Travels with Rhody

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 [...]

Believe it or not, I have friends who come to this blog to find out what Rhody’s been up to, not me. I guess I provoked that situation by calling the blog “Travels with Rhody.” And the truth that for as long as I’ve had a personal blog—and TWR goes back to 2004 now, though [...]

I’d hoped to get out to World’s End yesterday, but didn’t have time. Instead I grabbed my camera and headed out on a walk around the South End, with the goal of taking some auto-bracketed pictures that I could use for my first experiments with high dynamic range (HDR) photography.
I’d read about Photomatix, a program [...]

Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis is known for his arresting, color-saturated images of people in motion—skiing, swimming, somersaulting. He’s also known for (literally) trademarking the phrase “the best camera is the one you have with you.” His point is that you don’t an expensive SLR to take great pictures. You can do a lot with [...]

I love September. There’s a back-to-school crispness in the air that always gets me jazzed to learn something new, even though I’ve been out of school for 15 years. Maybe you feel it too. And with a long holiday weekend coming up, perhaps you’ve got a few hours free to experiment with a new tool [...]