I spent most of last week in Banff, a small tourist town for snowbirds at the edge of the Canadian Rockies. This was made possible, even mandatory, because astronomers who have their budgets cut to the point where their projects can only afford to meet as a work-all-weekend add-on to another conference and its airfare costs are good at finding ( Read more... )

I aten't ded ( Read more... )

Yesterday, after several days of continuous of pouring rain, a block of a central street connecting Baltimore's largest and busiest non-highway North and South roads collapsed onto heavily used CSX (once B&O) railroad tracks, swallowing ten cars, streetlights, and the retaining wall, with no injuries. Parts of the city originally built as ( Read more... )

I traveled to the University of Arizona in Tucson this past week, much to my consternation without my husband who spent his earliest years in that town. Still, the desert is an absolutely wonderful place to be lonely, and there was something to driving through unhurried in a rental car full of prepaid fuel and an almost reliable phone GPS system. ( Read more... )

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I spent yesterday participating as a photographer in a small people-and-animals portrait workshop run by freaking kylecassidy, on a blueberry farm two fantastic people are trying to save, with and for a nascent snake rescue/rehabilitation project run by a pair of offbeat teenage twin girls who happen to live around the corner from the house I grew up in, with ( Read more... )

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I misdeveloped my first roll of film last night. It feels strangely freeing to have got that out of the way. Luckily, I live in an adorably anachronistic future and made a partially correctable mistake: the film is scratched up and the images will probably fade over the next few weeks, but a Very Long Time in a scanner and software for dust and ( Read more... )

It's difficult not use the word "shoot" in discussing photography, so deeply is the firearm metaphor wound up in our vernacular. But I take, or make, most of my photographs in a city colloquially known as "Bodymore" with a somewhat embarrassing murder rate per capita, known outside its own borders primarily through television in the form of ( Read more... )

Friday, a double rainbow interrupted a photo adventure I had begun with a friend in West Baltimore, originally in search of abandoned buildings with trees growing through them and the like. This past week has had an unusual spike in violent crime in some of Baltimore's poorer neighborhoods, and watching long stretches of North Avenue come to a ( Read more... )