Rhino Chaser

Spring is almost here and my new Rhino Chaser was delivered today in an undercover brown box. I assembled it in the basement like a mad scientist. Now I wait for the first good day.

Portfolio

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Respecting Our Temple

Please Respecting Our Temple
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Coffee Shop

Coffee Shop Cross Process
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Doorway

[Above] Doorway and Cactus
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Anandapur Bus

[Above] Anandapur Bus
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Do Not Drink From Streams

Trekkers Sign

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Bike for Hire

Bike for Hire Sign
Secret Life of Bikes

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Bike with Coca Cola Ad Panel

[Above] Bike with Coca Cola Advertisement
The Secret Like of Bikes
Disposable Camera

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The Once Loved

[Above] Abandoned Car in Snowstorm
Digital Image Captured with Lens Baby 2.0
Peeble's Island
Cohoes, New York

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Bike Chopper

[Above] Bike Chopper
Somewhere in New York City
Lower East Side

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Statue

[Above] Statue
Captured with Lens Baby 2.0

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Northeastern Photography 2008

Northeastern Photography has been redesigned for 2008
The new site includes outdoor adventure photography and video production.

Visit: www.northeasternphotography.com
& northeasternphotography.blogspot.com

[Below] Candy for the Yamabushi
An Adirondack Photo Essay: A Collection of Alpine Environments
Promotional Graphic and Web Banner

[Below] Offerings for the Throne Room
Candy for the Yamabushi: A Collection of Alpine Environments
Photo Essay Page Layout
Photo Location: Petersburg Pass, Petersburg, New York
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Elevated Trail

[Above] Elevated Mountain Bike Trail
Hudson River Tidal Zone
Somewhere North of New York City

Image sequence for Northeastern Revolution Video Production

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Race Point Surf Wagon

[Above] Surf Board Trailer
Race Point, Massachusetts
Click here to see the promotional poster.

For more outdoor sports photos, videos, and gear reviews, visit:
Northeastern Photography & Killswitch Magazine
Unique Images of the Vertical Northeast.

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Clocks Tick Slower in the Winter

I can see the capital from my living room window. That wasn't always the case. Before the $300,000 condos sprouted overnight, there was a full forest of trees blocking the view of the Albany skyline. The universal law of the suburbs claimed the foliage. There can be no undeveloped land, only unwanted real estate. All but one of the condos sits empty. Every day I look out on a multimillion dollar ghost town, sterile, pristine, and empty.

On sleepless nights, the lights that creep out from behind the curtains of the Albany skyline give me the feeling that there are other people awake: lovers, insomniacs, the suffers of bad dreams, those whose miss their children, those who miss more, the businessmen working late, those without enough money, those preparing to witness another sunrise, the new parents, and the old souls clock watching. We are all in this together. This is what passes for company in the dread hours of insomnia.

On the nights I can't sleep, I take refuge in the anonymous channels inhabiting the upper reaches of my cable service: foreign movies, India business reports, reruns of Cheaters [always a good choice at 2am], the Henry Rollins Show, game show reruns from the 70's, and Cops. From the list above, Cops is my pick for thoughtless, time killing TV. Each crime is neatly resolved in 4 – 8 minutes. There are no lingering questions, no subtle subtexts, no cliffhanger endings. Sleep could come at any moment and I wouldn't have hours invested in something more culturally redeeming.

At 2am, I can be found hiding out on deep cable, the uncharted region of television found between channels 120 and 680, where perpetual reruns of Cops flow abundantly from the vaults of Fox Reality Network.

Tonight's location is Austin, Texas.
Summer.
Sometime in the early 1990's.

The cars, watches, and hairstyles betray the chronological reality of "present day." Although I don't remember this as such, everything was boxier in the 1990's. Hopefully most of these people have gone on with their lives since their 15 minutes of primetime infamy. But the one universal truth about cops isn't derived from the snippets of street geopolitical philosophy dispensed from law enforcement officers in high and tights. While it seems as though everyone arrested isn't wearing a shirt, this too isn't always true. There IS one thread that ties all the episodes of Cops together into a masterpiece of junk food TV.

It' s always summer on reality TV.

Any night of the week, I can tune in and watch slightly overweight men chase down fleeing perps while wearing short sleeves and sweating profusely. Winter simplified is nothing more than a wait and the math is undeniable. Subtract the last warm day from the winter and you get 4 months of low concrete gray skies and cold fingers. Upstate New York hasn't seen two solid hours of sunlight in what seems like weeks. There is a slight yet twisted solace to be found in decade old footage of a summer night long forgotten.

There are no shows about waiting for winter to break, shoveling snow, or washing the whitewash crust of road salt from your car. Those are tales better left in the land of never summer, a place too real for reality TV.

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Martyr

[Above] Graffiti
Harvard Square, Boston
Massachusetts

At the end of City Lights, when the film's heroine at last sees the man who has delivered her from blindness, we watch her romantic dreams die in an instant. "You?" she asks, incredulous. "Yes," the Tramp nods, his face, caught in extreme close-up, a map of pride, shame and devotion. It's the oldest story in show business — the last shall yet be, if not first, at least recognized, and perhaps even loved. This holds true for real life too. Sometimes. All the answers to all the questions are hidden on deep cable, wedged between remixes of Temptation Island and the Mole. Sometimes we're the hero. And sometimes we're the tramp.

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Fortune is Gone

[Above] Winter Surfer on Ogunquit Beach
[Lower] Surfer through vintage Kodak Duaflex

Rain hits the windows of the car in sheets with a sound similar to rock salt being thrown at glass. A lone, neoprene clad surfer makes his way through the 4 foot breakers to a non-existent lineup. Everything is gray. Up is gray. Down is gray. The only line of demarcation between the horizon and beach is the white fingernails of the waves. Somewhere off shore, a winter storm draws in energy from an air mass over the Canadian shield and coughs this miniature winter swell shoreward. There is talk of snow tomorrow. Another trademark day for the Maine coast. 50 feet from the car, a boarded up fortune teller’s booth reads “See you next season.”

There has to be a lesson in there somewhere.

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Rose with Logo

[Left] Rose on Black Velvet with Logo

Photography for Promotional Materials & Website Background

In-Studio Photograph

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Northeastern Revolution Promo Image

[Above] Image for Northeastern Revolution:
A New England Mountain Bike Journey
DVD menu screen and web promotion.

In-Studio Photograph

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Spheres

[Above] Terracotta Spheres
Texture Stock Image Series

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The Last Angry Man

[Above] Incredible Hulk Action Figure *
© Marvel Comics

This guy has been kicking around the studio for years. He used to live on my desk at a job I really didn't like.† He faced out to greet anyone who entered my office. His expression told the whole story, I raged vicariously through him.

Growing up with a darkroom and studio in the basement of our house, my father and I used to build elaborate miniature photographic scenes with Star Wars action figures, painted Styrofoam planets, and poster board. In retrospect, our visual effects were slightly less ghetto than the original Star Trek. In attempt to keep shooting and stay out of the concrete gray upstate weather, I scheduled a little photo time with Mr. Hulk. I chose a studio backdrop that would best set off his profile and mimic the color of his tattered shorts.

Really, who am I kidding? Like trying to assign meaning to reality TV on deep cable, I am just wasting time. There are no lessons for the outer world when someone is voted off the island. But wasting time is sometimes fun too.

* I wanted to name this post Some Kind of Monster until I realized it was the name of that documentary about that bad metal band and their millionaire personal dramas.

† I'm contractually prohibited from mentioning the name of the firm. Upon my departure, there was a mutual agreement that this firm would not defame me and in turn, I would not speak of their corporate secrets.

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Marvel Comics Logo & Incredible Hulk © Marvel Comics

Fallen Comrade

[Above] Fallen Comrade
Wild Beach Horses
Outer Banks, North Carolina

Early morning on the Outer Banks, 5AM. The solemnity of the scene weighed as much as every grain of sand on that 9 mile stretch of beach. I stood in silence watching them as they watched over their fallen comrade.

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January Notebook

While I miss the summer terribly, there are benefits to the winter. Over the past 10 days, the northeast has endured a chain of storms that have blown in from the Midwest, gained strength over the eastern seaboard and dumped a swath of heavy snow from the Ohio valley into upstate New York. This is considered to be a classic Nor’easter pattern of storm development and this season has seen a steady diet of these powerful storms. This particular weather pattern usually targets upstate New York for the heaviest precip. Right now, the weather station mounted to the back of the house reads 3 degrees. While I hate the gray skies and lack of color, I accept the cold. My personal theory is that if you choose to live in the northeast; there isn’t much of a basis for complaining about the winter weather.

Last night, a friend and I snowshoed eight miles of virgin powder. My secret stash of trails is always a great fix for quality snowshoe terrain. * [For purposes of anonymity, I call these trails the The Race Track. Locals only, Brah.] The sky was sharp and clear. Radational cooling chilled temps to the low single digits and the wind made it all feel that much colder. On the coldest night of the year, we hiked for well over three hours. Chemical heat packs under layers of fleece and gore-tex kept the arctic air at bay making for an almost comfortable excursion. Felt great to be outside. The reductionist in me tends to see the winter as series of portages between heated boxes. I have never dealt well with being locked down for long periods of time. Winter is a wait. The numbers don't lie. The next warm day is months off.

Not much in the way of new photography to post. I am in the midst of numerous writing and media development projects. Planning a minor road trip tomorrow in search of some ice climbing to shoot. The cold temperatures of the past few days are the perfect incubator for strong, plastic ice. I am sure it's possible to find some climbers who've shelved their day jobs on a Friday for some crampons and ice tools.

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Sign Post Medusa

[Above] Image Composite
Adirondack Mine

Winter is my slow time. Almost every day is a flat gray without contrast. With conditions less than ideal, I busy myself with media development projects that have been lingering since the summer while at the same time attempting to fulfill holiday print orders in hopes of having them delivered by Christmas. I have content for three websites to develop before the first of the year plus a few site redesigns and countless upgrades. Needless to say, I miss the summer’s possibilities for both adventure and photography almost as much as I miss warm trail runs. I hate sweating through cold winter workouts. Tomorrow, I am going to make an effort to get out and shoot some photos no matter what the atmospheric conditions are. I haven’t picked up my camera in almost 3 weeks.

I have a waterproof, helmet mounted DV camera on order. Every time the Brown Santa Claus (The UPS van) drives by without delivering my cam, I curse him under my breath by wishing heavy packages and obscure house numbers upon him. Seems like I have spent months out of my life waiting for either bike parts or photography equipment to be delivered out of the back of a UPS van. After I get the cam, I want to get out to Stratton and shoot some TGR rip-off video in one of those out of bounds broccoli forests on the upper mountain. Just 1 mile from the lodge its huge inland sea of parked SUV’s, the broccoli and rime ice covered snow mushrooms look like the deep back country. Getting off the high speed gondola at the summit is like stepping onto the surface of the moon. I need to get outside soon.

The following is from one of my ongoing projects.

Excerpt from The Inexact Science of Abandoned Places:
Urban Exploration in a Post-911 World:

The absolute silence of this remote portion of the Adirondack Park is eroded only by the irregular rhythm of a door left open to bang closed in the wind. Reports of an Adirondack “Ghost Town” have been circulating around the internet for years. There is little question as to its existence, only as to when the long silent structures of the titanium mining operation would fall victim to the wrecking ball. The rumors increase the urgency of getting there before any redevelopment is to begin.

“Don’t look at the NO TRESPASSING signs and they can’t hurt you.” I have used this phrase a lot over the years, mostly just before setting fat tire onto posted land to poach forbidden single track. The orange and black medusas on sign posts and need to be avoided at all costs. As we approached the gated entrance of the mine, I mumbled it again. Over the years, those 12 words have been transformed from a joke to a good luck piece for a non-superstitious person, my verbal talisman. We parked the car a few feet from the gate. On foot and carrying backpacks laden with camera gear, the option of a quick get away was an impossibility. We walked down the only road in or out hoping to talk our way out of any confrontation with security guards with the story that we were students doing research for a thesis.

Every time, without fail, I feel like I am being watched.

Upon first impression, the hollowed out structure of the smelting operation resembled the skeletal remains of an enormous, long dead beast. At one point in its history, this 5 square mile patch of real estate was the nexus of thousands of lives, serving as both the financial anchor and social web for not only employees, but their families and extended familes. The mine became a self contained planet isolated in a vacuum of pine forests and rural two lane highways. This small city housed a worker’s encampment, air strip, firehouse, medial aid station, and commissary alone with scores of science fiction-esque structures that served some highly specialized need. Almost completely self-contained, there was little need for workers and their families to venture far from the industrial landscape of the mine.

Walking through the maze of silent buildings, there is a palpable feeling that this place was abandoned all at once, almost like an escape in the middle of a perfectly normal workday. Time cards are still slipped into the slots of the rack next to the time clock which is stopped at 3:18 with no indication as to AM or PM. The floors and railings of the guardhouse and weigh station have been polished smooth by years of workdays. Tools still hang from peg boards on the walls of the machine shop, and vehicles half life into the diamond black soil. The inner chambers of the rusting, corrugated aluminum buildings beg to be explored.

The mine complex sits on a manmade reservoir of turquoise water, a blue jewel that stands out in the landscape of the Adirondacks where most water here is stained brown from tannic acid. The water appears to have an out of place purity among the rusting buildings of the complex. I am sure the water only looks clean as the mine is little more than an enormous scar on the planet’s skin. It is obvious that the environment here was milked of everything and left to wither away in silence. Hidden behind miles of buffer zone, destruction on a grand scale happened here, relatively unabated.

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The Rickshaw Pilot

[Left] The Rickshaw Pilot
Location Undisclosed

Today, I finally freed this image from my cryo champer of undeveloped film, a memory reanimated into tangible form. I had completely forgotten about it. I snapped this image just before a rickshaw ride in 2003. Later that day, I proposed to my wife.

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Coolidge Theater

[Left] Coolidge Theater
Coolidge Corner
Boston, Massachusetts

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Gust Front

[Above] Gust Front Passing Through Bridge Supports
Castleton Island,
Castleton-on-Hudson
New York

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Astonishing Panoramas of the Recent Past

[Above] Film Canisters

Over the last ten years, I have managed to bring a camera pretty much everywhere I go. A successful image is sometimes more luck than preparation. At this point, I feel like I am missing an important piece of clothing if I leave the house without some form of camera in my backpack. Having a camera along can turn even the most mundane tasks into potential opportunities.

I love the unobtrusiveness of a high end point and shoot for daily use. Practicality prevents lugging a 4 pound DSLR and lenses most places. The DSLR’s size and storage needs are hefty and preventative for working undetected in public environments. I’ll take the 8 megapixel, 6 ounce, point and shoot version any day. High quality digital images from a consumer grade point and shoot cameras weren’t always an option, but today, there is virtually little difference in a quality point and shoot’s image quality compared to the DSLR, only lens choices. Remember, megapixels have little to do with image quality. I have actually seen photographers use the number of megapixels their camera has as a marketing tool. For an uneducated consumer, I can see how this would be an effective strategy, but the reality is, after a certain point, megapixels become a moot point unless you are planning on printing extra large images. Seems like in any gear driven endeavor, there are pissing matches about whose equipment is better. Personally, I will take creativity over technology any day.

The bulk of my images from the 90’s are either film or slides. I have drawers of negative sleeves and hundreds of boxes of slides that never get looked at. I keep them for sentimental reasons, but they will probably never see the light of day again.

In a corner of my studio, sits a large glass container filled with at least a gallon of undeveloped film canisters. The canisters are in essence miniature time capsules of images from forgotten days ten years in the past that have been preserved in decade old air. At the time, as I accumulated more and more canisters, I lost interest in getting them all developed. At $11 dollars a roll, the financial investment would have been substantial. I wasn’t working professionally yet, so there was no urgency of a deadline to meet. A majority of the images in the containers are experiments, travel documentary, and a few failed attempts at cliché band photography. Today, the value of film photography has decreased substantially allowing me to have the film developed directly to CD.

The first electronic SLR I owned was a Canon EOS Rebel with a National Enquirer sticker on the outside of the lens hood and a Trek Mountain Bike Racing Team sticker on the inside. I think the system cost me in the neighborhood of $800 in 1990 dollars. I loved taking that camera to bike races because the Enquirer logo started a lot of conversations with interesting people. Somewhere in my archives, the camera and I are sharing a frame with Marla Streb just outside the press office at Mount Snow, Vermont. That Rebel has accumulated quite a few frequent flier miles.

I only recently started developing the film, and like some new age regression therapy, small details of past lives came flooding back in vivid detail. For the last ten years, undeveloped images have been preserved in small black cylindrical time capsules, bathed in the air of the day I sealed them. Atmosphere from Breckenridge, Ground Zero, thunderheads off the coast of North Carolina, mountain summits, underwater plant life, forgotten projects from art school, former friends, arch enemies, and younger versions of myself sporting varying lengths of hair, has been freed from the stasis of the small black and gray cryotubes marked with cryptic geographical information written in fine point sharpie: monster, obx, adks 03, winter3, nyc 0801, grd 0, kayak 4, moca, dc 00, troy wor, cc 98. It is a language all my own. Photography lost something when there was no longer a need for film canisters.

There is a strangeness is seeing the world as it was in your own recent past. The faces of former friends seem at the same time familiar and foreign, each linked by a nebulous shared moment of common geography and interests that have since evaporated.

Sometimes you are friends with people for no other reason than common and unpredictable intersections in personal history. The shared adventures of the past, both major and minor, are enough of a magnetic force to draw two people together.

Sometimes, that magnetic field weakens and the bonds that connect personal histories fail. They fail like cheap batteries and the signal becomes weak. The legends of youth are no longer impressive. Neighborhood tall tales shrink with old age as if starved for calcium. Sometimes, the simple fact of the matter is that people grow apart and little more analysis is needed.

Sometimes on nights like tonight, I sit here in front of the monitor and muse about all the people I once called “friend” and wonder how they are as they go about their days insulted in whatever cocoon they have chosen as I go about mine inside of my personal cocoon, orbiting those things and people who are important to me.

Sometimes the velocity of life is breathtaking. People become strangers a lot faster then it takes for them to become friends.

Did you ever wonder where the strangest place a picture of you resides? That drunken pose at a summer party locked away in someone’s junk drawer, or that trip to the shore with that person you dated for a few months folded up and stuck in a book on a shelf thousands of miles away, or a stranger’s blog? Every single picture of ever taken of you has to be somewhere. The evidence of your former self is scattered in a million unreachable places. What was once familiar is now taken out of context and stripped of sentimentality, like a piece of trivia.

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Night Bridge

[Left] Peeble's Island Bridge
Waterford, New York

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