‘real’ cam­era, and my dig­i­tal cam­era man­aged to not die. I had my film devel­oped the other day, but just got around to sort­ing and scan­ning this evening. There are two sets — a few pics from Bowditch Point in Fort Myers Beach on Estero Island, and a bunch of shots from the “Ding” Dar­ling Wildlife Refuge on Sani­bel Island. Click the thumb­nails to see the rest of my photos.

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