Tag Archives: nights

Places

Munich’s Rathaus-Glockenspiel at night

The city hall tower contains the famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel. We see it here lit up at night.

The city hall tower contains the famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel. We see it here lit up at night.

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Places

A particularly gloomy night

A night in recent memory featured an almost-full moon and gloomy skies. I took photos. It looked like something out of a scary movie. I used the digital zoom on my camera in order to get closer to the moon, and this means some of the photos aren’t as clear as they should be. Still, I think they’re interesting.

Photos taken in North Bethesda, MD.

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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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Places

Dawn over the Atlantic Ocean

This will be my 1,000th post, so perhaps it’s fitting that it be this: photos of the dawn, breaking high above the clouds, somewhere near the coast of France. It symbolizes a new beginning, a milestone — although I have to confess it came by surprise. I hadn’t monitored the number of posts for a while. By chance, I glanced at it yesterday and saw the fateful sum: 999. That’s when I knew I had to make this 1,000th post a little more special than the rest.

We were on our way to Paris from Washington, DC, on board an overnight Air France flight. We were going to have a short layover at Charles de Gaulle airport, then fly to Bucharest, where a rental car awaited our arrival. From there, we’d drive north, crossing the Carpathian Mountains to reach my grandfather’s house in Transylvania.

I liked Air France. The chairs were fairly comfortable, there was more space between the rows than on Austrian Airlines, and all of the seat gadgets worked, which was very unlike Alitalia (see paragraph 7 of that post for the details). The food was great, they got our menu selections right, the stewards and stewardesses were friendly and polite, and we had a good experience overall. I would fly with them again.

I hadn’t slept much all night. I can’t sleep very well on airplanes — I should probably say I can’t sleep much at all on airplanes. There’s the noise, then, of course, the “wonderful” seats and the lack of humidity, etc. I usually watch movies to pass the time while I gasp for air and pour water down my parched throat.

Outside, pitch black darkness stared back at me, and the faint reflection of a bleary-eyed traveler bearing my resemblance was visible in the window. Had there been no one around, it would have been eerie. But Ligia was next to me. She was sleeping somewhat peacefully, and that comforted me.

As morning approached and the first rays of light began to break through the darkness, Ligia woke up. I took out my 5D, and stood ready for that fleeting moment when color and light would combine to produce something worth capturing. Here it is.

Dawn breaking

At 33,000 feet, the cloud clover stayed below, and only its remembrance remained, in the shape of wispy lines that traced alongside us.

I kept my camera ready in case other opportunities presented themselves, and I wasn’t disappointed. A supersonic jet passed by us, leaving orange-yellow contrails in its wake.

Jet set

No matter how commoditized flight gets, there are still a great number of people that can never afford to experience it. I suppose that has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, enough pollution is generated by existing airplanes, so perhaps it’s better that their number is kept somewhat limited. On the other hand, many opportunities open up to you when you can travel so fast. Trips that take days suddenly take only hours. Life, for better or worse, gets faster, and you can do more. I suppose that can be both good and bad, depending on your point of view. I’m on the fence about it myself.

The rarefied life

We found ourselves in our rental car, driving toward Transylvania, that afternoon. We drove through the evening and part of the night. Road repairs made our trip unnecessarily long, but that’s a story for another day. As we were driving through the Carpathian Mountains, night set in, and I stopped to take this photo.

A closing account

As we paused to rest, we thought about the last 24 hours. In that relatively short span of time, we’d traveled over 4,000 miles and still had a few more to go.

Life moves fast these days. If we’re not careful, we can end up old and tired, having spent a lifetime running around from place to place. Sometimes it’s worth more than we know it to STOP, even if it’s only for a few minutes, and look around us. That’s when we realize that those few moments of pause are more precious than whole days of nonstop action.

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