Travels with Rhody

Rhody turns 14 years old today. I’ve had him ever since he was about 12 weeks old, so he’s been pretty much a constant companion during those 14 years—which adds up to almost one-third of my whole life! I couldn’t have asked for a smarter, kinder, more loving dog.
We had a little scare over the [...]

I took my mountain bike out on a ride around San Francisco yesterday, and somewhat unintentionally, I think I wound up tracing much of the route of the San Francisco Marathon. I realized this when I got home and saw from the readings on Everytrail—the GPS trip tracking software I’d been running on my iPhone—that [...]

I was banging away on the computer this afternoon when I heard a noisy, angry bird and looked outside. Atop the telephone pole across the street was a hawk dismembering a feathery corpse. Pestering the hawk was the local mockingbird, who was dive-bombing from various angles. It occurred to me that the hawk was chowing [...]

The truth is that I haven’t used my new Canon Vixia camcorder since I got it in June. Graham was the guy behind the camera all the way across the country for the World Wide Wade Goes West series. But I watched him work the camcorder and edit the videos in Final Cut Pro long [...]

Here I am with a camera that shoots video and a Mac with a perfectly good copy of iMovie on it, and I’ve never learned how to mix a video. Until today. Rhody and I went out on a video safari to Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum this morning, and played “puppy-razzi,” getting a good 15 minutes [...]

I journeyed to Alaska from December 18 to December 30 to spend the Christmas holiday with my family. My brother Jamie, his wife Jen, and their 2-year-old son Kieran (my nifty nephew) live in a beautiful house in the hills outside Fairbanks — which is about as far as Boston as they could live and [...]

I long owned a small set of antique stereo view cards (also called stereograph cards) that once belonged to my grandfather. There were about 18 cards altogether, plus a vintage stereoscope to view them with. But at the International Antiquarian Book Fair in Boston in 2008, I took the fateful step of buying a few [...]

You know how listening to music on a friend’s pricey Bose headphones makes it harder to tolerate your tinny little speakers at home, or watching your favorite show on a high-definition screen spoils you for regular TV? I’m at a moment like that in the way I look at photographs. For the last few weeks, [...]

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 finished converting all of the bracketed photos from my Columbus Day Weekend leaf-peeping trip with my parents into high-dynamic-range (HDR) fusion images. You can view the whole lot in this Flickr photoset. Now I’m experimenting with different ways of presenting the photos. Animoto, a cool New York-based startup, offers an interesting tool for making [...]