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On Monday, a coworker recommended I visit Edge River, New Jersey and take pictures of the New York skyline so I contacted Teejay Green and Sam Lodise and we left around 6:30 PM to capture the skyline.  This was our trip:

Le Trek

Or first stop was at KFC where we went through the timeless bonding ritual of eating a doubledown and then having to stop an hour later to use the bathroom.  We hit Hackensack and started going south until we hit a nice spot in Union City with both a Ben and Jerry’s and a Starbucks and a health peppering of well-dressed people with tiny dogs.

We took pictures and these were my best:

20101119-5075-NewYorksNonSkylineAnd2more [flickr album=72157625435366966 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

We drove a bit further south, and then into Brooklyn, and then through Manhattan, and then home.  Some time past Jersey City Teejay started googling New York City Skyline and we found that every shot of the skyline is pretty well taken from the same inaccessible spot below the Manhattan Bridge.  Having driven by that spot, and seeing that it’s surrounded by construction, we agreed that we either needed to rent a helicopter, or gain the ability to scale chain link fences.  The former is far more likely.

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Sam wanted to do some lightpainting with lightsabers and my bottom driveway hosted what happened.  As with other lightpainting, the images don’t receive postprocessing.  Sam had picked up some colored wands reminiscent of usher’s wands.

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I was impressed that Sam could pull off a lightpainting photobomb.

The other key item was the addition of lightsabers yielding the following simple long exposure.

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This was a rare shot in this sequence where neither I fall over nor does Dave look like he's dropping the lightsaber.

When we saw how Dave was cut out from the saber wipe we opted to try to extend that.  Technique-wise, Dave stood still and I did a wash with the wand behind him.

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I like how the light appears to cut a plain through him.

I probably deleted more shots than I should have but the following was the “best”.  Some had more energy to them but weren’t nearly as clean.  This should be revisited.

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There was one with me taking a cell call in the middle.

After Dave left the shots got much more limited as we no longer had the 3rd set of hands.  In previous attempts at lightwriting we ran into a problem of writing backwards.  These shots came down to our ability to write backwards but a simpler solution popped up: mirror the image from left to right.

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I was cool and wrote 'justice' with mine.

We’ve still got a long way to go before matching these folk but we’ll get there.

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This weekend’s shooting challenge with Sam and Teejay was lightpainting where one uses a long exposure and various photo-emitting and/or blocking tools to create an image in camera.  I arrived at Teejay’s house after attending a TF2 event where someone got inebriated in under 10 minutes and they were cutting out cardboard of a stormtrooper with what I describe as the Pringles guy moustache.

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Sam taking it in the pooper from a stache-having light-based stormtrooper.

The above was done in three parts, first using an off-camera strobe to generate the stormtrooper through a cardboard cutout with the light being funneled with a cardboard hackjob, then drawing the figure, and then a pilot flash to capture Sam .

Another technique was light-writing which is kinda shown above but what is better shown below:

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So close. Just one dot outside the wings.

This was done with a long exposure (like 22 seconds) while Erin stood in place as Sam did work with a restricted flashlight to do the wings  Erin was filled in with two pilot flashes from another strobe.

My creative contribution was the odd aura-ish crap below:

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He blinked, jerk.

This was done with the flashlight shining directly on the person with a dinner plate behind it to be a reflective surface to generate the whitishness (is that even a word?) of the outline.  If I did it again, I would have added a bit of a fill flash.

Sam left around 4 AM and Teejay and I twaddled for a few hours.  He realized that we didn’t  really accomplish anything in particular and drew up a list of crap to get for next time.  This has happened before with graffiti-ing magic cards and it may happen again: I’m going to go into a Claire’s.

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A few weeks ago a staff member invited me to go diving at a quarry north of camp and I thought this would be a splendid opportunity to take pictures so I took the invite and invited Sam Lodise to join as well.  The drive there was uneventful and every time I accidentally violated some rule of the road the response was a magical “It’s OK, neighbor” wave from the person I had wronged.  For lunch I tried Taskykake’s pineapple and cheese pie which would have made the day worthwhile, but there were more wonders in store.

Walking to the site was hot and where my companions were in swim trunks and t-shirts I donned my short sleeve button down shirt and failed to bring a hat, note for next time, but our efforts were well rewarded:

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Free framing

That wasn’t the actual jump site but I thought that it conveyed the feeling Sam and I experienced having never been there before of suddenly coming upon a diamond in the rough.

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Panorama of the Main Standing Area

The main jump point was a rock bluff some 40 feet above the water’s surface.  This is about the highest I’d ever jumped from but the restrictions of the site prevented me from joining.  Each jump involved climbing a 8 foot fence to return to the jump point, something that is simply beyond my physical abilities.

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X marks the spot

Sam was the last of the three jumpers to go and he hit the water with what sounded like an excited scream followed by a painful thud.  For reasons beyond my understanding, this would prove to be his only high jump that day, instead spending the rest of the time jumping from a height of about 10 feet off of a lower jump point where the others jumped from the high point four or five times each.

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He also took pictures of this thing... a lot.

They jumped and swam there for close to two and half hours and we began the walk back.  Again continuing the theme of smothering courtesy, passing vehicles would near completely enter the opposing lane to give us space despite the road having a reasonable shoulder.  I assume people to this to show that they know we’re there rather than for any actual fear of striking us.

About 20 minutes into our drive back I blurted out “I want ice cream” and everyone politely agreed and rolled their eyes.  At the ice cream store we purchased our snacks, sat down in the 93°F heat and demolished them.  Each person in turn at different times looked at me and said “this was a good idea”.  Sometimes it’s good to have a fat friend.

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Teejay had a wonderful idea.  Let’s take our cameras, and take pictures of nice things.   So, he, Sam Lodise and I went to Churchville Nature Center and attacked it with photographic vigor.  Teejay, having more latent skill and inclination than either Sam or myself took a number of quality shots.  Interestingly, the best photo he took of the day was in my driveway waiting for Sam and I to figure out if we wanted to bring our tripods.  Here it is:

Teejay's various-877-20090523

I printed it out as an 8.5″ x 11″ and it looks swell.  I desaturated the background a little to make Max stand out and punched up the red a bit to compensate for  a loss of brilliance on printing.

Teejay also took my favorite shot of the day, catching me in my “aggro-photo” pose that’ll I use as my stock icon for things from now on:

Teejay's various-984-20090523

I think it conveys my theory of photography whereas the photographer should have a warcry, mine being “ROTATE, CROP TO WIDESCREEN, PUNCH UP SATURATION.”  I was mocked for this tendancy in post processing but the new site banner is a result of this.  The picture I’ll giggle at for sometime is this gem:

May 23, 2009-79-Churchville Nature Center

If you blow it up to full screen, Teejay looks a spot like a Faulknerian Idiot Manchild or saying “my feet hurt” and Sam’s preoccupation with his uber-mega-macro-telephoto-portrait-widescreen-pano-lens.  He used it in manual for most of the day resulting in a very nice close up shot of blur.  If Sasquatch ever had a photoshoot, that’s what I’d use.

The day also triggered two Moments of Fatness.

The whole album:

[flickr album=72157618703444396 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

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I held a brunch today and went through about 6 lbs of potatoes, 4 lbs of meat, a dozen eggs, and the equivalent of 4 sticks of butter for 6 people.  This is a bit of an exaggeration as I have sizeable leftovers.  Anyway, most of the butter went into dutch baby bunnies that quickly became called dutch baby butter bunnies as the recipe called for 1/2 a stick a piece.

The start of the recipe is to melt the stick in a skillet and then to dump the batter on top of it.  I think the recipe overstated the need for butter as the bunny wasn’t lifted from the skillet so much as slid from it with about a tablespoon or two of butter puddled in the middle like a confectionary kiddy pool being dropped from a drop deck trailer.  Based on the grunts and groans, everyone had their fill and I wasn’t too enthused about cleaning up so I left the butter soaked pan to rest until after nap time.  I returned and pan had been licked clean based on the tongue marks and the rest of the butter had been absorbed by the pan, nicely seasoning it.  Behold the power of butter.

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SimStapler is quite possibly one of the dumbest applications for the iPhone.  You press the stapler on screen, and it plays an animation of someone using a red swingline stapler.  Every 10 presses, a woman’s voice says “splendid!”  I’ve currently pressed it about 4000 times and everyone who sees it call me an idiot; until they try to see how fast they can use it.

Teejay Green challenged Sam Lodise to a friendly competition of who could get to 50 first.  Teejay got 50 presses in 22.23 seconds where Sam beat him out narrowly at 22.18 seconds.  Teejay had knocked back a few beers at this point and what I assumed was a friendly competition was not: Upon learning of his loss at an utterly pointless game Teejay said the following:  “You cock-sucking mother-fucking Chinese bastard”.

This is why I don’t drink.  In other news, Teejay stated to me that he’d pay me 10 dollars if by 2018 he didn’t have a personal fusion generator in his basement.  With God and the blogosphere as my witness, I will have my 10 dollars.

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A diminutive Lodise and his band of friends got stoned yesterday and I was immediately transported back to 10th grade.  The exception here was while my friends talked about screaming monkey brains and talked to the ground, he told me he’d seen my brain fade to infinity, then taking my Sharpie drew a 3-4-5 triangle on his arm. I wonder if Pythagoras worked the same way.  Anyway, it’s nice to know the person in question is still a nerd even if he’s stoned.

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Sam’s current girlfriend and I talked for 20 minutes with either of us shooting laser beams from our eyes, breathing fire or resorting to 3rd grade insults.  Like a house of cards, no one said anything, for fear of a speck of dust or sun mote destroying the fragile peace.  Danger appeared when I failed to understand the difference between a neurological disorder and a mental disorder.  If we can do it, Israel/Palestine should be a cake walk.

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Sam’s current girlfriend and I talked for 20 minutes with either of us shooting laser beams from our eyes, breathing fire or resorting to 3rd grade insults.  Like a house of cards, no one said anything, for fear of a speck of dust or sun mote destroying the fragile peace.  Danger appeared when I failed to understand the difference between a neurological disorder and a mental disorder.  If we can do it, Israel/Palestine should be a cake walk.