Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you

Translating this Oaxacan knicknack would require too much explanation of the ins and outs of Mexican wrestling, but I loves it. “Work hard, play hard” would be near it but doesn’t capture even a fraction of the colour…

Anyroad, just a note to say that any minute now the internets are getting cut off to this here house and we’re moving to NYC, then on Friday, Guadalajara for 6 weeks or so, then L.A. for a week, then back to NY, NY… shall be something of an adventure. My new zip code resolution (to coin a phrase, nay, a tradition) is to update this blog a bit more often. So let’s see how that goes. If you don’t already subscribe by RSS, and would like to be emailed whenever new ramblings find their way to this site, please sign up for email updates here:

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Maine’s been grand. I’m going to miss the folks and the ample, accessible, countryside and coast. We’ll be back… A bientot, folks.

Vintage bridge

A parade of vintage vehicles preceded the Memorial Day parade in Brunswick yesterday. I know nothing about cars. I can barely remember the make and model of our car when I take it for an oil change… I think it’s green. Anyroad, I wanted them to be a background element lending atmosphere to the shot rather than being centre stage.

Portland Observatory TTV

I haven’t uploaded a Through The Viewfinder shot for a while, so here you go… This is from a while back, the first week of ‘spring’ on a phototour Portland, ME. Because of the way Maine’s coastline works incoming ships couldn’t be seen from the harbour so they built this here observatory (not a lighthouse) on the hill so they could see when boats were on their way into the port and sound the horn/ raise the flags to tell the dockers to get on it. (more…)

Hungry, hungry

What with us moving to New York in the near future, here’s a shot from our garden while we still have one. Matey here is crawling across a solar-powered light that we have in the tree there. A lot easier to photograph than butterflies…

Diente de león

I could understand if it was called Lion’s Mane or something similar, but lion’s teeth always seems like a stretch.

Anyroad… I found out today that by affixing my fisheye lens (x 0.25) onto my manual 28-75mm (f3.5-22) it does a very passable impression of a macro lens. And I know flowers are right up there with sunsets for photographic clichés, but it’s spring innit. Hope you’ll bear with me while I’m going through this phase. I take requests by the way…

Weird weather

Yesterday Brunswick was treated to about 5 seasons in one day. Bright sunshine, gales, snow, hail, rain, cold then heat.

I wanted to get a shot of some of the blossom that has sprung up everywhere of late but with a sense of the elements too. This is a 2 second exposure with a tiny aperture and the polariser in full effect to get the flowers in motion. It took quite a few attempts but this is the best one I managed.

Get my camera back tomorrow

Here’s the sole photo I took in its absence. Flickr doesn’t display panoramas very well, nor does my photoblog. So sorry if you’ve seen this one before, but here ’tis:

Tip your head back as you scroll down for full effect...

If everything goes according to plan the next photos you see in this blog should be of mole, chapulines, mayan ruins and mezcal.

It’s time for Winter Tweets

I could never get the hang of Twitter, but 24 hours later I’m liking Google Buzz. This is taken through the window of one of those shops that makes you wonder how they manage to stay in business. East Portland, Maine…

This blog’s gone to the dogs

Sue on the (very active and friendly) Maine Photography Meetup group on Flickr mentioned the Greenville Dog Sled race a couple of weeks back. I didn’t think I’d be able to make it because it’s pretty far up north and I didn’t relish the idea of driving through the ice to get there. Luckily another member, Jason, offered me a lift and thus on Saturday at 6:45am outside the Brunswick 7-11 the expedition began.

Once you get off the highway the towns get pretty scant. Mainly made up of a few churches, an ACE hardware, and a few taxidermy and hunting shops. It was nice not to be driving so I could take shots out of the window and Jason slowed down to expedite the process. Some of the houses struggle to withstand the elements.

The wrong kind of winterization

We missed a turn but still got there a bit early at the meeting point. It was next to Moosehead Lake. So-called because it looks like a moose’s head from space if you squint. Which either speaks to the impressive cartography skills of the early settlers or the view from local mountains. The lake was frozen, obviously. Really thick- planes were landing on it, trucks driving across it and herds of skidooers (skidooists? skidoodlers?) noisily sweeping over it.

Jason decides he needs more layers

Next up, the main(e) attraction, the 30 mile dog sled race start. The 100 mile one had been cancelled due to patchy (lack of) snow which was a blessing in disguise because it started at 9am which would’ve meant getting up even earlier and being colder still. I bet the dogs were disappointed that their run was shorter than they wanted.

There were about a dozen teams, they’d get set up on the start line and set off every couple of minutes which allowed everyone to change their vantage points. You could tell the dogs were loving it. Here’s on of my favourites:

Greenville_DogSledRace2010-13

Here’s the link to the full set. After a couple of hours of dog watching we went to the Black Frog in Greenville for lunch. A restaurant specialising in comfort food with a menu that gave Bertie Lou’s in Sellwood, OR a run for its money. They had Poutin on the menu which I’ve heard nothing but good things about. So I ordered that:

Poutine
Poutine

It’s chips, cheese and gravy. What’s not to like? I expect there are a few differences to the Poutine they serve in Canada but until I sample those delights I’ll just have to recommend the N. Maine version.

Next up Jason reckoned skirting around the side of the lake, over towards to the Canadian border and then down following the Kennebec river’d be entirely possible and still manage to get back to Brunswick for 6pm, so we did that. Very little traffic along the way, maybe the Moose warning signs every 500 yards put other road users off. It was fantastic scenery- frozen rivers, ice floes, more taxidermy shops. If we’re around in the summer that would be the time to get the full experience though as leaving the car for more than 5 minutes invited hypothermia.

State of the Union
State of the Union
Mooses
Half of me wanted to see one. Half of me didn't.
1 deer, 1 impala, 0 moose

One of the many coffee stops was in Waterville on the way home. I only mention it ‘cos there was a gorgeous sunset. Regardez:

Sunset on the way home from Greenville
As long as I gaze on Waterville sunset

And that was my Saturday. Even managed to squeeze in a Flickr meetup in East Portland on Sunday too. Lovely to see the gang again. Here’s the 4×4 of my pix from then. As you will notice it was a TTV day:

East Portland Through The Viewfinder
East Portland Through The Viewfinder

How was your weekend?

Last night midomi saved my life

Well not literally.

6 weeks since my last post eh? That’s got to be some kind of new record. Sorry about that, I’m sure you found other ways to spend your time though. It was probably good for you to take that break. What did you do? Learnt a new language? A musical instrument? The harpsichord eh? Good on ya. Upload a cover of something baroque to YouTube would you. Thanks!

I nipped over to the UK and Eire for a few weeks just to check in on everyone and have a fine old time. We’ve been back in Brunswick, Maine, Top Right of ‘Merica, Last stop before Canada, for nigh on two weeks now. It’s still cold and that snow that fell last week is not going anywhere. I’ve taken up ice-skating and am working on describing graceful figures such as 1 and 0 in the ice.

Your laces are undone
The 'one-glove' technique

There’s a song I’ve been trying to find for almost a decade now I think it was on one of David Byrne’s compilations. It’s a Brazilian duet so I could only sing it phonetically. I think it’s about arrows. Probably. Anyroad, usually if you want to find a song on the internets you usually just google a few words from it + “lyrics”, but if you don’t know how to spell them, you’re stuck. Same with instrumental pieces (like this one). So I thought I’d try www.midomi.com. You hum it for 10 seconds, then it searches its database for songs that match, and lo and behold, first time it found what countless hours of googling couldn’t. I’ve been listening to this over and over. It’ll warm you up when you’re in the negative celsius.

It wouldn’t be a proper post without an Atticus update. He’s almost back to his usual self after 3 weeks on the mean streets of Harpswell, ME. We’ve nursed him back to health after a nasty bout of kennel cough, and some new toys. His favourite is a squeaky hedgehog thing. DON’T try and take it away from him.

Squeak Squeak Squeak
Ñom ñom ñom squeak

Back soon. Abrazos

Tis cold

Been a pretty busy couple of weeks on the work front. On Tuesday one of my latest sites, www.elizabethharveyphotography.com went live. Liz is a fellow Maine Flickrer and she takes fantastic shots of the local scenery and puts them to music. I went to Portland to show her the ropes on updating it with WordPress and afterwards had a wander round the freezing streets with me camera before picking DrSita up from the airport (email if you’re interested in details on that particular point)

Portland Lighthouse
Dalek in the town centre

I’m awaiting the arrival of a Bokehnator kit, which will change the circles in unfocussed shots like this:

Stop. Repeat.
'Normal' Bokeh

Clear Skies
Temperature: -15°C * Wind: WNW at 5 mph * Clouds: Clear Skies * Wind Chill: -18°C
…to all kinds of other shapes. Yep, it’ll be tacky but I’m all about experimentation in photography.

It’s hard not to mention the weather at the moment. Look at the weather thingy in the left hand sidebar…

I know that a fair amount of the UK got snow today and, as you know, I’m all about the frozen water crystals; However I’ve never experienced cold like we’re having right now. Yesterday 16 degrees C below zero was the ambient temperature. That’s before factoring in windchill. I was wearing at least 6 layers plus my favourite furry hat but as I was dragged around Bowdoin campus by Atticus it felt like I was wearing shorts.  Today if I venture out, I’ll be wearing pajama bottoms underneath me trousers. Wonder if it’ll get to -40° which will spare me having to specify centigrade or Fahrenheit….

Talking of Bowdoin, the maintenance peeps are building an ice rink in the middle of it. They cleared the snow off a patch of the grass and are spraying it with water on a daily basis. Might have to see if Goodwill has any cheap size 12 skates, though it’s been a good few years since I did any skating and I’d be very cautious given that there aren’t any rails around the edge to slam into when it all goes pear-shaped.

Looks like we're getting an icerink
DIY Ice Rink

My favourite bit about going ice skating when I were a lad (f’rinstance, James Healy’s birthday in 1985ish in Bristol) were the arcade machines. They had my all-time favourites Mr.Do!, Defender… and with Bananarama, The Bangles, & Blondie blasting on the speakers…good times…

Apparently the Androscoggin river down the road is going to freeze over more or less completely. It had ice floating down it t’other day and at the bend half of it had a good couple of inches of ice over it. According to one of my local Flickr friends there’ll be a ‘Fishing shanty town’ on it in the new year so that’ll be worth a photo or three.

After you’ve checked out Liz’s site another recommendation is Mario’s latest Circulo Vicioso podcast. This month the theme is Los Angeles, cos that’s the guest city of this year’s Guadalajara International Book Festival (FIL). He’s picked some great choons. I listened to it the first time on a long walk with ‘Cus round the snowy woods, and it was a tad incongruous, but no less pleasurable, listening to the likes of Los Lobos and Lalo Guerrero as my extremities slowly froze. If your Spanish is a bit rusty, skip to the songs.

Here endeth the blog post. See yous soon  😉

(more…)

Bowdoin College Campus

You might have already seen this one on my blog or at Flickr. Sorry to repeat post, but I’m quite proud of it. Mainly for managing to get up early enough to capture it… We’re due for more snow tomorrow and I’ve been reading up on snow photography tips.

BTW- Gina, Evan & Adrian, thanks for the card! Little Ady’s looking cuter than ever.