Promised Caryopteris

This is a Caryopteris. I shot it to accompany a first-person essay about the fact that this is the only true-blue flower, not purple-blue or blue-purple. All of the photos I found on photo agency sites were too purple so I biked out to the Arnold Arboretum in JP to find this one. It was the bluest one I could find. What can you do?

See it the one that published with the article here: http://features.csmonitor.com/gardening/2008/09/30/amid-fall-hues-a-splash-of-blue/

And a few of my other picks that didn't run:








I thought the bee was kinda cool, but I guess it distracted from the story.

All taken on a sunny fall day at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in Jamaica Plain, Mass.

Ho Fo Fo Toes

Here are some Bison Albondigas, buffalo meatball tapas that I shot to go with an article on restaurants' preference for local meat that was published in The Home Forum on Wednesday.

I staged and shot them in our tiny studio. I found some burlap at the bottom of a cabinet where we keep camera equipment. The cloth is actually Kendra Nordin's scarf (the reporter who wrote the article and cooked these). I haven't really done studio work or food photography before and frankly it was kind of challenging to make meatballs look appealing. Anyway, I managed to pull this off in about twenty minutes. I think it's pretty good.

The recipe's attached to the article if you've got a hankering.

(Un)exciting

Here's the first photo I had published in the Christian Science Monitor through my internship.


Exciting because, hey, it's my first photo published in the Monitor!

Unexciting because, hey, it's a pretty boring photo. Television through your Blu-ray is pretty innovative, but not exactly what I'd call a visual story.

I was actually out shooting something else and I remembered we had a story coming up about Blu-Ray and I shot this quick portrait of Nick Bernard with display in Border's at Downtown Crossing. It was better than the archive photos we had from the wires shot in a Best Buy so we used it.

Stay tuned for more CSMonitor assignments: Buffalo meatballs, Caryopteris, and tropical fish hunting in Rhode Island.

Jessy, owner of Yellow Cab Co, Cincinnati, Ohio

I had a nice ride with Jessy, who drove me to the Cincinnati airport in Kentucky at the end of August. He had this fantastic classic cab driver hat and he wore a yellow uniform. He owned a small cab company with about 15 drivers and he said he couldn't manage to convince anyone who worked for him to wear a uniform. He likes it, though, so he wears it himself every day. And the hat: he bought it on ebay.

In other news, since this is a photo blog I'm going to be making the photos bigger within the entries. There's always been an option to click the photo to see it bigger but I like this better.

a good journey under a pleasant sun

Photos coming soon, I know it's been a while.

In the meantime, a quote from the beginning of a book that I'm really getting into (thanks, Grandpa!)

"Perhaps there is no meaning in it all, the thought went on inside me, save that of journey itself, so far as men can see. It has altered with the chances of life, and the chances brought us here; but it was a good journey--long, perhaps--but a good journey under a pleasant sun. Do not look for the purpose. Think of the way we came and be a little proud. Think of this hand--the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.
Or consider its later wanderings."

- Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey