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.
2025 in Photography, part 3
Something for Thursday
It’s always amazing to me what random stuff people will suddenly be talking about on social media. The last few days I’ve seen chatter as millennials and GenZers discover “Schoolhouse Rock”, those wonderful animated shorts with memorable songs that taught us things back when we were otherwise watching cartoons on Saturday morning and flooding our bodies with sugary cereal. Ahhh, those were the days.
Anyway, this isn’t even the first batch of “Schoolhouse Rock” nostalgia that I can remember! The first wave came in the mid-90s, when Gen X rediscovered all those old cartoons and songs. There was a CD boxed set of them all, made to look and feel like a school binder that we all remember, and there was a separate disc that I did buy of popular bands of the time doing covers of the most popular Schoolhouse Rock songs. I probably still have that disc sitting in a box someplace…and it was actually a fun album! Hearing all those familiar old catchy-as-hell educational tunes done through the prism of 90s alt-rock? Good times, those.
Here is Better Than Ezra with “Conjunction Junction”. (The sound takes a bit to start up.)
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2025 in photography, part II
2025: The year in photography
It was a good year for photography. Wow, that was easy! Next post!
OK, I’ll go into it a little more. I don’t want to do a long boring thing here, but I noticed a number of things as the year progressed that I take to mean I did, in fact, get better at photography. I “leveled up”, as the kids say.
First, I started getting a lot more confident about just taking the picture. I used to hem and haw and wonder if it was the right shot or if I should or shouldn’t be taking that person’s picture or if I had my composition exactly right or if my settings were right because what if they weren’t and I took the right photo but with the wrong settings so it would end up looking bad and what if…you know the drill. I used to feel a lot of indecision when taking photos, and the result of this was, oddly, taking more photos than I needed, because I find that this lack of knowledge and confidence leads to what photographers call “spray and pray”. That’s when you take a ton of photos in hopes that a few of them might, if you’re lucky enough, turn out to actually be good. And hey, doing that usually gets you something usable. After all, as Ian Fleming wrote, “You cannot sow a million seeds without reaping one potato.” (From Russia, With Love.)
In 2025 I noticed that I was seeing the photo more before I snapped the shutter. Did I always get the photo? Well, no. But I saw it! And that’s definitely an improvement. And a lot of the time, I did get the photo. Yes, there were a bunch of times where I found myself saying to myself, “Ach, ye screwed up the settings and couldnae fix them ‘ere you snapped yon shutter!” (Yes, when scolding myself, it’s in a weird Doohan-esque Scottish brogue.) But I also found myself starting to understand my settings better and being able to adjust them more quickly. Again, that’s huge.
I also felt my eye developing. It’s one thing to be able to competently grab the photo, but it’s quite another to see the compelling composition unfolding before you, to note the leading lines that have presented themselves, and to quickly decide on where to place your subject or where to wait for them to be for the best photo. So, did photography become easier for me in 2025? I’m not sure I’d say that…but it became less of a challenge. Less of a mystery. And that makes me happy.
I also became more aware of what my preferred genres and styles of photography are: streetscapes, infrastructure, nature, floral, and festivals. This is by no means permanent, obviously; you never know how these things will develop, and who knows…when I upgrade my camera set-up to include changeable lenses with some wide-aperture options, maybe I’ll find myself gravitating to portraits.
The balance of this post is a selection of photos of mine from 2025 that I particularly like. As always, all of my best photo work can be found on my Flickr stream. I was going to group this series of posts by photo genre, but you know what? That feels a bit too much like work. So instead, we’ll just randomly hop through my photographic year over a series of posts. (By the way, I’m hoping to have my full 2025 Quiz post up on Saturday.)
More photos to come tomorrow!
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Tuesday Tones
The weekly music feature returns! As does the theme we were exploring before December took over: music inspired by water, or written with a watery “theme”. And today we have two works, by two titans of classical music, neither one of which I had ever heard of before last week when I listened to them for the first time. I feature these two works because they share identical inspiration: a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poems are called “Calm Sea” and “Prosperous Journey”, hence the two works Calm Sea and Prosperous Journey. The first is a cantata by Ludwig van Beethoven; the second is a concert overture by Felix Mendelssohn. The works date, respectively, to 1815 and 1828.
First, the poems:
“Calm Sea”
Deep stillness rules the water
Without motion lies the sea,
And worried the sailor observes
Smooth surfaces all around.
No air from any side!
Deathly, terrible stillness!
In the immense distances
not a single wave stirs.
“Prosperous Voyage”
The fog is torn,
The sky is bright,
And Aeolus releases
The fearful bindings.
The winds whisper,
The sailor begins to move.
Swiftly! Swiftly!
The waves divide,
The distance nears;
Already I see land!
Reading the first poem, one might wonder why the speaker seems so vexed by calm seas. Wouldn’t you want a calm sea? Well…no, you wouldn’t, because this was in the days of sailing vessels, and a calm sea means no wind…and therefore, no voyage. Calm seas were viewed with dread by sailors. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner again for a good illustration of this: a calm sea means a ship floating along powerlessly. No, for a sailor, the wind is the key to a prosperous voyage.
Here are Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).
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Announcing! (and a quiz)
First things first: I have decided to dust off the newsletter that I’ve been maintaining (sort-of) on Substack! But, for various reasons I’ve also decided to migrate my newsletter to the Ghost.io platform. If you previously subscribed to me on Substack, you should have already been migrated and received the new one; but if not, and if you want to subscribe–and why wouldn’t you!–you can go right here to check things out. Yes, this is part of my new focus on content creation in 2026.
And now, let’s take a look at the Sunday Stealing questions for this week!
1. What would you rather be doing right now?
Right this moment, I’m fine! It’s Sunday night, we’ve just finished dinner. We’ll be walking doggos soon. Now, I’d rather not be going back to work tomorrow to start my 2026 work year in earnest, but there it is.
2. What is always on your grocery list?
Half-and-half for coffee. Lactose-free milk. I’m more often than not buying some kind of cheese and chocolate.
3. Have you ever used a fire extinguisher for its intended purpose?
Yes! One time at work one of the ovens had a bit of pooled-up grease that caught fire. I dealt with that right quick!
4. How many times did you text yesterday?
Just twice! Yay, me! I don’t actually text a whole lot.
5. Would you prefer a slow-paced, relaxing vacation or one filled with new sights and experiences?
Some mixture of each. A proper vacation is nice and long with space for both of those things.
Moving on!
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I like the Botanical Gardens at night because it feels like the set of an episode of STAR TREK.
Frohes Neues Jahr!
It’s January 1, 2026. Wow. We made it. We got through 2025. And if I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure that 2025 doesn’t slide in right above 2020 if we’re ranking recent years by how much of a shitshow they’ve been. 2025 was a shitshow, and there’s no mistaking it.
Normally right about now I’m tucking into a lengthy year-end quiz-thing, but this time…I’m not going to do that. At least, not right now. I’m already working on it, but it probably won’t be appearing until Saturday, 10 January. Why so? Because 2025 was a year that needs some thinking about. Lots of dust to settle, and much of it won’t settle for years anyway. I just want to take my time with this, is basically where I land here. So stick around. Regular posting will resume now…though also with a few changes there to come, which I’ll be announcing soon. (Nothing bad, by the way, but I’m going to try adopting a more structured approach to my content creation, in hopes of spinning it into something possibly lucrative.)
Longtime readers will know that my annual tradition is to, at some point in the first few days of the New Year, watch the New Years From Vienna concert, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This year is no different. If you’ve never seen it, I strongly recommend it! PBS always has it on Great Performances, but they do an abbreviated version of the program, which is why I recommend, if you can find it, the BBC’s full version. Still, it is always a wonderful way to bring in the new year and send out the old. And if you just can’t manage that at all, well, here’s the work that is always heard second-to-last in the program. A musical cliche, yes…but cliches become cliches for a reason, and not always bad.
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When the ice falls
A pretty significant winter storm rolled through the northeast the other day, and Buffalo doesn’t tend to get hit too hard by these when they roll through; we’re generally on the outer fringes of whatever dumps snow and ice (or rain) on the northeast corridor. But we did get some ice out of the deal. Here’s the resulting ice as it coated the berries that were left behind on one of the trees in our backyard.
f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISO400
f/2.8, 1/640, 9mm, ISo400