Today is July 16, 7-16, or…716 day! Which means it’s time to celebrate the 716!
Here is a bunch of photos that I have taken since the last 716 Day. Long live the 716!!! It was hard to pick which ones to use…I limited myself to two photos from any Flickr album I have devoted to images taken of or at a 716 location. (So, no Ithaca or Toronto or Letchworth photos here, among other places!)
I truly believe in the beauty of this region and the loveliness of its people, and I hope my photos capture that.
When one visits the train depot, one should dress accordingly.The platform.
Both of these photos are unedited JPGs; I will be editing the RAW files at some point soon. But yesterday I went to the Orchard Park Depot, the old train station from the grand old days when passenger trains went through here. Alas! I also experimented with shooting monochrome, which was a lot of fun and something I will do again in the future. When I went out it was already very bright, and as I heard on a recent photography YouTube video (I can’t remember where, though!), “If the light is shite, shoot black and white.” I will do more monochrome in the future!
I’ve just come through what has been a particularly obnoxious period of time at work…my main work area was relocated, and the great majority of the work involved in relocating my work area fell on me, so I guess a better way of saying that would be, “I relocated my work area.” In the middle of that relocation effort I had a brief mini-vacation that felt more like a pause to gather breath than an actual break, and even while moving all of my Stuff I still had to execute normal job duties along the way. (By way of analogy, I am to The Store as Scotty is to the starship Enterprise.)
The move is probably around 80 percent complete now…I’ve finally reached the point where I can reliably execute my job while continuing to organize my Stuff, so maybe things will lower back down to a simmer. Anyway, I continue to find art and beauty to be the best emotional salve for the obnoxious times in one’s life…though it would be nice if I were more able to approach art and beauty on their own terms rather than turning to them for relief. Anyway, here are some recent photos of things!
“Indian Family Life”, by Norval Morrisseau (1931-2007) Art Gallery of Hamilton
Absolute World Towers, Mississauga, ON (colloquially called the “Marilyn Monroe Towers”)
The Niagara River, flowing north toward Lake Ontario.
Butterfly on Leaf, Niagara Butterfly Conservatory
Butterfly on Leaf II, Niagara Butterfly Conservatory Note the butterfly’s visible tongue!
Some of this is stuff I’ve already said on social media, but I like to say it here too, so:
:: Yesterday at work, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan brought up the Mets season opener on the Peacock app on his phone. As the Mets were hosting my Pittsburgh Pirates, I decided to watch along for a bit. I watched until 2/3 of the way through the bottom of the 1st. This is more Pirates baseball than I have watched in quite a few years…and yet, watching that single 2/3 of an inning feels like a total microcosm of most of the last 30+ years of the Pirates. Paul Skenes, the super-human pitcher who is the reigning Cy Young winner (and who will NEVER finish his career with the Pirates, let’s be realistic), proceeded to pitch very badly, and he was not helped at all by not one but two godawful defensive plays by Oneil Cruz, a guy who is in center field who should not be in center field.
A deeply rare shot of a baseball and Oneil Cruz’s glove being in the same place at the same time.
So, that was fun. I got to see the Pirates’ best pitcher get pulled in the 1st inning of the season opener, and some predictably terrible play by a guy who is only playing center field because…well, I’m a bit fuzzy on that, actually.
:: Here’s another WNY sunrise. We don’t get to see many of them this time of year, but when we do….
:: Anybody watching High Potential on ABC? It’s the show that’s currently giving us our needed “Murder mystery procedural with quirky characters” fix. This sort of thing has been in pretty short supply since Castle went away. This show is a lot of fun, though I do wish it was able to dispense with the “long mystery arc” storyline that is glacially unfolding underneath the week-to-week stories. I do recommend it, though.
Also, a recent episode’s murder method was a poisoned pie in the face! So that was amusing. I was hoping that lead character Morgan, who has a photographic memory and knows everything, would give her cop friends one of her impromptu lectures on the pie in the face, but no such luck. Alas.
:: And finally, in the Four-Legged Friend department:
Even though it’s only 31 degrees out, proper care of your House Hippo is important. Let her get some sun.
Of COURSE it’s a trap. Don’t stick your hand down there.
I’m long on record as not liking this time of year in my neck of the woods, but even this dreary time of year yields some good photographic opportunities.
OK, this is it! The last of my Photography favorites for 2025. As I’ve noted before, all of my photography ends up on Flickr, where I really try to organize things into albums for convenience. (I also use Flickr for image hosting on this site, so there’s a lot of stuff there scattered throughout that isn’t mine. These are always noted in the image descriptions.) In terms of photographic gear, all photos are currently taken either on my Lumix FZ1000ii (“Miranda”), or my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (“Ophelia”). Now, the photos…and at the end, my six favorite self-portraits from 2025.
Yes, I like my own work! And I’m not gonna apologize for that. So there!
Moving on. These are in no particular order, but they do mostly come from the latter half of the year. There will be one more of these posts after this one.
