Posted by Ted on Jan 6, 2012 in
Burning Man,
Photography 2012 is all about new beginnings and our craziest adventure yet; parenthood.
If you follow my work, you know that I love sunsets. Who doesn’t? But what I find even more special are sunrises. Not being a morning person, I see a lot fewer of the sun emerging out of night than I do of night overtaking the day.
The photo below was taken at 5:30 on a June morning in 2006, on the Atlantic shore of Rockport, Maine, boats gently pitching with light waves.
Maine Morning
I had been in Rockport taking an intensive week-long photography course at the Maine Workshops. That inspiring week was a turning point in my photography career. It was that week that I went from a default of ‘auto’ to ‘manual’, and I started to see shapes and colors and macro photography in new ways. One of many transformative experiences in my life.
Quite a few of those experiences have happened at or because of Burning Man. It is a place of strange and wonderful beauty, and which gives one innumerable chances to explore their personal boundaries. Many years, the only sunrises I see are at Burning Man. Below is a photo of my playa-covered Doc Martens, taken a few months later than the Maine picture, as my Lily and I are lounging in a cupcake out by the trash fence.
Playa Sunrise
(Related photos of Rockport, Maine can be found here.)
(Related photos of Burning Man 2006 can be found here.)
Tags: Maine, parenthood, sunrises
Posted by Ted on Dec 9, 2011 in
Food & Drinks,
Photography,
Travel This week’s entries come to you from the village of Colnbrook, just outside of Heathrow Airport. I find myself in this unlikely place due to a last minute trip to kick off a new job that I started on Monday as a developer advocate for the newly launched Travelport Developer Network. Feeling trapped by the manicured comfort of my hotel, I needed to get out. Knowing that a trip to Central London wasn’t feasible, I settled for exploring the nearby town, stopping in at The Ostrich, which just happens to be England’s 3rd oldest pub.
As I savoured my Guinness, I read a pamphlet which detailed the history of the inn, dating back to the year 1106. Before there were trains, there were stage-coaches, which gave rise to an industry of coaching inns. The Ostrich was a popular stop for travelers from London on their way to see the king at Windsor Castle, where they might swap horses and change out of their riding clothes and into more formal wear.
Of particular notoriety was a 17th century proprietor named Jarman. He and his wife built an elaborate trap door in the room above the kitchen and would drop unsuspecting lone riders with large purses into a boiling cauldron in the middle of the night.
Business travel is rarely glamorous. When one isn’t working, it can be all too easy to relax into the comfort of expense-paid 4 star hotel luxury. However, one just has to walk out the door and be open to finding a little adventure.
Tags: England, history, London, pubs, signs
Posted by Ted on Nov 25, 2011 in
Photography We spent last Thanksgiving in our guest house in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Just NW of the moat, WaLai House was a great place to spend a few weeks as Liz took classes in Thai Massage and I biked around town and the countryside. Largely in our honor, the two proprietresses of WaLai, who enjoy any excuse to celebrate, decided to throw a Thanksgiving party. While biking around earlier in the day, I came across a restaurant that was reputed to have pumpkin pie. They were sold out.
“When do you need them by?” the owner asked. ”Can you wait 90 minutes?”
So I parked myself down at a table with my notebook and laptop and caught up on journaling while she made two beautiful pumpkin pies. We fashioned a pie holding insert for the bicycle’s basket, and I rode back across town to WaLai. A couple of us went to the liquor store and the market to pick up more supplies, and in short order a party was started. Being a guest house near an international school of Thai massage, there were students from Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, South Africa, and Japan. The pumpkin pie was well appreciated.
Yesterday, we had a more traditional Thanksgiving dinner with good friends, just as wonderful.
This week’s Photo Friday is from a few years ago, during a motorcycle ride west of Boston to enjoy some Autumnal leaf peeping. We stopped at a small country market with fresh apple cider donuts.
(Related photos of New England autumn can be found here.)
Tags: Chiang Mai, Thanksgiving
Posted by Ted on Nov 18, 2011 in
Causes,
Photography,
Politics I’m not a full time occupier, but I do drop by the Camp a couple of times a week. After a leisurely ride around the lake last Thursday, I stopped by the corner I’d been scrubbing walls of the week before.
I could tell instantly that I had clearly just missed something big.
I hung back, secured my bike, and leaned against the railing of the 12th St BART stairs. 
The crowd was agitated. Someone was on the ground, surrounded by concerned people. Police broke out the yellow barrier tape and established an expanding perimeter – which my bike was now 10 feet inside of.
A few minutes later, ambulances and fire trucks arrived, a gurney was wheeled to the scene, and the injured person was taken away leaving a pile of evidence and blood behind. The cops maintained a peaceful blocking of the crime scene, and life at camp continued, albeit with many whispers. That someone was shot was the only thing people knew.
An hour or so later, the #OccupyOakland Twitter hashtag announced the sad news – Kayode Ola Foster was pronounced dead at Highland Hospital (the same hospital where Scott Olsen was taken).
Feeling once again moved to act, but not knowing how to help, I saw a couple of lit candles and had an idea. I looked up, saw a Walgreens across the street, and decided to buy some more candles. In the candle aisle, I met a young woman who had the same idea. Her name was Mimi, and she had brought her visiting-from-out-of-town mother to the Camp, and they too wanted to help. What they didn’t grab, I took the rest. Together we brought our armloads of candles bought from a 1% corporation, and gave to the 99%. We deposited boxes at several locations where candles were already being lit, and they were put to sombre use.
(Related articles of the Occupy Oakland shooting can be found
at SFGate, the LA Times, and CNN.)
Tags: Oakland, Occupy, OWS, violence
Posted by Ted on Oct 21, 2011 in
Events,
Memories,
Photography San Francisco shook twice yesterday, and it wasn’t from a Giants game.
Almost 22 years to the day after the Loma Prieta earthquake rattled the Bay Area during the 1989 World Series, two quakes occurred yesterday along the Hayward Fault, with epicenters several miles below the UC Berkeley campus. At 2:41p, I felt the first one (4.0) from our lab in the SoMa district of San Francisco – a rumble that jiggled parked cars on the street. At 8:16p, I felt the second one (3.8) from our much closer second story apartment in Oakland and did a mental double-take as I truly felt the house shake for a moment. Of course, Facebook and Twitter had a flurry of status updates as people all across the Bay Area shared their experiences.
When my wife and I moved here from Boston three years ago, we traded snow for earthquakes. I personally don’t mind these relatively small earthquakes, in that by relieving fault pressure they delay “The Big One“. Even when that one hits, I have some faith that it may not be as bad as what I saw in Haiti last year.
The second floor becomes the first - Jacmel, Haiti (March 2010)
Here you can see a bit of earthquake physics you might not have realized – that on multi-story buildings, it is actually safer to be higher up. Notice that the first floor has been completely crushed and the third floor is comparatively unscathed. My faith that California will weather a large earthquake better is due primarily to the three following things that Haiti does not have;
- Higher quality building materials – What I saw in Haiti was cement that crumbled to the touch and woefully thin rebar
- Better building techniques – California in particular practices seismic design principles
- Adherence to building codes – Perhaps most important, for without this the other two become meaningless
This is not to say that Californians should be complacent, but our awareness and continued engineering advances should give us a decent chance of avoiding the devastation that I saw in Haiti.
(Related pictures of Haiti 2010 can be found here.)
Tags: Berkeley, earthquake, Haiti
