02Pete

Boston is working on a long-term project to restore the Muddy River in the Fens, the urban freshwater wetlands which support a variety of wildlife in the middle of downtown Boston.

Shortly after this photo was taken, this family of gees crossed the street: one adult in the lead, the goslings strung out in single file, all in line, and the other adult bringing up the rear.  All of the cars stopped until the adult in the rear reached the other side.  The photographer was too struck with the sight to even try taking a picture of that.

Daytime shot of sign over Shell gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.  At night, this sign is illuminated and can be seen from a long way off.

Students studying for final examinations in the Main Reading Room of the Boston Public Library on Memorial Day weekend, 2013.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Memorial Day weekend, 2013.

Sidewalk memorial to victims of Boston Marathon bombing, 2013.

Boston Memorial Run, held on Memorial Day 2013.

Memorial display on Boston Commons, Memorial Day weekend, 2013.  Each flag represents an American from Massachusetts who died in one of America's wars.  There were far more flags than shown in this photo -- this is just a small part of the display.

This memorial to the Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry, 1861-1865, is one of two guarding the main staircase in the Boston Pulic Library.  Note the list of actions in which this unit fought:  Ball's Bluff, Fair Oaks, Glendale, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Marye's Heights, Gettysburg, Bristol Station, The Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Appomatox Court House.  Since this unit was active from the beginning to the end of the Civil War, and fought in some of that War's bloodiest battles, it appears likely that few if any of the unit's original members survived to the end of the War.  This was just one unit's part in the human cost of saving the United States from armed treason.

A portrait engaging by reason of the inner qualities revealed in the face of the person portrayed, rather than by reason of makeup or Photoshopping.  The impression left is not one of an image artificially enhanced to comply with some perceived ideal, but rather of a person who would be very interesting to know.  Congratulations -- this is an excellent portrait, both technically and aesthetically. 

I like this portrait quite a bit.  The calm, level gaze of the subject; reliance upon the subject's quiet personal dignity rather than overstated makeup or provocative attire to draw the viewer's interest; the even lighting from open shade; the use of shallow depth of field to direct interest to the subject; and the use of the leaves to frame and add a greater sense of depth to the image, all make this an exceptional portrait which manages simultaneously to respect the subject and present her to best advantage.

I have only two minor quibbles.  One is that, probably due to the very even lighting, the catchlights in the pupils of the eyes are sufficiently subdued to be difficult to see without close inspection, which detracts slightly from the vitality of the subject's gaze.  The other is that the subject is laterally centered almost exactly in the middle of the image, so that there is no imbalance between the space on either side of her which would tend to draw the viewer in.  I do not consider either of these comments, however, to detract significantly from my view of this as a portrait of very high quality.

I could be wrong, but I tend to suspect that the subject is not a stranger, and that the photographer may be well acquainted with her.  It is not easy to produce a portrait such as this without a certain level of trust and emotional connection between photographer and subject, something which can be sensed in the result.

Truly an excellent portrait.

My father's first cousin was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force who flew 35 missions over Germany and occupied Europe.  Thanks for posting this.  It's good to know that there's a B-17 still airborne over the UK.

Nice shot of what appears to be a DeHavilland Twin Otter on the base leg of an approach.  The person and railing provide a clear sense of how close the aircraft was when you took the picture.

Very nice. The composition, exposure, use of terrain for framing, silhouetting -- it all comes together. The time you spent waiting for this one was not wasted.

You have an eye for dramatic natural lighting, based both on this photo and on others in your portfolio. Thanks for sharing this picture with us. It looks simple, but there is a lot going on within it -- the cypress tree standing on its own as the main vertical element in a picture full of horizontals, the contrast between the dark plowed earth and the lighter grassy or planted areas, the line of the ridge almost disappearing in the mist, the alternating light and shadow in the low-lying layer of clouds, the middle cloud layer slanting in a different direction from the lower one.

Alex -- Very nice shot. How did you mount the camera? Which aircraft are those, a Blanik being towed by a Wilga? Looks like maybe 2,500 to 3,000 feet AGL (+/- 1,000 meters) of altitude, getting pretty close to cloudbase and release altitude. Also looks as though it might be pushing the VFR minimums for altitude below cloudbase under US FARs, although I don't know what the rules are if you're flying in Europe.

Good composition, lighting and texture -- a well done, effective portrait.

Interesting available-light image. Successfully conveys the involvement of the musician in the music. Both the timing and the exposure are just right. A few quibbles -- not sure why a horizontal rather than vertical image; why the image cuts off the lower half of the body of the bass, when there's some extra space above the musician's head; or what the microphone and stand contribute. That's being too fussy, though. It's a good picture.

This picture conveys, very well, that wars involve organized madness in which there is little for either victor or vanquished but heartache and lasting sorrow.

 

The verse "If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home" is a modernized version of a parody of a common childrens' prayer that first became common with Union soldiers during the Civil War. The original version, reflecting the experience of infantry in the field, went as follows: "Now I lay me down to sleep / In mud that's many fathoms deep / If I'm not here when you awake / Just fish me up with an oyster rake."

 

This picture may have been taken at Arlington National Cemetery. Those buried there include casualties from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. Judging from their uniformity and general appearance, the headstones in this picture may date from the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, Arlington was owned by relatives of Robert E. Lee, a graduate of West Point who resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederacy. During the War, Union commanders confiscated Arlington and ordered that it be used as a military graveyard, so that Robert E. Lee would never be able to forget what he and his Confederate comrades had done to America and Americans. By the time that War was over, the Union and the Confederacy had suffered a combined total of approximately 900,000 military casualties, at a time when the total combined population of the United States and the Confederacy was approximately 35 million.

 

After that War was over, people on both sides began placing flowers on the graves of those who had been killed; some stories have that tradition starting in the South, others in the North. In 1868, General John Logan, the national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the national organization of Union veterans, officially proclaimed May 30, 1868 as a Memorial Day to decorate the graves of combat casualties at Arlington Cemetery with flowers. New York State, which had lost many troops in the War, officially recognized that date as a state holiday commemorating the Civil War in 1873, and all of the former Union states recognized it as a holiday by 1890. Southern states did not recognize May 30 as a holiday until after World War I, when the holiday was changed from a Civil War holiday to one honoring U.S. casualties in all wars. Eight southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas) still have legal state holidays, on dates other than May 30, commemorating Confederate casualties of the Civil War.

 

The Christmas wreaths at Arlington are not placed there by the U.S. Army, or by cemetery staff. They are placed by volunteers who bring them down by truck from the State of Maine. If you ever wonder why people would bother driving all the way down from Maine just to place wreaths on old graves, the explanation might possibly have something to do with how the troops of the 20th Maine Infantry conducted themselves during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, after the Confederate Army invaded Pennsylvania, trying to cut Washington, D.C. off from the rest of the Union. When a Confederate force tried to turn the flank of the Union line, the 20th Maine, a relatively small unit, was sent to defend the end of the line on a small hill named Little Round Top. The unit held its position despite suffering heavy casualties from repeated attacks by larger Confederate units from Alabama and Texas. When the unit finally ran out of ammunition while under attack, its commander, a former school teacher named Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, ordered those left standing to fix bayonets and charge, taking the attackers by surprise. This protected the Union line from collapsing, and allowed sufficient time for reinforcements from other units to shore up the Union position. Subsequent Confederate attacks on the Union line failed with extraordinarily heavy losses. When the battle was over, the combined casualties from four days of fighting totaled roughly 48,000, including 3,155 Union dead, roughly 20,000 other Union casualties, between 2,600 and 4,500 Confederate dead, and more than 20,000 other Confederate casualties. The Confederate Army retreated south from Pennsylvania, never again seriously threatening to invade the Union. Many in the 20th Maine, however, for whom that fight was quite literally "the end of the line," did not survive to know that they had played a key role in saving the Union. One can understand why people from Maine might still consider it worth decorating graves at Arlington.

Since the light is coming from the west, from the New Jersey side of the Hudson, and has a warm cast, you probably took the photo in the late afternoon, shortly before sunset. A photo like this isn't about composition or exposure, though. You can't re-shoot the picture, and I can't be objective about offering a critique, so this isn?t a discussion about technique. It?s a discussion about memory.

Some years ago, when I was in school, I worked afternoons a couple of days a week in an office on the 44th floor on the east side of the South Tower. They gave me at a desk by a window, which made it a bit difficult to concentrate at times. If I looked up from my work, the Brooklyn Bridge sat framed between other, shorter buildings. It was quite a view. I still remember the steps up from the Cortlandt Street subway station, the Zaro's in the Concourse, the lobbies with the windows that were pointed at the upper ends, the big express elevators, the view of the Statue of Liberty and the Harbor from the south side. If I close my eyes, I can still see those things.

After I got out of school and moved up to Albany, the agency I worked for had its regional office in the North Tower. Every so often I'd have to get up early, take the Amtrak redeye out of Rensselaer, and go down there for meetings. In the early 90s, in an effort to balance the State budget, the Port Authority moved most of the government agencies out of there to make room for commercial tenants that paid higher rents. One of our units was a consultative body that also involved City agencies, though, so it stayed there.

There were 50 people on the staff of that unit at work on the 83rd floor of the North Tower on the morning of 9/11. One of them was a member of the tenant safety organization - just a desk worker with a badge who had volunteered to help out with fire drills. When he went out in the hall after the impact, it was already full of smoke, he didn't have a mask, and the closest fire stairway was blocked by debris. He found another fire stairway farther away that was still passable, though. He led his coworkers by the wrist through the smoke to the stairs, and got them started walking downward. They kept moving, but it took them a while to walk down 83 flights of stairs. When they got to the bottom, there was a firefighter holding the door open at the bottom, urging them to keep moving and leave the building as quickly as possible. Many of them were only a block or two away when the tower came down, with the firefighter still at the door inside.

It took a couple of days to sort out afterward, but it turned out that 47 out of the 50 members of that unit, including the evacuation volunteer, had made it out alive. I worked on survivors' benefits for the families of the three who didn't. One of them was a man I knew, who left behind a wife, a five year old son and a three year old daughter. I ended up testifying before the special master of the federal Victims' Compensation Fund in a hearing on their benefits.

After being housed in temporary space, the unit finally found new office space in Manhattan. The evacuation volunteer still goes to work for that unit every day. Every so often, I exchange e-mails with him when our jobs involve working on the same project.

I'm nobody special, and I didn't do anything special. I'm just somebody who worked 150 miles away and wasn't there that day. I still remember the view out the window, though.

I'm no great fan of the current administration's handling of diplomatic, military or intelligence matters, or of law enforcement. They aren't the people who planned the 9/11 attack, though. A number of the people who did plan it are still free, and still planning future attacks. Sooner or later they're going to carry out another attack, and the next one may be worse. We need to prepare for that day, and we need to think harder about what policies we can all agree on and support, instead of allowing people who hate us to divide our society.

If you think that such things are not your problem, you might want to take a moment to look at the view out your window.

I suppose all this just goes to show that the content of an image is not just in the image itself, but also in the mind of the viewer. If you who are reading my comment look at this picture, you won't see the same things that I do. If you look at it closely, though, you may see some of them.

Nice shot of the boys -- and of the Blanik and clouds. Must have been one of the last flights of the day.

Thanks for your response, and I am glad that the arrangements for this were appropriate. Those of us who hang around airplanes tend to be fairly safety-conscious. For the most part, flying has a good safety record, but that is because instructors train pilots to focus on safety in all aspects of flight operations, and not because flying is an inherently safe activity. While much of this is technical in nature, some of it involves personal attitude. Some of the more traditional catch-phrases drummed into flight students:

-- "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

-- "The pilot in command is always the first to arrive upon the scene of an accident."

-- " A midair collision can ruin your whole day."

My first flight instructor, when I was a teenager more years ago than I care to remember, was a gruff and grizzled older man, Mr. Madison, whom just about everyone around the airport referred to as "Pappy." On the landing at the end of one instructional flight, I misjudged the flare on my final approach, leveled off a bit high, and ran out of flying speed while still several feet in the air, coming down with a bone-jarring thump that fortunately did not damage either the airframe or the aircrew. As Pappy sometimes reacted with profanity to errors during flight maneuvers, I awaited his reaction with trepidation. All that he said, quietly and mildly, was: "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." Then he opened the canopy, climbed out, and walked away, leaving me to push the sailplane back to the flight line by myself. I thought that what he said involved a certain degree of humor, and repeated it to the manager of the small airport when I got back to the office. The manager, a highly skilled pilot himself, simply gave me a level gaze and said, with no particular inflection in his voice: "He meant it. He was a US Army Air Corps flight instructor during the War, and not all of his students survived their first solos." After that, I paid very close attention to everything that Pappy told me. His good training is at least partly responsible for the fact that I have managed to reach middle age without damaging any aircraft.

As for wartime aircrew, my father's late cousin, William Guldner, had been one of those kids who hung over the fence of the local airport, thinking that flying looked adventurous and glamorous. On his 35th and final mission over Germany, he was lined up flying straight and level on the final run in to drop ordnance on the target when flak struck the B-17 directly in front of his in the formation. The flak burst hit the aircraft directly in its bomb bay, before it could release its weapons. There was an enormous explosion, and then his plane flew directly through the remains of the aircraft in front of it, with small pieces of wreckage banging off the fuselage and wings. There wasn't anything left of the aircraft or aircrew large enough to have a real collision with. While he had once loved flying, and had brought his crew home safe from 35 missions, Bill refused ever to set foot in an aircraft again after he came home from the War. Instead, he got himself a much safer, quieter job. He became a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, the LAPD, and held that job for many years before retiring and becoming a private detective. He died the way every good pilot should die -- in bed, of old age.

I enjoyed seeing your sequence of photos. The aviation museum at Duxford is first-rate, and I was glad to have the opportunity to visit there. I'm licensed to fly sailplanes, my father was a US Navy officer who landed British troops on Gold Beach during D-Day (I note the invasion markings on the wings of the P-51 you photographed), and his late cousin was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force who flew 35 missions over Europe, most of them over Germany. It's good to know that people in the UK still remember the American aviators, soldiers and sailors that came to their defense during the War. I trust that you had advance permission from the Duxford authorities, however, and also made specific arrangements with the pilot of this P-51, before positioning yourself in the location where you took these pictures. I also hope that anyone who decides to emulate your photo sequence takes care to make such arrangements. I don't mean to be a killjoy, but mention the following in the interests of safety. If the details were worked out in advance, this could be done safely; but if not, this could be quite hazardous to both the photographer and the pilot. Even with a high-performance aircraft such as a P-51, the take-off roll, point of liftoff and rate of climb can be affected by temperature, humidity, fuel load, flap settings, and pilot technique. With a tail-dragger such as a P-51, forward visibility is also limited by the tail-down attitude of the aircraft prior to liftoff, and by the long nose in front of the cockpit. One would not want to be located at a vantage point in the middle of an aircraft's takeoff path on a hot, humid day without the pilot knowing in advance. Suddenly seeing an unexpected obstacle ahead might startle the pilot at a moment when concentration was required for safe operation. Due both to the high torque of the 1,520-hp Merlin Mk 29 engine in a P-51C, and to the large diameter of its propeller, the P-51 has a reputation for being a challenge to handle on takeoff. That big four-bladed prop, with all that horsepower driving it, would also make a very efficient salami slicer if the pilot hadn't gained sufficient altitude by the time the aircraft reached the photographer's location. That said, it's a great photo sequence, I enjoyed seeing it, and I hope you had fun taking it as well.

The lighting and exposure are good, as is the basic concept of the photo. My only suggestion would be to consider how the composition might look if the camera were moved slightly up or down, left or right, or both at the same time, so that the leaf was in one of the four quadrants (upper left, lower left, upper right or lower right) rather than squarely in the middle of the image.

No filters, and no manipulation -- just in the right place when the

light was there. Comments?