The Other weBlog

I spent last week in Chicago on business. I only get there once or twice a year, and rarely get a chance to spend much time downtown. This time I was there for most of a week, staying in a hotel in what was originally the 'Carbide and Carbon" building - a tall skinny edifice on Michigan Avenue designed after the black, green, and gold designs on a Champaigne bottle, if we are to believe the stories.

Chicago used to be referred to as the "Second City" - when it was second largest int he U.S. after New York. In recent years, with the building boom and the creation of Millennium Park, Chicago boasts an impressive skyline and a great focal point for civic events. I enjoyed some alternative music by The Dirty Projectors and The Sea and Cake, and had an even better time at two nights of Mariachi concerts - with all events attended by diverse crowds of at least 20,000 people - all enjoying the evening and getting on well together.

Chicago is also home to the Art Institute, which opened its new Modern Wing earlier this year - making it the second largest art museum in the U.S. Thanks to business donations, it is open two nights a week in the summer - free to the public.

Size notwithstanding, it is an excellent museum, with a broad collection well displayed, and is very popular with locals and visitors alike. It is also a museum that allows picture taking, which gave me an opportunity to captrure some paintings and do photo studies of several sculptures. I have added these photos to the Facebook page for The Other Pages. There is good variety and subject matter for writing. My favorite is piece in the museum - The Rock by Peter Blume.

Posted by Steve at 07:16 PM | Permalink

More images have been added to The Other pages on Facebook, in the Beautiful Images 2008 Folder. Subjects include images from South Florida, Chicago, and St. Louis.

http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/The-Other-Pages/17383669929

--Steve

Posted by Steve at 01:30 PM | Permalink

Alex and I were recently visiting Jungle Island in Miami on an overcast but otherwise pleasant day, along with a large group of friends. Whlie we were there, a variety of other faces caught my eye. Here is a sampling.

Click on any image to view at 1024 x 768 

  --Steve

Eye of the 'Crocosaurus'

    Unwilling Resident

Cautious Pedestrian

      Best Dressed

Posted by Steve at 10:29 PM | Permalink

I have just finished going through some of the oldest photos (or what years of space saving has left of them) and updating the Photographs collection.

 This now puts all three photo collections in a simpler, much cleaner, and uniform format that highlights the images, not the style of the page.

 Have a look.

--Steve

Posted by Steve at 09:02 PM | Permalink

After a long period of inattention, I have updated the original 100 Beautiful Images collection with a simpler, cleaner format and new graphics. I have also eliminated the background image. A dozen years ago it was colorful and eye-catching. Now it is distracting (must be the bifocals).

This is one of the three original collections that launched with The Other Pages back in 1994 on a corporate server, before going private in 1995. This was back in the day when the only easy way to get a digital image was to use an optical scanner on a photographic print.

In addition, I have increased the contrast and sharpened some of the images for improved display on LCD monitors.

The collection includes a wide variety of images “from around the back yard to around the world.” Thanks as always to the contributors, Amy Shipman, Jim Rioux, Theresa Bzdek, and Louis Spanoudis.

--Steve

Posted by Steve at 09:18 AM | Permalink

 One of my projects in December was to launch a new online image collection, put together mainly from digital images taken over the past few years.  Previous Other Pages collections have been comprised mainly of film images scanned from print or negative. 

The address for the new site is  

           http://images.theotherpages.org

With about 110 images as a starting point. I will be adding more photos from Asia, the western U.S., and Florida before long.

The collection is titled Beautiful Images II, and yes, original contributions are welcomed. 

 --Steve

Posted by Steve at 09:08 AM | Permalink

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

I had the opportunity this past weekend to spend a night on Sanibel Island with my daughter. While best known for its long beaches and plentiful seashells, my favorite thing about the island is its sunrises. (The sunsets are beautiful too, but are often plagued by swarms of “no-see-ums” – biting insects almost too small to see).

The south and west sides of the tilted-crescent-shaped island face the normally calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The northeasterly coast is a large nature sanctuary, named for political cartoonist and conservationist J.N. (‘Ding’) Darling.

We also had an opportunity to cycle through the sanctuary, and kayak across Tarpon Bay. We didn’t go far enough out to see any dolphins or manatees, but we did see plenty of herons and egrets as we paddled in among the mangroves.

Back to the sunrises – while the effect is more pronounced at midsummer, sunrises over the gulf have a languorously slow quality, as the colors shift from black to blue to brilliant red-orange at the moment of dawn. Reflections on the ocean, beach, and tidal strips between the sandbars add to the effect.

--Steve

Continue reading "Sanibel at Sunrise" »

Posted by Steve at 09:20 PM | Permalink

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

last weekend I had the opportunity to camp overnight with my youngest son at the Seaquarium on the causeway to Key Biscayne. This is a local institution that has been in place for over 40 years, dating back to the filming of the "Flipper" TV series.

While the spaces are a little cramped by current standards, (and the facility has weathered many a hurricane), it is in reasonably good condition, and the staff clearly does genuinely care for the animals and takes their rescue and rehabilitation mission seriously.

 Being in such a place at night is always an unusual experience - places that bustle with activity during the day seem eerily still after dark. We also had unusually still air, which combined with the island setting to enhance the effect. Our guide for the evening, Lucy, took us to the dolphin tank and explained a little bit about the current understanding of how dolphins manage to sleep while always in motion.

Studies show that when dolphins sleep, half of their brain rests at a time, while the other half keeps necessary functions running - swimming, surfacing to breathe, turning - something between autopilot and the aquatic equivalent of sleepwalking. It seemed a little otherworldly, these creatures surfacing our of the dark water, inhaling, and slipping past each other into the water on a starlit but moonless night.

I can't recall anything I've read that captured this scene, but this idea of spending half your life half asleep begs the question of what dolphin dreams must  be like. Perhaps in 20 years our 'current understanding' will be able to explain that too.

While I didn't have the ASA10,000 camera it would have taken to photograph dreaming dolphins, here are a few other faces from the Seaquarium. --Steve

http://theotherpages.org/blog/seaq01.JPG

Continue reading "Dolphins Dreaming" »

Posted by Steve at 10:07 PM | Permalink

Monday, October 9th, 2006 

When is a photo not a photo? How about when it is a virtual snapshot from virtual space?

On  a whim this summer I picked up a relatively inexpensive 3-D rendering program named Easel. It's by a German software company that also makes a series of higher performance rendering and animation programs used to create a suprising range of images and animations.

 I recall when digital photography became commonly available - first as computer software that allowed images to be digitally manipulated, then as digital still cameras that could capture actual images. Digital image alterations are now commonplace - from improving sharpness and boosting color to removing wrinkles, reshaping waistlines, and making McFood look palatable. In the 'old days' (BD = before digital), when you had to rely on film processes, your options were limited to lenses, filters, and exposures on the camera side, dodging and burning in the photo enlarger, and time in the developing bath.

I remember National Geographic admitting a few years ago that they had altered their cover photo by moving the sun closer to the horizon to create a 'more dramatic effect.' Very recently, a photo editor for a major wire services was fired after he (clumsily) added more smoke to photos from the recent fighting in Lebanon - once again to increase the sense of drama (without requiring him to get closer to the actual fighting).

 Getting back to the software  - you can create arrangements of virtual objects in space - people, plants, mountains, buildings, - and add planes of water, sky, and 'atmosphere'. You can apply a variety of materials, colors and textures to objects, and select camera and sunlight angles. Then you go about finding the best picrture-taking angles - the result is a cross between playing with children's blocks and being a cinematographer setting up a movie scene.

 So instead of some photos this week, here are some initial virtual images I have cobbled together. By the way, there is even an online store where you can purchase vitrual plants, buildings, furniture, textures, and yes, even virtual people. Maybe when I retire I can become a virtual carpenter. I might enjoy making virtual furniture. Or perhaps being a virtual gardener. Or a virtual zoologist.  --Steve

Continue reading "Virtually Real" »

Posted by Steve at 11:27 AM | Permalink

Wed, October 4th 2006

Welcone to the new Blog for TheOtherPages. Our original Blog, which pre-dated blogging by half a  decade, was Bob Blair's Daily Poetry Break.  Bob was such an engaging writer, and provided such a wealth of content and insight, that no one (least of all myself) has attempted to take up the torch since he retired from the post on January 23rd, 2004.

 Nor am I trying to take it up now. I lack Bob's humor, judgement and practiced style. Instead, this is intended as a composite of several media types from TheOtherPages, with perhaps an occaisional editorial thrown in.

--Steve 

A recent photo of the lamp at the Cape Florida Lighthouse, at Bill Baggs State Park, on Key Biscayne, Florida, with various aquamarine shades of the Atlantic Ocean in the background.

1024 x 768 image (80k):  http://theotherpages.org/blog/billbaggslight.jpg

 600 x 450 image (200k):

http://theotherpages.org/blog/billbaggslight-s.jpg

Posted by Steve at 12:01 AM | Permalink