At least once a week, I will walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge from at least the City Hall stop (I don't think I can make myself go past Canal Street and remain sane). Sure, the photos I take will be shaky, since I haven't mastered setting the shutter speed on my (recently acquired) digital camera, there are cars rumbling beneath, and, for now at least, it's fucking freezing without gloves. But it's one of the few places to be thoroughly in the city without a full-blown crowd around, and with proper timing, I'm there as the sky changes colors. Even on rather crappy weather days, as below, it's beautiful and keeps the psychosis at bay.

Though my previous entry is dated the 13th, the photos were taken walking home on the 11th. Thus my walking over the bridge today constitutes adherence to my recently announced policy; I'm good until at least next Friday. Considering the sad fate of other resolutions I have made--I will only read books that challenge me! I will be a better correspondent! I will not plot coups!--this is remarkable progress indeed.

Fewer photos, though, and only one worth posting. It was cold, dammit.

Pardon the ripped-off Adrienne Kennedy quotation. Especially since its only applicability is that all of the photos I took on today's Brooklyn Bridge walk were black and white compositions.

We've got yer basic moon through the cables shot:

And yer folks walking over the bridge with Brooklyn behind them and the Manhattan Bridge to the north:

Aaaaand we've got the first album cover for The Adairdevils. (Album forthcoming once musical talent attained.)

Ah, the moon over Brooklyn. It is like the moon over any other place--beautiful--only you can't get a photo of it without cars wrecking the shot. It continues to surprise me how much I edit out of my perception when I'm looking without a camera; I know the cars are there, of course, but I see the brownstones, trees, and moon. Put a lens on it and BAM! It's crapass Corollas for miles.

Anyway, following DeGraw from Fourth to Fifth Aves. on my way home Friday, I made a valiant, traffic-defying attempt to capture the lovely evening.

Mixed results.

. . . of ways to take photos of the same place without taking the same photo. Good thing I hit this week's walk around sunset instead of when it was already dark.

This had the added benefit of getting me home in time to see the contestants on America's Next Top Model lose their shit after erroneously assuming that one woman's rash was--what else?--flesh-eating, pneumonia-causing bacteria. That was some great TV. Thank you, Tyra Banks. May you go from strength to strength.

Anyway, before I settled down to bask in ANTM's awesomeness, I did my weekly walk home over the bridge. Stay tuned for next week, when my increasingly desperate bids for photo variation will probably have me taking photos of angry, oncoming cyclists in the bike lane.

My personal assignment to see the same thing in different ways continues. (So I am ignoring the suggestion that Monkey Pants, aka my sister, made in comment to my previous entry. But not out of spite.) Bless Daylight Savings for making it easier.

Also, Veronica Mars was awesome last night.

I never did edit the photos for last week's walk, and may never get around to it now. But dammit, I went! And then the next day I went to the Bronx Zoo and photographed penguins and primates . . . and I haven't edited those either. Someday.

In the meantime, I did get back on track a bit by doing the bridge walk yesterday. A lovely evening, a full moon, and only one cyclist running into me in the pedestrian lane. It only hurts a little, but was not the best mood leavener; were it not for him, I probably would not have found myself yelling, "You have a red, douchebag!" later that evening at a motorist who failed to respect my crosswalk rights.

Anyway. I like my photos this week. I'm even making one of 'em BIG.

Haven't blogged in a long time, mostly 'cause when it takes about three hours a day to summon the will to live, there just isn't any time left over for self-absorbed Internet rambling.

But I did some real rambling in the snow today, and it was fun. Click the dog for more:

I've gone over the bridge a number of times in the last year, but haven't done the dedicated photowalking/blogging. As part of a larger "yes, everything went to hell last year, but so goddamn what" campaign, the copious photographing resumes.

Yesterday's tack: underexposing to bring color to a blah, washed out sky.

My cameraphone, while possessed of some reasonable limitations, is startlingly good for, you know, a bonus feature on a cellphone.

For fun times with the W600's panoramic mode, see below. Some images I intensified in Photoshop, but all images were stitched together by the camera, not on the computer (hence some imperfections). I also didn't do more than one effect on any image. And all of these are half-size.

Pretty damn cool.

Unfiltered images:

The full spectacularrrr:

True story.

But I should still remember to take my digicam or SLR around with me. This is getting ridiculous.

Pics from yesterday's walk through Prospect Park.

The lake.

One of the bigass trees by the Long Meadow.

Quite the revelation, I know.

Anyway, what was meant to be a quick stroll through Prospect Park turned out to be a very long photo session. Because all of the following things are wrong with me:

-- I can't just see a duck. I have to look for its duck and geese friends!
-- If I have a camera, I have to photograph all of them
-- When near a lake, i have to take photos every three feet as the vista changes
-- Similarly, during a sunset, I have to take photos every 45 seconds as the light changes
-- If the moon is out, I have to shoot it in every damn segment of the frame
-- If the moon is out amongst trees . . . oh, forget it, I go on forever
-- Like most photo nerds, I bracket my exposures
-- Unlike many photo nerds, I also go beyond bracketing and just screw around with exposures to see what I can make appear from seemingly drab subjects

Well, this walk through the park was basically the perfect storm of my photo spasticity. Ducks! A lake! Sunset! A moon visible before and after! I'm lucky to have emerged without smoke coming out of the lens.

The very much culled results can be found by clicking on one of the ducks below:

I did a rather spur-of-the-moment walk over the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, and then just kinda kept going until I was most of the way home.

Pluses:
--There were flood lights on at South Street and at the base on the Brooklyn side, so the whole thing looked different than usual
--It was freezing (literally) so there weren't many people out
--I walked 4.5 miles!

Minuses:
--That 4.5 miles was in improper footwear.
--I left my digital camera in my friend's car on NYE, and I keep forgetting to get it back, so I only had my cell phone's camera to snap away with. All that dramatic lighting went to waste!

Results, such as they are:

Strange shadows on the first tower:

Lights between the two towers:

Being a strange shadow on the second tower. I love my hat:

Twofold joy!

1. I finally took a picture of my favorite Brooklyn storefront: Bad Apple Bail Bonds.

Why do I love it so?
a. The presumption of guilt in the name. It's such an awesome way of attracting clients. "Yeah, asshole, we know you did it, and we don't care. Just sign here."
b. The worm in the apple is wearing striped prison garb and an olde tyme prison hat!!!

2. I was racing racing racing for the F train this morning--you enter my subway station by a ramp, go through turnstiles, then straight down stairs, so you can hear the train coming a good ways away--and despite my best efforts and speediest MetroCard swipe I heard the telltale chime of defeat as I was still descending the stairs to the platform. BUT! But but but! For no reason other than pure kindness, a fellow passenger stood in the doorway of the train as the doors closed so that I could squeeze past him and make the train. Oh, it was only a few seconds, but it made all the difference.

Because it was an F train, and who knows when the next one is coming.

And because it was an F train, and I had become convinced that its ineffable crappiness had made Machiavellian monsters out of all of us forced to rely upon it.

Oh, Subway Hero, you have restored a small bit of my faith in humanity. I have no choice; I must quote Lyle Lovett: I love everybody, especially you.

Because moonlight and the beginning of Spring are not to be wasted.

More pics if you click.

in inappropriate footwear, as is my wont.

As ever, click for more.

On the one hand, I find the rampant Anglophilia of those who built up and labeled Kensington and Flatbush (particularly Victorian Flatbush) rather off-putting. Street names such as Westminster, Argyle, and Marlborough make me itch, especially since it's not as though these were colonials settling the neighborhood.

On the other hand, the steadfastly unbadass graffiti of the neighborhood's lone active tagger leaves much to be desired as a system of nomenclature. Witness his rechristening of one street:

I don't really know what to make of this one--was he molested at nine? Why would this be the way he unburdened his soul? Is "molested at nine" instead some kind of motto? Does he perhaps merely mean that the signal was tagged at 9 pm?--but I do know it's not an improvement over the desperation for Britishness marking the earlier era. I mean, set aside how boneheadedly awful his nom de spraypaint is. His lettering isn't even good. That C is ridiculous!

Surely there's a middle ground between naked class envy and the inartistic scrawls of 14-year-old boys?

I'll stop bitching now. It's this constant not-quiteness that has, after all, endeared Kensington to me. It's also what's kept it in my rent range. So keep on, spazzy early teen boy, keep on.