Tag: photos

Revisiting the Museum of Glass and Bridge of Glass in Tacoma

Way back in 2003 and 2004, I wrote about a trip that we took with our friends Charlie and Carie to see the Museum of Glass and pointed to the pictures we took there. That trip started a chain of events that saw me enter an NPR phoneblogging competition and one of my photos published in The Guardian.

Most of that is offline now, but with a little careful archaeology I was able to pull some of the pieces back together and also get some updated photos from our trip yesterday. Here are some of the bits and pieces.

First, the photos from that day. I used to use Mac.com to serve my photo albums before switching to Flickr. Unfortunately you can’t access any of the Mac.com content any more; fortunately it’s all in the photo albums in my Photos app, to this day. So here’s the gallery of the photos that were there.

Second, there was the SENT online exhibit of “phonecam art,” which included both a curated portion and a participatory portion (which was run by NPR). On the blog, I announced that I sent some photos from my phonecam, including ones from above. Sadly, SENT no longer exists so you can’t reload the page to see my photos alongside those from Wil Wheaton and Warren Ellis, but you can get the drift by clicking on the link above which takes you to the Internet Archive. The physical exhibit went online July 10, 2004 in Los Angeles. And my photo was selected as a winner in the NPR contest; you can see the winning photos in the archive here, and the NPR episode of “Day to Day” where they discussed my photo is still online. (My photo gets discussed at 2:40.) There was even a spread on the contest in an AT&T magazine (again, rescued by the archives).

In the middle of all of this, the Guardian wrote their article. My photo was never in the online version but Newspapers.com now has the actual print article online; see below.

My photo in the print edition of The Guardian, January 8, 2004.

Last but not least, I retook some of the photos from that day when we visited the museum again last month. Amazing to me how the exhibit still has the same impact though the landscape around it has changed.

Meadow lands, or locally sourced Zoom backgrounds

Swan on the pond of the Mill Stream, Lexington, MA.

In these days of confinement, I’ve taken to occasionally grabbing a little fresh air in our extended backyard. Certainly around the house—though after Monday’s windstorm, most of my efforts there are around picking up fallen tree limbs—but also in the fringes of the park behind our street, and in Arlington’s Great Meadows.

The meadows are wetlands, fed by Mill Creek, which passes down from Moon Hill, through the fields of Wilson Farm, and under Massachusetts Ave, stopping long enough behind the Parker-Morell-Dana house to form a pond that swans (above) nest and swim in every spring through fall. The friends association has built a series of trails around the edges of the wetlands, and you can explore through the woods and across a few boardwalks that span the wetlands.

Of course, this is more challenging in our social distancing time, so I’ve taken to exploring secondary trails that lead to random interesting points: an old sewer system manhole, a patch of solid land around the roots of birch trees surrounded by slightly marshy grass, and of course lots of birds.

It can be downright peaceful, if you get far enough away from the Minuteman Trail that you don’t hear the bicycles going past. So sometimes I can forget everything that’s going on and just watch spring arrive.

And yes, the above (Creative Commons licensed) photos are not bad as Zoom backgrounds. ????

Flickr catch up

Snowstorm sunset

Back in the day before Facebook, we had to have multiple services for posts and pictures. I ultimately became a Flickr customer, but not without some wringing of hands about putting my photos in the service of another company.

These days, that concern seems incredibly naïve, considering how much of my writing and photography is currently behind locked walls at Facebook. Part of what I’m going to do with this new daily writing project is liberate some of the more interesting stuff that I’ve put into their walled garden and make it available on my blog, and on Flickr. I still have concerns about Flickr (especially in these days of angst for Yahoo, its parent), but it’s the best photo hosting service, hands down.

I just posted 20 new photos to my photostream, starting here. Go check them out!