Tag Archives: beauty

Places

Reagan National Airport

As you read this, Ligia and I are supposed to be in Florida. Instead, I’m back at work. We were supposed to fly out yesterday. Everything was set. We were really looking forward to it.

We got to the airport, checked in, went to the gate, and noticed that our flight was listed as leaving at 6 PM instead of 4:50 PM. A few minutes later, an elderly lady came by and asked if we’d heard that the flight was canceled. No, we hadn’t. Five minutes later, the notice was posted — the flight was canceled indeed, because of bad weather in FL.

To make matters worse, there were no other outgoing flights. All were full. The earliest available flight was on Saturday. No thanks. We went around to all the other airlines and checked. They had nothing, unless we were willing to pay Monopoly prices and fly tonight or on Friday. That would have been okay if only we could have paid with Monopoly money…

What were we to do? We could have gotten angry, but that would have been pointless. So I took out my 5D and started taking photos of the airport. I’d always wanted to do it and never got around to it. Isn’t DCA beautiful?

Travelers

The main floor is shown above. I love the pillars and arches supporting the roof.

Repetition

Light

Radiate

The ceiling is made up of repeating cupolas, as you can see above, and each cupola has a skylight in its center. It’s such great design!

Skylight

I think I could spend a few days walking around the airport and taking photos. There are so many possibilities with the light, as it comes through the wall of glass or the skylights and reflects off the floor… It’s just beautiful, and if you get the right mix of people walking through (not too many, not too few), it really makes the place look great!

Arrivals

Steps

Departures

I leave you with an outside shot of the control tower, taken from the Reagan National metro station. It felt pretty painful to get right back to it a few hours after we’d just left it, on our way to FL…

White tower

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Places

Grosvenor metro station

There’s a neat tunnel that goes under 355 (one of the main roads in our area) and surfaces right at the Grosvenor-Strathmore metro station, under a beautiful canopy of curved glass, framed with steel ribs and anchored with pillars.

Descent

Ascent

If you’ve ever seen one of the old classic cars (early 1910s and 1920s) that had the pull-down roof which folded in the back, the glass canopy follows the same concept, except (of course) it’s anchored in the up position all the time. Come to think of it, the design also recalls the large, see-through fuselages of the big bomber planes of WWII. The effect is a successful combination of post-modernism with industrial-age design elements.

Fuselage

Radiate

The same canopy design (initially restricted to just a few metro stations) has now been extended to all of the stations I’ve visited. The canopy sizes are varied based on the size of the tunnel that leads down to the metro. I’m glad to see a good design philosophy being consistently applied and adapted to existing conditions, and I congratulate WMATA on making sure the work was carried through to completion.

This is my Week 6 submission for the 2008 Community Challenge.

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Places

Watching the skies

I count myself blessed for living where I live. Our community is a beautiful place, and even though it’s in the middle of a city, surrounded by major roads, great care has been taken in its planning and maintenance over the years. It feels more like a park than a residential community, and the fact that we’re bordered by forests on either side helps a lot. We have an open view of the horizon that looks out toward Rock Creek Park, and as a result, I get to see a lot of beautiful skies. Here are a few recent photos taken right from our terrace.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful these clouds were. They look hand-painted, don’t they?

Quilted for extra softness

A recent dusk featured a gorgeous light show that painted the clouds in all sorts of hues.

Heavenly light show

We had a full moon last week, and I “captured” it.

Shoot for the moon

These two buildings are quite far apart, yet the long focal range compresses the distance between them, making them look as if they’re superimposed.

Superimposed

Planes often fly above. We get plenty of supersonic jets and military aircraft, since we’re very close to Washington, DC. Sometimes we also get these planes. I think they’re doing aerial photography that later makes it onto Google Maps.

Aerial photography

Lots of Canadian geese choose to winter in our area. I see them in the nearly frozen water, swimming along as if it’s summer. I don’t know how they do it. I guess it’s warmer than Canada, but still… These three geese (one of them is obscured by the tree) were flying in to bed for the night.

Sojourners

This is my week 4 submission for the 2008 Community Challenge.

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A Guide To A Good Life, Places

Manhattan, from the top of the Empire State Building

These are photos of the Manhattan skyline, as seen from the top of the Empire State Building. We got there just as the sun ducked behind the horizon, so we caught the beautiful transition from dusk to twilight to night.

These were taken last May — that will tell you how behind I am with my post-processing. You’ll find more info about that trip in this post. I keep trying to squeeze every bit of free time out of my schedule to work on my photos, and somehow it’s never enough. But enough complaining, here are the photos.

My world is tilting

We were so high up that the curvature of the Earth became evident, especially at wide focal lengths. You’ll see me play that up in a few of the photos.

New York, New York

Classic Manhattan skyline

I’m just amazed at all the life below. There’s so much squeezed into so little space.

A slice of the old town

Cut across the horizon

I love how the Hudson cuts a wide swath across the horizon.

Light up the nights

Parallels

The slanted perspective makes the curvature of the horizon more evident (at least I think so, anyway).

Overflow

I hear the Earth is round

Lines across a furrowed brow

Blue nights in NY

Moonshine

This is the top of the Empire State Building. It looks sort of like a spaceship, doesn’t it?

From here to the moon

Flatiron night

Night reflections on the Hudson River

Far as the eye can see

It was truly crowded at the top. We had to wait in line just to look at the view. People were snapping photos left and right, and shoving cameras between each others’ heads just to get a glimpse of the city. It was crazy, it was packed, and there were more people coming up every minute. I wonder if it’s ever quiet up there.

When we got back down, we were spent, literally. Then we had to make our way back to the hotel…

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Places

Document your community through photos

Trevor Carpenter is running the “2008 Challenge“, a project which is meant to encourage people to document their community through photos and to share them online. All it takes is to publish one photo per week (52 in total) to your site or to a photo sharing site. Check out Trevor’s post for the details.

I thought I’d share a few photos from my community a little ahead of the deadline. After all, I’ve been doing it all along, but you may not have known about it since I didn’t call attention to it.

This is a typical morning view from our terrace.

Reflected sunrise

We took a walk during a warm fall afternoon. This is one of the photos taken on that walk. A “Now Leasing” blimp floated in the sky above a neighboring building. The beautiful trees in the forefront obscured that photo, so it looks as if the blimp is advertising them instead.

Now leasing - trees

These next few photos were taken during various afternoon walks.

Red and redder

Bloomathingamajig

A brook dressed for fall

Twigalicious

I am literally in love with the color of these tree branches. It’s not personal bias because I took the photo, but that shade of brown coupled with the fresh green just floors me.

Stretching toward the sky

This is another view from our terrace. It’s a night scene, taken during a dark and stormy night.

Night rain

You might think there’s something wrong with the next photo. It seems a bit off, and there’s that strange thing jutting out in the bottom left corner. Look carefully. That’s a reflection you see in the water of a lake from our community. The odd piece in the corner is the shore I stood on when I took the photo. If you examine the bottom of the photo, you’ll see tiny ripples.

Looking glass

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