Monday I've got Friday on my mind...

... mostly because I can't keep up with my photos.  And I have a bunch of reading to do for class in the morning, so this will be quick and dirty.

These are un-edited photos from my Olympus Stylus.

I mentioned in my last post that I walked to Cambridge on Friday afternoon. This is the view from the bridge to Cambridge from Fenway, of the bike path I blogged about last week. As you can see, it runs right along Storrow Drive on the right, and it's very narrow. Storrow is busy avenue pretty much all the time.

Boston University crew practice..

 This is a little wooden plank bridge that is part of the bike path - it juts out over the river because the base of the railroad bridge is anchored on the shoreline there.  As you can see, when there is one biker on the bridge, there's really not room for much else. 

And this is the Boston skyline, looking east on the river, from the bridge. I am zoomed in pretty far with my little point and shoot on this one.

These next 2 series are sunset progressions, shot using pretty much the same composition over time. It was a beautiful sunset. We were hanging out on a floating dock that is situated off the bike path, to the east of our neighborhood.  For these shots, I used the "sunset" scenic setting on my camera, which deepens the colors in the sky for me, so I get a truer representation of what I am seeing with my naked eye:

This series are some zoomed-in shots. The colors in the sky were amazing:

And these are the people who were watching the sunset with me:

 Koh, Janelle, Christopher (hamming it up!)

 Christiano, Paul, Janelle in back, Gabe and Ryan foreground (they have no idea the camera is on them)

 Julia, Christiano, Paul in back, Gabe and Ryan foreground again

 Allegra and Koh (a more intentional shot)

 Christiano, Paul, Janelle, Ryan, Christopher, Manny

Our motley crew - look at that sky!

Just two more shots - the water was purple at the end of sunset, and we were being watched by some ducks... we were all very careful not to feed them, but they were convinced that they could break us down, so they hung around a long time...

Goodnight.

Come on, Baby, photo safari... come on a safari with me...

So on Friday, I decided it was time to get serious about my photo safari.  All of the photos in this blog entry were taken with my iPhone.

Every morning, I walk 2 blocks from the dining hall in Warren Towers to the BU Bus stop, and I pass by this fountain.  But I wasn't noticing it. On Friday, however, I was looking for photo opportunities, and suddenly it was there. The whole world looks different when I look at it with a photographer's eyes.


We had a short break at lunch, before Brian gave his presentation, so I decided to use that time to take some pictures. It gave me a great excuse to grab some alone time and listen to some music, too.  There was a neighborhood we walked through the other day that had really cool wrought iron railings, and I did not take pictures, so I quickly walked back over there to get some shots.  Here's what I saw during lunch.

Boston has a subway, the T, but is also has the Hubway, where you can rent a bike to ride anywhere in the city. There are Hubway stations all over. This one is near the Boston University Department of Public Health.

They also have a lot of old-fashioned street lamps here. These probably have LED bulbs now, but I can totally imagine them being fueled by gas back in the early 1900's, can't you?

Blunch is a sandwich shop about 2 blocks from where we have class in the mornings.  They can give you ANY of their sandwiches on GLUTEN FREE BREAD.  You can guess where I will be getting my lunches most of the time for the next three weeks... I also found out that the Rhetty To Go lunches we can pick up in the dining hall can also be made on gluten free bread. So, I'm starting to see an end to this daily salad for lunch rut, which has already gotten old.

This is the neighborhood I was looking for.  It's one of the nicer streets on the south end, according to one of my classmates. I love the combination of the handrails and the blue doors here.

Here is a shot looking down the street. Almost every house has a different style of wrought iron railing, which I think gives the street a lot of character. Boston is way too big for me, but if I had to live here, I would want to live on this street.

These buildings are also very near our classroom. I love the architecture here. Something about the roofline just feels so old-fashioned to me.

This is New China, a little one-room takeout place near the classroom. The food is pretty good there, but I like this shot because of the repetitive pattern in the buildings. They seem to go on forever...

After lunch, we head over to the data lab, which is in the University's Medical library, about 2 blocks away. Every day we pass by the emergency room, and I look up at these walkways which remind me of hamster tubes.

And just across the street from the library is this little building. I just really like the wrought-iron railing on these little balconies.

So, that's my photo safari from Friday afternoon.  Later in the day, I walked across the Charles River to Cambridge, and then had dinner down by the river at sunset with my classmates. I've got a bunch of photos from those events, but it's bedtime, so they will have to wait for tomorrow's blog entry. Tomorrow I plan to go to the Museum of Fine Art, where I will not be able to take pictures inside, so it will be nice to have more pictures from Friday to blog about.

Riding on the Charles River

The heat wave finally broke here in Boston, thanks to the rains yesterday.  While it was kind of a drag having to walk around downtown in the pouring rain, it was worth it.  Here's a shot of the rainy weather from the window outside our data lab on the 12th floor of the Boston University Medical Library:

So, let me start by saying that as lovely as Boston and the Charles River are, riding on the Dr. Paul Dudley White Bike Path here is NOTHING like riding on the Erie Canal in Syracuse.  For one thing, you don't get to see the Boston University crew team members practicing on the Erie Canal.

Also, the Charles River has some views of some really beautiful parts of the Boston skyline...

... and the Eric Canal isn't quite as polluted as the Charles River.

There are also some beautiful bridges on the Charles...

 

... and some really spectacular boat houses....

And all of this is in downtown Boston. This picture shows you how close the bike path is to the four-lane road that runs along the river.  So, while you are technically biking on a nature trail, you are also constantly surrounded by the sounds of traffic and the city.  On top of that, the path is pretty narrow in many spots, and you have runners and bikers traveling with you in both directions, at different speeds, so that you have to pass them, and they have to pass you, often when someone else is coming in the opposite direction.  It's a little nerve-wracking for a small-city girl like me, to say the least, but it was worth it to be out in the open air and to be near the water.  I think the next time, I will try an early-morning ride and see if that's any quieter, at least in terms of the traffic.

The other alternative to the bike path is to ride on the actual city streets themselves. I did a little of that to get to the bike path today, but only on the little street here where my dorm is, which isn't too heavily trafficked.  Most of the other streets are more like the photo below, however, and I am absolutely terrified about riding on them. I don't know if you can tell, but that white car down the road doesn't really care about being in the bike lane, and that happens quite a bit, not to mention the times when you might have 1 or 2 other bikers in that little lane alongside you between the parked cars and the cars flying by you on the road. And this guy's not wearing a helmet! No, I am definitely NOT an urban biker. Good to know!

Thank God the library here is air-conditioned!

Okay, so I promised MG I would blog about my time here in Boston. So that the 2 of you who read it can keep apprised of my activities.  I'm not sure she really believed me - I mean, look at that smirk!

 Anyway, she was much more interested in what was going on around Boston Harbor...

 And why not, look at that scenery! This bridge was part of the Big Dig here in Boston.

And this is the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy. We got to see their flag ceremony, which was cool.

The next day, MG helped me unpack my gear in the dorm, and we went lookin' for Bed Bath and Beyond to buy me a mattress pad.  Our mattresses are wrapped in the same plastic you see in cribs, and it sort of feels like lying on a prison bed, so I needed something more comfortable.  On the way, we found Chipotle! Yay! We also saw several ice cream shops, which MG made me ignore. Meanie! :-)  This is some of the wall art in the Chipotle....

Fast forward to Monday afternoon, and my fellow students and I are waiting for our bus back to the dorm from our classrooms at Boston University's medical campus. This is the building across the street from the bus stop. A lot of the brick buildings here in Boston are just so pretty. I will try to get some pictures of the wrought-iron railings that I have seen around the medical campus. They are very ornate and old-fashioned looking. You really do feel the history around you here.

 The bus was five minutes late, as you can see by the clock across the street...

I'm not sure what THEY were doing with THEIR phones while I was taking this picture of them with MY phone, but these are just three of the very nice young men attending the Institute with me this summer.  We spend a lot of time looking at our iPhones here, trying to figure out where we are and where we should be going.  It's kind of an adventure, but it also kind of sucks, depending on my mood at the moment.

Now, it's after 10, and I've been hiding in the library's free air conditioning since 8pm.  At some point, I do have to go back and sleep in my hot little dorm room.  Even with two oscillating fans going, we struggle to keep it tolerable. Especially today, which has been a pretty hot day.  But it is supposed to cool down for the next few days, so I'm looking forward to that!  My roommate is very nice, originally from here, but has been living in northern California for something like 10 years, so she has as much trouble tolerating this heat as I do.  There is some comfort in that.

Fireworks photos

I love my Canon Rebel T3i!

I took so many pictures of fireworks 2 weeks ago, but these were some of the more unique images I captured.  These are unedited, except for being reduced in size for the web.

 At first, I was zoomed out pretty far - that white spot on the right is the moon.  Most of these photos were taken with a shutter speed between 3.2 and 5 seconds.

After a while, I zoomed in some more, to get better images - as you can see, the moon is not included in some of these zoomed-in images.

Eventually, though, I had to zoom back out, as the firework bursts got closer together and larger in the sky - the the reappearance of the moon.

This is one of my finale images.  I took this at a 5 second exposure, to capture multiple bursts in one image. I particularly love the white trails, because they make this look like a bouquet of flowers.  My friend Brian pointed out the little stars at the base, which I also like.