Here’s one dramatic sky.
I had just left Whole Foods in Lake Grove, N.Y. after working the bulk of the day at the tables there – I love the free Wi-Fi and food bar – when I noticed this cyclone in the sky, painted in purple, pinks and oranges by the setting sun.
I wasn’t the only one taken in by the natural beauty, others in the parking lot stopped to gawk. Luckily, I had my camera.
Painted on the back wall of an old barn in Riverhead is a faded and stripping mural of a farmer riding his John Deere. It’s a portrait of Americana, a reminder of our county’s farming roots in an area that’s still so defined by its remaining agricultural businesses.
Last May, I snapped a few Hipstamatic photos of the barn while I was there to cover the annual Street Painting Festival for Patch. I love the way they came out.
In April, the Riverhead News-Review reported that the town’s Business Improvement District is looking to have the mural repaired, before the yearly weathering eventually erases it.
From the story:
The mural was painted in 2003 by Pennsylvania artist Wayne Fettro and was paid for by the Agricultural Heritage Festival committee. The BID board agreed last Wednesday to allocate $6,000 to hire Mr. Fettro for a week and pay for his hotel room.
Turns out it’s a sprinkler system that regularly doused the barn that’s responsible for the damage.
As for the street painting festival, it was my fist time at the event and I look forward to returning in the spring. I’ll take fresh pics of the mural then.
In addition to all of the photos I shot with my DSLR at the Long Island Photowalk in Greenport, I took a bunch using the iPhone and the fantastic Hipstamatic app, which I am obsessed with.
I love the drama these black-and-white films create.
Enjoy.
My photography picked up some steam this past weekend when I joined the Long Island Photowalk in Greenport, NY. It’s a group of Long Island photographers – many who are just hobbyists like myself – who meet up at various places on Long Island to explore the area with their cameras. I posted the photos, along as ones taken my my coworkers who also marched in the photowalk, on North Fork Patch.
The Long Island Photowalk also has a Flickr group.
As for my pics, I think many came out really well. I’ve also been playing with presets in Aperture, which helped me punch up a few of these.
Enjoy.
Today I’m running a write-up on Smithtown Patch about the St. James General Store, a historic outpost in my town, for the weekly 100 Things to Do in Smithtown column. But I only ran a few of the photos I took with the article.
Here’s a collection of the other photos I took at my visit to the store, taken with the Hipstamatic App for my iPhone. I’ve already expressed how much I love this app.
Some of these are pretty damn spooky.
Enjoy.
When I met my wife in college, I had never been to Long Island. In fact, I never wanted to go there. Most of the cantankerous fraternity-types I had nothing in common with came from there, and all the literate Long Islanders I met couldn’t be any happier to have left.
On my first trip to Long Island, I remember how the border-less villages blended together, me leaning into her and asking, “And what’s this village called now? When did we leave the other one?”
But eventually the strip malls disappeared and we pulled in to Port Jefferson, the quaint, maritime village she grew up in that was full of small shops, varied eateries and a classy hotel. And there were the boats, too: small ones, large ones, yachts, a ferry and a tugboat moored in front of the power plant.
Then I moved to Long Island, and today I still smile when I escape from the strip malls and land in Port Jefferson, where the boats sail into the Long Island Sound.
I visited Port Jefferson the other day to work overlooking the port, snapping a few photos in between phone conferences.
Enjoy.
I was just digging through some photos and I found this gorgeous shot, which I had taken a few weeks ago from my office-of-that-moment at Long Beach in Smithtown, N.Y.
Maybe the people in the photo were just looking for Connecticut, but I see them looking for answers, or perhaps seeing the futility of asking in the first place.
Here’s another photo I took that day. Nice spot, right? And on Long Island, too.
