Travels with Rhody

Ever since I moved back to the Boston area I try to make an annual autumn pilgrimage to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, a 178-year-old property that is, to my mind, the most beautiful burying place in the world. It’s really more like a carefully landscaped park that happens to be decorated with lots of weathered stonework. (I like the cemetery’s tagline: “Beautiful, Timeless, and Still Available.” In other words, you don’t have to have lived through the nineteenth century to get in.)

In October 2008 I visited the cemetery on a crisp, cold, bright Sunday after a rainy Saturday, and got lots of gorgeous shots of the foliage, which was still shiny with damp. While the leaves were showing brilliant color, I also used that visit to start experimenting with black and white shots.

Today (Halloween 2009) was a very different kind of day at Mt. Auburn — warm (in the high 60s) and very blustery, with fast-moving clouds in the sky that kept throwing different kinds of shadows. My rechargeable camera batteries were dying, so I didn’t get as many shots as I would have liked with the Canon. But I had my iPhone with me (as always) and used that to get some nice shots, with an emphasis some of the amazing statuary around the park. A few of today’s best shots are below. (Can you tell which of the shots below came from the Canon and which came from the iPhone?) As always, you can click on the images to see larger versions.

After my recent leaf-peeping trips through New England, I’ve got a quite a little collection of cemetery shots going now — here’s my cemetery set on Flickr.