In Gary, Indiana, several buildings are abandoned. Even moreso, the kids have found their way into some of them and run amock.
This image is taken in the Post Office, before it was boarded up to better restrict entrance. All but one window was smashed out of the building, and everything else left in the building was in an equal shape of disarray.
May 2009. (3283)
While up in Vancouver for a few days, some friends and I wandered around the harbor. British Columbia is stunningly beautiful, and it always helps seeing things one doesn’t normally see. In this particular case, watching all of the seaplanes come and go certainly lended itself to some of the charm.
February 2011. (8044)
As mentioned previously, I don’t have a lot of patience in life. Photography has helped me learn it, and this image is another fine example.
One the tall, light-colored building to the right, there was a white-hot glare of the sun on one of the windows. I had to sit and wait for a while to get the glare to dissipate, then I was able to get the picture I wanted.
June 2009. (4511)
While walking around Siracusa, Sicily, Alisha and I passed by an area with a number of locals swimming in the Mediterranean Sea; some were adults, some were children, and others were adults acting like children. As we were watching the people all splash around in the water, we noticed a small boat bumping up against the rocks behind us.
The boat wasn’t tied off to anything, nor was it occupied by anyone. Strange still, no one seemed to care about the boat.
The water was shallow enough that we walked over and checked out the boat, and it looked to be sealed up. We’re not sure if one of the people swimming just dumped it there while they frolicked in the water, or if it broke loose in the harbor and ended up where we saw it.
Whatever the case, the next day we returned with our suits to go swimming and the boat was gone.
September 2005. (0331)
We arrived at the Great Wall of China pretty much as soon as it was available to tourists. It was nice because Alisha and I were the only two people around for quite some time. Sure, there were others, but everyone kind of spread out and did their own thing, leaving a vast distance in between us and the next people.
In addition to being quiet the first part of the morning, the sky was clear and there was decent visibility. We could see the Great Wall snake off into the distance. Much like the crowds and tour busses slowly growing throughout the morning, so did the weather. Eventually, as we were preparing to leave, both the crowds were deplorable and the weather had turned foul; visibility was far more limited than earlier.
By the time we took the trail down to meet our driver, it had started to rain. After warming up with some tea, we headed to the car and it turned to a solid downpour.
It was nice that we could get some quiet time on the Great Wall of China, before the crowds swarmed, and it was an added bonus to get the weather to cooperate as well.
October 2010. (4718)
This is Spain’s Segovia Cathedral. (I also have a night-time picture of this same cathedral posted in the European Photography Gallery).
The fun part about the town of Segovia, aside from it’s centuries old — and still functioning aqueduct — is it was here Christopher Columbus convinced the King of Spain to fund his trip West to find an easier trade route. Instead of finding India, Columbus and his ships stumbled upon the New World.
July 2009. (0160)
Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
I never really realized how many random and sometimes strange phrases are on candy hearts. I always thought they were short and cute simple phrases (Love You, Miss You, etc.), but just looking at the picture above, Get Real doesn’t seem sweet and romantic.
February 2007. (1985)
Last weekend I posted a photoblog entry about how I’d be willing to take up playing basketball regularly (you can read it by clicking here). Much like that location, I’d play soccer everyday if I had a field with this view.
February 2006. (0230)
It’s always entertaining to me when traveling to other countries and we stumble upon people playing games in the middle of a public way. I’ve previously written about being in Turkey and watching men play backgammon in the middle of a walkway, and prior to that, Alisha and I watched two men play chess with each other in Vienna, Austria.
In the above picture, the gentleman to the left (in the blue shirt) is playing the gentleman to the right (in the orange-colored shirt, with his left hand up to his chin). It was strangely quiet in the plaza, as everyone watched the two men go at it. Since I don’t play chess I took a few pictures, but everyone else around seemed to be playing out their own game in their heads, and what moves they would and would not make.
August 2008. (0435)
As the title suggests, this is the Armenian Grape Hyacinth.
This is another picture taken this spring at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. While we’ve had a fairly mild winter (so far) this year, I’m already looking forward to the colors and temperatures of springtime in Chicago.
May 2011. (9828)
In a previous blog post, I’d written about Alisha and my “off the beaten path” adventure in Panama (you can read that previous blog post here). Something I didn’t mention in the entry was the small village in which we grabbed a 20-minute water taxi to take us to the next town over.
After riding in a pick-up truck for several hours, our driver turned off the paved road rattled his way down a dirt path. After a few minutes, we arrived in Almirante, Panama and a small concrete building along the water.
The water taxi station was, essentially, a boat-house, big enough for only a couple boats. The floor was so filthy I couldn’t tell if it was an actual dirt floor, or a cement floor and was just covered with an inch or two of dirt. The docks appeared to be hap-hazardly constructed, or the wood was pilfered for other things (I couldn’t tell which). The amount of garbage floating around was stunning. Children were wandering around, watching us watch them.
In situations like this, it’s difficult for me to raise my camera to start snapping photos. I don’t want to appear like a standard tourist and fire away, taking pictures of people, but I also want to record the situation for my own interest.
After waiting about ten or fifteen minutes, the water taxi arrived and chaos ensued. The boat held about two-dozen passengers, and people were barely out of the boat before others started piling in. Alisha and I had our bags with us, and they were quickly taken by the dock worker and thrown in the back of the boat. We quickly sat down as close to them as possible. It seemed like only mere seconds the boat was tied to the dock, before we shoved off and were making our way through into the bay and across part of the Caribbean Sea.
Before our boat hit warp speed, we slowly crept through the village of Almirante and its ramshackle huts.
August 2007. (0187)
Sometimes I enjoy heading down to Chicago’s Millennium Park, Michigan Avenue or Navy Pier — the tourist hotspots — and watch the world go by. With this picture, I was doing just that.
I can’t remember if I rode my bike down to Navy Pier or drove, but either way I just watched the tour boats come and go. It was nice and relaxing for a warm, May afternoon.
May 2009. (3444)
Early one morning in Bali, Indonesia, a group of fisherman are prepping their boat to launch it out to sea.
October 2010. (6354)
I don’t play basketball, but if I had a court like this near my house, I’d probably start playing basketball.
February 2009. (2422)
This picture was taken from within the Damnoensaduak Floating Market, located a short car ride outside Bangkok, Thailand.
People have complained the market has become touristy over the years, and while yes, tourists do go through it, schoolchildren and locals do as well. It definitely made for a fun morning and a unique experience.
October 2010. (4893)
Bhuddism is alive and well in Cambodia, and it has existed for several thousands of years through various empires kingdoms. Then, in the mid-1970′s, when the Khemer Rouge came to power, Bhuddism was made illegal and followers either fled, went into hiding, or were executed. As a result, overall numbers of monks went from (roughly) 70,000 to a mere 3,000.
So, while we were exploring Angkor Wat, Alisha and I were passed by a group of teenage monks, exploring the temples just like we were. It was nice to see so many young monks around the area, as their religious history is almost starting anew, and these kids are a big part of it.
October 2010. (5888)
It’s amusing to me that I have, as of this writing, about 270 blog entries. Of that, this is only my second post about Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. I guess it’s good that I have so many pictures to pick from, but of all of the images taken over the years, 2,362 were taken in the Galapagos Islands.
You’d think I could have posted more Galapagos Island pictures then averaging just one image a year!
So this brings us to the above picture of a Sally Lightfoot Crab. They’re all over the Galapagos Islands, and they’re a welcome sight because much of the archipelago is now hardened and centuries-old lava. Clearly the crabs are bright, so it’s a nice contrast to the darkness of the lava rock.
March 2007. (1250)
While driving through Ireland’s Doo Lough Valley, we noticed signs of human habitation slowly slipping away. After curving around on narrow roads with sharp turns, we eventually pulled over for a quick break from the driving. When we were about to get back in the car to continue on, around the next corner came an “Irish Traffic Jam,” I guess you could say.
June 2011. (2163)
This past weekend Alisha and I went to a local jazz club. We ended up sitting at a table with random strangers, and during the break we all started talking. Turns out, one of the guys at the table with us was a die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan, and he and his family have had season tickets for twenty years. (That’s pretty impressive, considering there have been some extremely dark years during that span.)
The part that bother me — and it really, really bothered me, I might ad — is the guy described the greatest Christmas present his longtime girlfriend gave him this year: It was a picture of the Chicago skyline taken the night in 2010 the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. He went on to describe how the buildings were lit up like usual, but when you look closer, a lot of them turned off their lights in just the right way to spell “Go Hawks” or show the team’s logo. It’s something nice the Chicago of Chicago does for big events. The moment Patrick Kane buried the puck in Philadelphia’s net and won the Stanley Cup, I was driving down Solidarity Drive to set up my camera and take pictures of the skyline. Now, the part that bothers me, is I can’t find the pictures from that night anywhere.
Obviously the pictures can be only three places: still in my camera, on a loose memory card, or on my hard drive. I can’t find them anywhere. I realized it sometime after I took the pictures, because I think I saw a similar image to the one the guy described, and when I went to search for my picture, I had no luck.
If I were to guess, I’d say I had it on a memory card, changed cameras and put that memory card into the new camera. Since the new camera doesn’t show another camera’s images on the memory card, I probably formatted over them without ever knowing they were there. Damn.
On the bright side of everything, I did learn to dump my pictures to my hard drive immediately after taking them. Don’t wait a week or two later when I sit down to finally go through pictures.
Lesson learned.
May 2011. (8963)
Alisha and I love attending different celebrations around the world. It’s interesting to see so many similarities between so many different cultures.
In Pamplona, Spain, we watched a small boy and his grandfather keeps tabs on things while the Running of the Bulls took place below their balcony. In the above pictures, taken in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a father carries his daughter through mayhem on the safety of his shoulders. She was dressed for the occasion, but still wide-eyed as the revelers celebrated around them.
March 2011. (0042)
