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Built in 1888, the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, NJ was the place to be. A hundred rides and the white sands of the Atlantic Ocean were the height of entertainment. After a century, it grinded to a halt and closed in 1988, and the painted horses were sold off in an auction. The old building that served as its home is still standing and is a cornerstone of the rebuilt Asbury Park waterfront.
Witte's Marine Salvage in Staten Island was the home of scuttled and abandoned ships as the owner sold off the components under contract. When he passed away in 1980 there were about 400 rotting hulls at dock, and that's been reduced to about 200 now through salvage. Unless you're in a kayak, it's not possible to see more than a tiny fragment of this place - just 6 ships out of the hundreds of hulks. This is one of the six visible at low tide just off of highway 440 on Arthur Kill Road.
An abandoned farm is slowly disintegrating just off the bike path in Marlboro, New Jersey. Somehow these wrecks still seem to speak about their former livelihood. This sits just across the stream from the land that is rumored to have been the eerie Marlboro Slaughterhouse. A farm haunted by its former owner who's farm is said to have been appropriated by the nearby mental hospital, causing him to become a patient and then a stalking escapee.
The city of Cleveland stands along the Cuyahauga River in northern Ohio (yeah, the river that caught fire). The suburbs begin near the edge of the river's valley and continue on through the high ground above the valley. One the east side where I grew up many of the suburban villages carry the surname "Heights": Cleveland Heights, University Heights, Highland Heights, Euclid Heights, etc. Little houses along little streets. That's one of the things my memory connects with Cleveland. True, Jefferson sits in the flight path of the airport on the west side, but this photo of that suburb still reminds me of home.
The Chagrin River slices through the "heights" roughly marking the end of the Cleveland area. Looking at a map of the city, you'll see it surrounded by parks - the "emerald necklace". The east side parks line the banks of the Chagrin. Chagrin Falls sits in the center of the city bearing its name that was founded roughly 40 years after the city of Cleveland that's about 20 miles to the northwest. As a cyclist, diving down the hills to the Chagrin valley is the start of my fun early morning rides when I return to visit family.
I have glowing memories of the days we spent at Lake Erie beaches. Gentle waves, long shallow beaches, and building sandcastles. Sure, the occasional dead fish line the recesses of my brain. But as a kid this wasn't a big deal. It wasn't nearly as important as the sun and the sand.
Costa Rica's sparsely populated Osa Peninsula isn't a typical tourist destination. Dangling out in the Pacific ocean shielding Golfo Dulce (Sweet Bay), this remote spit of land is teaming with wildlife. This photo shows what may be the lights of Puerto Pilon across the Bay. We were staying at Lapa Rios - a vacation lodge that offers nature hikes & expeditions daily. We flew, of course, into San Jose,took a small prop plane to Puerto Jimenez's one runway airport, and then bumped along in a small jeep along a dirt road to get there.
We were in New York for a wedding and had a room on the 15th floor of a hotel. The view isn't architecturally inspiring. We were surrounded by apartment buildings. The lack of information within this scene creates dozens of storylines for me.
I have no idea how anyone who lives in the Denver area gets any work done. The wonder of the Rockies are tirelessly distracting. I was out there for some business meetings, and I snapped this from the parking garage. How I made it into the building after this is beyond me. This is a photo of Rocky Mountain National Park from something like 60 miles away. The tall mountain is Longs Peak, and it's something like 2.5 miles (4.2Km) tall. OK, so the thing in the upper right is a bit further and still captivating too ... about 240,000 miles. Somewhere between the scene up front and the Front Range hills in the middle is the city of Boulder, Colorado.
Sure Manhattan never sleeps, but it comes alive in unique ways for special events.
Viewing the Macys Thanksgivingday Parade begins the night before uptown by the Museum of Natural History. Just outside the 10 story planetarium, half-filled vinyl carcasses line the street held down by infinite rope webs. Packd back-to-front, kids and their handlers slowly crawl past these unnatural creations. The next day the balloons each make their way several miles through manhattan pinned down just barely by tiny humans While not a huge floating ballon, here at about 50th street the Hooters Owl confronts a NYC cop.
The winter that the "The Gates" were going to take over Central Park, it was also the last winter that the famous Plaza Hotel was open. So a year ahead of time, we reserved a park-view room at the Plaza for Valentines Day. Expensive, of course. But it was the last time we'd ever be able to do it.
We had no intention of watching the St.Patrick's Day Parade in New York. We had family visiting us, so we took a day to visit some of the museums. We were just lucky to have caught the parade. See the snow across the road? I had never realized that these dudes in kilts were marching in winter weather. No wonder they need to warm up in the bars afterwards. And sometimes before.
As a country nestling around the delta of the Ganges River, "Bangladesh Waters" is practically a redundant term.
The Buriganga river flowing through capital city Dhaka once was a part of the meandering Ganges river system but was cut off ages ago. Today Dhaka remains a port city and water transportation is central to the community. Here near Fort Lalbagh, dozens of huge ferries like the one tied to the Ovalaush line the river waiting to take passengers throughout the
country.
The largest port in the mainland, Mongla, is around 150km south of the capital city. Ships tie up in the middle of the Mongla River shortly above where it merges with the Passur. It's humbling to observe that this is all part of the mighty Ganges river delta. Here the smallish shipping frigate the Parsha was being unloaded onto several smaller transports while a local ferry was passing by.
It's hard to digest that should oceans rise from global warming, much of Bangladesh will be transformed. Here in the Bay of Bengal, life goes on as it has for centuries with fishing as one of the main industries. Of course, fishing will continue here, but if oceans do indeed rise, wading alongside the fishingboat may not be possible.
It's easy to take water crossings for granted. We zip across bridges without much consideration for life before these bridges were built. Here near where I live, for example, one of the biggest Revolutionary War battles was fought in part around a crossing over the world's tiniest stream. Tiny or not, the little brook inhibited the rapid movement of an army that needed to drag along cannons that could itself weigh more than a small modern truck (1500kg - 3400Lbs).
Regensburg was the Bavarian Capital for 700 years or so, and for much of that time was just a port city. In 1147 the merchants funded the building of a bridge. And Regensburg soon became the capital of commerce as it was the most convenient way to bring goods into central Europe. As a convenient and secure route across the northernmost spot on the Danube, the one bridge transformed the city.
The Charles River in Boston was forded only by a Harvard-owned Ferry service until 1785 when the first bridge was built near this spot. Today it takes less than a minute to hop across the Charles River basin on one of several bridges. Up until about the 1900s when a dam was built near this Charlestown bridge, the Charles basin in Boston was a lot less picturesque than it is today - it was sort a meandering mudflat.
A canal runs along the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River down to New Hope and was the primary path for shipping coal out of the Catskills. Across from New Hope in Lambertville NJ a canal allowed for calm water shipping to take these barges on to Port Jervis New York and ultimately over to Manhattan. At New Hope (on the left side of the photo below) the canal barges forded the river with help of a cable system helped the calm waters formed by the dam just below New Hope (the dam in the photo below is just above the ripple current). OK, so this isn't about a physical bridge, but I found this so cool, I just had to mention it here.
The norther Danube served as a border between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes. But the river served many purposes other than as a fortification. Here, briefly, are some observations as we traveled along the Danube from Bavaria, through Austria, Slovakia, and ending in Budapest, Hungary.
South of Vienna, the Danube once again winds its way through the steep walls of a valley - the picturesque Wachau Valley . Castle Schönbühel ("beautiful hill") - first built about 900 years ago - guards the east end of the Wachau Valley. This is a privately owned castle. Nice house, eh? Austria's Wachau Valley offers storybook scenery with steep terraced hills and castles lining the banks of the Danube before it enters Slovakia and then turns south towards Budapest.
The Hungarian Parliament building finished in 1904 presides over the Pest side of the river in what is arguably one of the most glamorous waterfronts on the Danube. Of course, this gothic revival building - one of the biggest parliamentary buildings in the world - wasn't fully used after World War II when they no longer had two representative houses in the communist era.
I had the same commute for years. I meandered just about 16 miles each way along back country roads - a couple thousand times, by my estimation. And my camera came with me the last few hundred journeys.
But nothing is forever. The company relocated, and I have a different commute to learn.
Meanwhile, I was lucky my new hobby developed while I was so familiar with the scenes along these roads. Since I rode my bike about 10% the time year round, I had the chance to really get to know it and admire it. Sometimes the smallest thing caught my attention: the way the light hit the pond in the morning. The lines of a plowed field. And the way the sky danced behind "my tree".
Well, it isn't actually *my* tree. It belongs to some farmer, I suppose. But I adopted it. And each time I went past was an opportunity to see it in a different light.
The first photo above is offered as part of a charity auction. Offer to donate to Haiti relief, and I'll print the photo and send it to the highest bidder.
Sometimes it takes a while to understand what's wonderful about an image and to figure out how to make that come through. Here's a recent flickr posting, for example. It's a photo I've had hanging around for over 9 months.
But it didn't start out looking this way. I had been down at the 'Squan Reservoir one morning last spring taking photos of the sunrise. And, of course, it was obligatory to have the sun in the photo. While I knew that that huge bright object took attention away from what was wonderful - the trees - it took me a long time to figure out what the crop should be. And then, once I cropped it, the image had all kinds of digital artifacts hanging around ... it generated a lot of little rectangles and odd lines that were distracting. So I had to learn how to crop it, yet keep the image looking like a real photo. Plus there was also a bit of post-processing of the lighting in order to make sure that the trees showed up well against the background.
While traveling to Denver, I snapped a scene while flying at several hundred miles an hour out my airplane window, and I had no idea where I was. I posted it on flickr, and the photo was spotted by a person with an amazing world view. Somehow using Google Earth they pinpointed exactly where it was. Amazing. Try it yourself - it's really hard to do. 
But this wasn't the only one. Notsogreen had done this for another of my random 'from above' photos. According to them, this fascinating valley is from Raven Ridge, Colorado.
Built during the Depression by a local Turpentine magnate, there are about a dozen of these cabins sprinkled around the little town of Shiloh, Florida (which no longer exists). All from one farm. These shacks are no longer occupied, but you can tell they're being maintained. These huge trees seem to be playing a part in sheltering them.
Florida's natural wealth of pine trees led to its dominance in Turpentine production sourcing 65% of this product in the early 1900s. Huge swaths of land were dedicated to slashing trees to feed family stills with each still requiring about 4 square miles (several thousand acres) of trees.
