introduce you to my blogging and life 
09
02
2010
Below is a section of the Brooklyn Bridge Park that remains under construction, as seen from the Brooklyn Promenade above the (B)BQE.
New York: Pandora's box. Imagine a giant hand flipping the city upside down and shaking hard. These are the strange images that might fall off at random.
08
30
2010
"Lying in a den in Brooklyn
With a slack jaw, and not much to win
I said to the Marie, 'Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?'
And she said..."
"Yes."
Score!
Posted at 11:43 PM in + Panoramas: & New York: & Schtroumpfissime:
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08
27
2010
UPDATE: Apologies to those of you who were stuck with the Rockport panorama coming up instead of this one. There was a conflict between two panoramas on the same page (sloppy coding on my part, I placed them in identically named DIV's.) What happened is that once you switched to the comment page, a single pano was loading and thus, worked fine. This should all now be fixed!
Here’s a 360° panoramic shot of a newly opened section of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, to echo a much more substantial post by Marie. It was taken last week at night on the way back from the overrated Grimaldi's Pizza, where we'll probably never go again, just not worth the trouble and wait. Maybe I'll post about that later.
Click on the "Full Screen" icon and then click and drag to navigate within the image in all directions.
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Notice the tidal pool and public boat ramp, probably intended for launching kayaks. Curious to see how vehicle access will be regulated. Also in the background, the 4 levels of the very poorly located and inconvenient BQE highway, with the lower service road, two levels of opposite high speed traffic and the pedestrian Brooklyn Promenade at the top...
08
08
2010
Out of necessity more than curiosity, I descend into the cave. Darkness there isn’t as overwhelming as I remembered but from the depths of the Earth rises an evil breath of pure searing heat. The planet’s core suddenly seems dangerously close. I punch my way through a narrow opening and instantly, sweat starts pouring down my back and forehead. A suit and tie are not dream attire for such an unbearably unfriendly place.
It seems as though an unseen volcano is half-asleep nearby, sending flows of lava through the ground and super-heating the many tunnels that surround it. Rats are running unrelentingly across the space in a never-ending quest for edible garbage, and garbage is everywhere.
Fellow cavemen are enduring the heat the best they can, looking around them with worried eyes, in search of clues. There are too many of us here despite the late hour. Routine more than awareness has brought us all down but I feel a hot wave of hesitation. The cave has become a trap. Our steel monster and its random coolness, are late. Yet again.
I look around me. A dreadful sign of official looks and customary colors is posted on a rusty metal pillar. It reads:
AUGUST 8, 2010. There is no F train service at this station from 12:00 AM to 5 AM. How will this affect my trip? Take the downtown-bound D train across the platform and transfer at West 4th Street to an F train.
I look at my watch. 12:20 AM, August 8. Bloody cave. Damn metal monster. I was counting on the F to get home. I turn around in a hopeful move towards the D train track and stop before a new sign that reads:
AUGUST 7 to AUGUST 10, 2010. There is no D train at this station from 12:00 AM to 5:00 AM. How will this affect my trip? Take the downtown-bound F train across the platform and transfer at West 4th Street to a D train.
I look to my right. A young woman that just finished reading too is staring blindly at the tracks, trying to make sense of the mysterious cave drawings. Heat is just numbing us. My shirt is drenched. It is actually much hotter down here than at the surface. I can’t figure out the physics of it.
Why are we here chasing our tails and wasting time? And why on Earth - or below it - did we agree to pay a soon-to-be-further-inflated fee for this absolute lack of service, incoherent information, ridiculous absence of ventilation, antiquated system and utmost inefficiency?
Because we are MTA customers and like all sheep, we go with the flow.
07
20
2010
The terrace is beautiful and lush, but its 66 square feet don’t allow for much movement or lookout. At dinner, crossing my legs is a challenge and the Japanese grass keeps tickling my back. So once in a while we climb to the roof 
and picnic there, among satellite dishes, skylights and chimneys, with the wind in our face and the lifeless old windows of the hospital building for our only top neighbors.
The cat comes and joins us after a little coaxing. This is his kingdom and at first, he is reluctant to share it. We sit facing the Orient, spread one kikoi as a seat and another for a table, and we eat our feast watching the sky and the planes and the rising stars. To the west, the New York Harbour basin shines in the vanishing light and we can see ferries dance back and forth between Manhattan and the islands.
The Battery Tunnel building immortalized in Men in Black stands strongly in the center stage, brightly lit and massive. In the background and to the left, a short Lady Liberty tiredly lifts her flame into a world of overwhelming obstacles to her stance.
Not for a minute are we allowed to forget where we are as the invisible BQE highway sends a continuous low-pitch roaring towards us, major player in what we call the New York hum, the ever-present surrounding noise typical of large cities and 
whose absence strikes us as so incredibly wonderful when we get to such heavenly places as the Namib Desert or Table Mountain.
A few feet behind us is the Farm. Marie’s new horticultural effort has rapidly grown from modest experimental proportions to a full-fledged potager and we are watching with fascinated anticipation as our vegetables grow hurriedly in the summer heat.
Eventually, when night has fallen and our wine dried up, the plates empty and all stomachs content, we squeeze back down the trap door and into the welcoming light of our apartment. The cat follows from the outside, rounding the terrace and glancing nonchalantly at the street below, and he comes into the room with the manners of a king returning from the Crusades, victorious, hungry and tired, and after assessing the fleeting possibility of more food donations, he chooses a sleeping spot for the night and settles in.
07
07
2010
I’m not one to celebrate nor appreciate National and Independence days much, whether a 4th of July, a 14th or a 1st. While people drink and party, I tend to ponder. It is so easy to raise a flag high and forget the atrocities that have led us where we are. I do not feel that ancient blood baths are anything worth celebrating, especially when they are actually being perpetrated all over again on some distant land. If anything, a day of mourning and remembrance would be more appropriate. To feel sorry for a necessary evil and convince ourselves we have grown. But have we?
This 4th of July was equal to itself. I worked most of the week-end and had to deal with drunks and fights. The fights were fueled by ideology conflict, intolerance and latent racism. If a country’s national holiday meant anything serious, one would think that the masses would find something more intelligent to do than get trashed.
And was I in France, I wouldn’t look forward any more to the upcoming 14th of July, for exactly the same reasons.
In any case, a walk along the Brooklyn Promenade with Marie was uneventful and I managed to get a nice-ish shot of our Manhattan skyline from the new park in Brooklyn. Peace to all.
07
06
2010
While temperatures creep up and the Big Apple slowly fries under an unrelenting sun, the mercury having just busted a cruel 100°F (38°C) mark, it is sweet and a bit surreal to remember that last year, those were the brutal conditions we faced in Namibia and South Africa’s Kgalagadi National Park.
More recently though, but just as hard to believe, we were having drinks on a Cape Town beach with loved ones and friends, celebrating the impending Cape Argus Cycle Tour - and despite the season and location, summer nights were chilly and Marie had wrapped herself in a Grand Cafe blanket. This is the irony of the weather. It’s never what you want it to be.
07
01
2010
South of Cape Town, all the way down the Cape Peninsula, part of the Table Mountain National Park and next to Cape Point, is the famous Cape of Good Hope, southernmost part of the peninsula and often (falsely) labeled as the bottom tip of Africa.
First rounded in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, 
the cape was initially named Cape of Storms and certainly has claimed its share of wrecks. Just a mile offshore, the warm Agulhas current coming down from the Indian Ocean clashes violently with its cold counterpart the Benguela as it heads up the western coast of Africa to a foggy rendez-vous with the Namib Desert.
Some tales claim that the legendary ghost ship Flying Dutchman was doomed to eternally sail the ocean while attempting to round the Cape into Table Bay. When looking out to sea from such harsh, desolate shores, it isn’t hard to imagine the sailors fighting against mother nature’s fury in the darkest of nights, the wind hauling through torn sails and waves crashing down on decks with maddening strength.
Yet on a sunny afternoon, as we walked down from the Cape Point parking lot with our picnic, leaving the crowds behind and entering a world of high cliffs and sandy perfection, peace was all around and soon inside of us, too. The many wooden stairs leading down to a secluded little bay just east of Cape Maclear are steep and high enough to deter most tourists and we found ourselves just about alone once we got to the bottom.
The wind was blowing steadily and we first sought shelter from the sun in the shadow of one of the great stone walls. Swimming is reputedly dangerous in the area, with strong undertows and ripping currents lurking in very cold water, but we 
wet our feet and walked the length of the beach before picnicking in the shade.
This is the magic of Cape Town. Less than an hour away from the city, in all directions, exist many oasis of pure, undiluted beauty, where one can be alone and feel like the real world has disappeared beyond a horizon of a thousand years of tranquility.
There are very few places in the world that carry as much romantic symbolism as the Cape of Good Hope. Standing there and looking out into the ocean is a bit like staring into the future and the past simultaneously.
There is nothing beyond but empty space and while at your back sits the hungriest, hottest and most tortured continent on the planet, the ocean in front seems to be calling for a truce, for a fresh start, offering a level playing field in which all men can measure themselves by the only value worth governing the world: courage.
06
20
2010
It would seem the fantastic emerging art of DSLR videography is going to challenge conventional photographers on concentration and focus levels, if you’ll pardon the pun. When I shoot stills, I immerse myself completely in the scene and think only in terms of photography. Composition, settings, technique, lenses and goals are all specifically photo - and thus single-shot - oriented.
Video, however, ticks rather differently. It involves motion, time-lapse, the progression of a story and very different sets of techniques and settings. Suddenly, I find myself split and torn, pulled in two opposite directions, one that hunts for glimpses of a motionless world and the other hungry for the passage of time and the fluidity of movement. They conflict. And without much discipline, I’ll end up messing both up.
Out on Coney Island this week, I had intended to play on all sides, recording some video, shooting a 360 panorama and taking some stills too. I messed up the panorama. Too few stills were taken to make up a full post. And the video footage is still being studied via a very steep learning curve. It’s incredibly promising, though, and will eventually come off the editing board and onto these premises.
In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of New York in summertime.
06
16
2010
They just are there. Some at ground level, others perched on rooftops. 31 of them. They stand and they stay and they stare out of empty eye sockets, looking right through the crowds into a frozen parcel of eternity.
One can not avoid, when bumping into these iron men on the street or catching a glimpse of a silhouette high on a ledge, wondering what drove sculptor Antony Gormley to disseminate such anonymous statues around the Flatiron District.
Maybe they don’t mean anything more than what we carry up to them. Maybe they are us. Pondering our existence within the walls of a gigantic city, surrounded by many yet isolated in our quest for a reason to our presence in this world and a proof that the next one will be better.
« Since it looks like you guys might get brushed by Hurricane Earl, will you take pictures and post them? »
Date of comment: 2010-09-02 18:21 • Reply« Indeed, with sections of the Eastern Seaboard under a Hurricane Warning, we’re keeping an eye on Earl - which has just downgraded to a Cat. 3, with hurricane force winds extending to 70 miles and tropical storm force winds to 200 miles outward of the eye (now at 947 MB.)
Date of comment: 2010-09-02 18:40 • ReplyIt’s expected to weaken some more overnight and everything now depends on that forecast turn to the NE. The current track puts Earl tomorrow afternoon at a little less than 200 miles offshore, so we could get 40 to 60 mph easterly or northeasterly winds, enough to threaten the farm on the roof...
If and when everything is secured, yes, I’d like to go shoot some waves. Haven’t thought of the perfect spot yet, though... »
« How many pictures do you have to take on average to make such a stunning panorama? Not that I’m going to attempt to do it :) »
Date of comment: 2010-09-03 23:44 • Reply« Oh but you should. 3 or 4 images stitched together should do the trick, and you try and keep the camera level with the horizon near the middle of the frame...
Date of comment: 2010-09-04 02:01 • ReplyMe, I just overdo it. The 360 panos take most work. This one, however, was simple: 4 shots x 3 bracketed exposures each. »