Travels with Rhody

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 [...]

I spent the Columbus Day weekend traveling through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine with my parents. It was a classic leaf-peeping tour, proceeding counterclockwise from Boston to Killington, VT, to St. Johnsbury, VT, to Bethel, ME, via lots of back roads and scenic byways. The weather was overcast and drizzly on Friday and part of [...]

My friend Brad King, a journalism professor at Ball State University, makes fun of me for being such a Web and gadget geek while at the same time shunning social networking tools like Facebook. He’s got a point. I’ve written a lot about Facebook, MySpace, and their predecessors, but I’ve never wholeheartedly joined in, the [...]