Tag Archives: photography

Sunrise at Nantasket

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Yesterday was the last day of Daylight Savings Time for 2025. By the time DST ends, I’m generally happy to see it go. Sunset is early enough that you’re not gaining all that much by extending it an hour, and sunrises have become late enough that you’re getting up in the dark.

This late sunrise does make it easier to be up and about for it, and so, for the past few years, I’ve tried to view it from the ocean. Generally, I don’t bother setting an alarm; if I oversleep, I figure I needed to. But the intention is usually enough to get me up. The past few years I’ve done it from Castle Island; this year, I was a little more confident I could get down to Nantasket in time.

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Fall Foliage in the White Mountains

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Following the summer’s trip to the White Mountains on the motorcycle, I decided I wanted go back up for the fall foliage. I’ve done this a couple of times; last time I did this, in 2017, I did it over a weekend. I’ve also done it over the Columbus Day weekend. The trouble with doing it on the weekend, of course, is that when everyone else does it, so this year, I decided to take the first three days of October — Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off from work, and head up. It turned out to be a good move. There were a lot of other people around up there, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

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Making of a Christmas Card: The Early Cards

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I’ve been making my own Christmas cards since 1997, but my 2013 card was the first card I documented here on the blog, and it started an annual tradition I’ve kept up each year since.

There were a couple of reasons I started posting with that card. First, the blog was relatively new at that point. More importantly, that card was a particularly difficult one; I still remember the feeling of being completely stumped for days regarding the subject matter, and the difficulties I had trying to execute the idea once I came up with it, and how ultimately, it came out much better than I hoped for. So I posted about it, patterning the title based on Theodore White’s The Making of the President 19xx series. And I’ve been writing about each card since.

That card had 14 predecessors, though, and I thought it might be fun to look back at them and describe how they came about.

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Quechee Balloon Festival 2024

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I decided once again to book a flight at the Quechee Ballooon festival. I had high hopes after last year’s washout, especially considering that the weather had been great in 2012, 2013 and and 2018.

I’d originally planned to take the motorcycle up. I’d booked my flight for Friday evening, figuring that if there was a weather problem, there was more of a chance of picking up a standby flight. As the weekend got closer though, it became apparent that there were thunderstorms due to roll through.

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Waterfire, June 1, 2024

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I first went to Waterfire shortly after starting to work in Providence. My coworkers were talking about it, so when there was a Friday Waterfire scheduled, I decided to stick around for it.

I often went while I was working in Providence, but less so once I stopped. At some point, I asked Mum if she’d like to go; she was always good for tagging along, and it turned out she enjoyed it too.

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LEDs Redux

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There’s been an noticeable improvement in the quality of LED based Christmas lights this year, They still have the supersaturated blues that the first generation had, but while those had relatively dim yellow and red lights, the newer sets are coming with more and brighter warm colors. With brighter yellows, oranges and reds, I can tolerate the deeply saturated blues.

I went into Boston this evening for the First Night “Pipes and Pops” concert at the Old South Church. I decided to walk through the Common looking for ice sculptures. I found out after the fact that they’d been moved to City Hall Plaza, but I did get to see the city’s official Christmas tree. It was quite nice. It seemed to me that there were a lot more red and warm white lights, and fewer greens and blues. The effect was quite pleasant.

The 2024 Boston Christmas tree.

(The concert was really good too, starting with Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and ending with the Radeztky March.)