Fall isn’t here yet, but we can certainly feel it knocking on the door. And I’m fine with that! Fall is my favorite time of year, followed by winter, and lately summer has been rising in my esteem. The summer that’s entering its final weeks was a particularly pleasant one, if my photos (many of which are still awaiting editing!) are any judge. There’s one big post about my day shooting around the City of Buffalo that’s still waiting in the wings…but for now, here’s my latest panorama of the Buffalo Niagara region as imaged from the sledding hill at Chestnut Ridge Park. Note that now you can see clearly the emerging superstructure of the next home of the Buffalo Bills, and between the cranes, on the horizon, the faint skyline of Niagara Falls, ON.
Last weekend, The Wife and I attended the Sterling Renaissance Festival. We went by ourselves and The Daughter stayed home, because we didn’t want to board the dogs overnight; but never fear, The Daughter was able to use the third ticket today. In fact, she’s there as I write this.
Three little maids from school are we…oh wait, that’s not right.
Not sure what you call this, but this act is amazing! It’s a duo of ladies.
I don’t know why photographers insist that getting great bird photos is so hard. All you have to do is find a bird who is photogenic and restrained from flying away!
Her Majesty the Queen!
Harper
Her Majesty the Queen, bestowing her blessing upon the Joust.
Our Knight. Interesting how the Joust never really crowns a full winner. It’s almost like the real winner is the friends we make along the way….
The Renaissance Faire continues to be a pleasant mix of the old and comforting with the new and exciting. I didn’t see as much of the Festival’s cast interacting with the attendees in impromptu displays of Elizabethan-inspired improv this year, but there was still quite a bit of that. Also, we seem to eat less at the Festival than we usually do. Lunch was a turkey leg (and I managed to eat mine without getting barbecue sauce on my white shirt!), later we had wine slushies and She had a pickle while I enjoyed a pretzel. We stopped for fried chicken on the way home. I do admit that I had plans on a slice of cake, but they were sold out when I got back just before the evening joust, and honestly, I’m not sorry about that. Much.
The weather for us this year was nearly perfect: low humidity, temperatures in the mid to high 70s, and decent breezes through the wooded Festival grounds. I continue to be amazed at my adaptation to heat as I get older. Years ago wearing overalls to the Faire would have been unthinkable, and yet, here I was!
Three years in a row of rocking overalls at the Faire!
Look how SAUCY that thing is! Not getting any on me is a MAJOR victory, I tell you!
There’s a chunk missing from my pretzel. Because I bit it before I remembered to photograph it.
Celtic hair tie!
And now, another year is over. Next up for us, Festival-wise, is the Erie County Fair, and then about six weeks after that, we’re off to Ithaca. This is a wonderful time of year.
From a walk at Buffalo’s Canalside and the Military and Naval Park a couple weeks back, the USS Little Rock presented a particularly nice look. I was there early enough that the sun was reflecting off the water in between the ship’s starboard side, casting a wonderful shimmering dappled effect on the hull. I like that because of photography I am starting to see what light is doing, in addition to just seeing where light is.
The shift in thinking about photography, from capturing images or subjects to capturing light, has been one of the most fascinating parts of this entire enterprise for me.
Walking at Knox Farm yesterday, I arrived at the pond on the park grounds and noticed a bunch of dragonflies zipping around one end. These dragonflies were pretty striking-looking, with stripes on their wings. I stuck around a bit, trying to photograph them, and I actually did manage a few, though not without an unforced error. Earlier I had been trying to get a few photos of a couple of bees drinking from a birdbath, and to do those I put my camera into its Macro mode. And then, I forgot to take the camera out of Macro mode for trying to shoot the dragonflies, which I had to try and shoot from a distance. So, the focus wasn’t what I would have liked had I not screwed up my camera settings, but a few shots turned out OK. Here’s one that I gave a quick and rough edit earlier on Snapseed (a good mobile photo editing app). I’ll try to give it a better polish using Lightroom sometime in the future, but for now, this looks pretty good to me.
I doubt I’ll ever have the patience to really embrace wildlife photography as my genre of choice, but I have to say that I’m very happy with how these two shots turned out. One nice thing about photography I’m discovering is that you get pretty much immediate feedback as to how you’re doing, which means you know when you’re leveling up a bit.
Bigger versions can be found on my Flickr stream. Sharp photos of moving birds has been a challenge for me…and I didn’t even use burst to get these!
Last Sunday morning, after leaving the Outer Harbor on a photography walk, I grabbed my camera as I was cresting the Skyway heading into downtown Buffalo. (Relax, there wasn’t anybody behind me for about half a mile…it was a really dead morning on the Skyway right then.)
Some folks want to tear down the Skyway because…you know, actually, I think I’ll save that topic for another time. I’ve got another photo that I haven’t edited yet that I think will work better in the context of talking about the Skyway. For now, I still feel a thrill whenever I’m driving on it toward Buffalo and the road crests as the city rises beneath you….
Downtown Buffalo does look kind of small from this angle, because it’s a narrow and lengthy downtown. Still an exciting vista!
I love art museums…not just for the art, but because watching people look at art is eternally fascinating to me. I suppose this isn’t “street photography”, but for me it’s street photography-adjacent.
A while back we visited the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum in downtown Buffalo. We had somehow never managed to visit this attraction, but now that we have, I look forward to returning and I in fact think it may be one of Buffalo’s most under-known treasures. This museum began as a way for a local man, Jim Sandoro, to exhibit his collection of classic cars, but now it’s so much more than that. In addition to his collection of Pierce-Arrow vehicles, the museum is a fine collection of all manner of automotive memorabilia, including one car that really hit my sweet spot. It’s an amazing museum that should be better known as a local attraction than it seems to be.
I took a ton of photos during our visit, but frustratingly, my camera’s battery died just about a quarter of our way through. I have an extra, but alas–it too was dead! Yes, a goof-up on my part…luckily I still had my phone on me, thus proving the advice I often hear in the photography community: “The best camera is the one you have with you.”
As always, you can peruse all of my photos from that day in this Flickr gallery, but here are some standouts from a really good day:
Motorcycle goodness at the museum too!One sometimes wishes for a return to voluptuous chrome figures adorning our cars, doesn’t one?I can’t lie here: seeing this scarf made me think of Isadora Duncan’s sad fate.
I have never heard of these….If you don’t think the Corvette is beautiful, in all generations, I just don’t know how to relate to you as a person.This is the single most beautiful car in the museum’s collection. Every part of it gleams, and the blue-and-gold color scheme is just dazzling.
Finally, the car that thrilled me the most: this little number, that happens to have featured in one of the greatest automotive stunts in movie history. Yes, this is the very car that James Bond used in The Man With the Golden Gun to maintain his pursuit of villain Francisco Scaramanga, by executing a full cork-screw jump over a canal. (No, we are not discussing that damned slide-whistle sound effect. Harumph!)
Of course that wasn’t actually Roger Moore and Clifton James in the car doing the stunt! Notice how the interior has been reworked, with the driver and the wheel centered, to get the weight right.Next goal: to pose with the Millennium Falcon! Or, one of Bond’s Aston-Martins.
One particularly fascinating part of the museum is its reconstruction of a gas station that was designed (but, as far as I know, never built) by Frank Lloyd Wright. I did find the museum’s display of the gas station kind of hard to follow; at first I didn’t even realize that I was looking at the gas station at all. But the more I looked at it once I realized, the more I was honestly amazed. I was unable to get any photos of the station in its entirety that were to my liking, but here are the gas hoses, as Wright envisioned them: a gravity-feed system instead of pumps, I suppose.
If you’re coming to Buffalo, add the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum to your list of things to see, folks!
