Travels with Rhody

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 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 [...]