Scattered Thoughts . . .

So, since I am sitting around waiting for my spinal inflammation to subside, I thought I would sit here on my pillows and work on some old photos while sipping on some coffee.  I'm still sorting through the folder that holds photos from our 2013 trip to Manhattan. I was using an old, crappy Olympus camera back then so I often left whole folders of images left untouched because I was so frustrated by the images. This was one of those folders. After my experiences with two Olympus cameras, I don't ever want to use another Olympus camera for the rest of my life... the colors absolutely suck, white balance is always a problem, the noise is horrendous, the files are very shallow causing the image files to fall apart very quickly in post-processing... I just hate working with these files. I've found, however, that I can get some decent black and white images out of the files when color is my main problem as is the case with this particular folder of images. The Empire Sta

I went back into one of my external hard drive to search for a photo I thought I had shot while in New York City a year ago. In my mind, I remembered a shot that captured both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in the same frame. It turns out that my memory was remembering this composition a little differently than how I actually captured this composition. When you are limited by distance and elevation, it is tough to get the shots you want... exactly the way you want or envision them... especially when you are just a speck in a large landscape which stretches in all directions including vertically.  In this case, the Chrysler Building is a little low and the angle is slightly off for my taste but it was worth trying out a composition with my location when I shot this image.  Putting these two iconic art deco buildings into the same frame with no other distractions seems like the right thing to do...

A little over a year ago, we brought Adam to New York City for his last visit to Manhattan before he graduated high school and left for the Air Force. As always, we had a busy schedule during our visit to New York and I shot a lot of photographs. Upon arriving back home, my health needed some time to recover and I somehow lost track of most of those photos from that trip. On this particular visit to New York, we spent a very busy day sightseeing in Manhattan. The goal was to show Adam some new sights we had not shown him already in previous visits to New York. Of course, some sights are visible no matter where you go in Manhattan... such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. We did a lot of walking and even encountered some long detours and delays due to a parade that day. In the end, I believe I shot almost three hundred photos... many of which are quite impressive yet have never been seen by anyone other than myself. This past weekend, while we were shopping

Downtown Manhattan, One World Trade Center This past weekend was the long Columbus Day weekend so we decided to head toward Long Island to see some family.  It had been a year and a half since we had seen any of my family. That last trip was for the funeral of one of my cousins which happened to be the same day the grandchildren were born.  This particular cousin was also a neighbor and school classmate so I knew I needed to make the trip down to Long Island for his funeral. While I headed toward Long Island for that funeral a year and a half ago, Sheila headed to the hospital to meet Liza for the birth of the grandchildren. Afterward, Sheila and Adam hopped on a train and headed down to New York to meet me. Anyway, we hadn't seen any of the family since that very hectic week a year and a half ago.   The Empire State Building We headed south on Saturday for the long Columbus Day weekend while it seemed the rest of the northeast was heading north to check out the aut