The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
On Labor Day, The Wife and I went down to Canalside in downtown Buffalo to hang out a bit, and afterwards we stopped at Wilkeson Pointe on the Outer Harbor. We hadn’t planned on the second stop, but we wanted to see more closely the big kites that were flying there. They were like giant airborne cephalopods, brightly colored and vibrant.
What a great show this was!
My Sunday Photography Walk was at Buffalo’s Outer Harbor again, with a side-trek into the Tifft Nature Preserve. Photos here…but these are my favorites from the day’s work:
This next is my favorite photo from yesterday. This makes me think that maybe my time practicing photography is not actually time wasted!
Heavens, I think I may be actually getting better at this photography thing! I know it’s only been a short while with this camera, but I’m getting to the point already where carrying this camera around feels natural. Looking around feels natural. Thinking in terms of, “How can I capture this? What’s a neat way of looking at it?” is becoming natural.
Or…at least more natural than it used to feel.
This past Sunday morning I ventured up to Chestnut Ridge for the second time in three weeks. (Titling this post “The Ridge, again” might be a bit confusing, since I didn’t post my thoughts on the photos I took that day yet!) What’s nice about Chestnut Ridge, which is by area larger than Central Park in Manhattan, is that you can go multiple times and not visit the same areas. This time I walked along a different stream, one that has a spot where it tumbles down probably twenty feet or so of incline over a few hundred feet laterally, making for a series of neat-looking miniature waterfalls. This is a spot that ends in a large pool about four-feet deep. Farther upstream the bed is lined by large moss-covered boulders. Here are some of the photos I took that day; more are in a Flickr album, here.
Meantime, here are some of the shots I took the other day. I like how many of these turned out.
Pump House, and Pump House Roof Detail.
I love how these old pump-houses are left to slowly crumble in the forests of Chestnut Ridge. The overgrowth around them and the moss on them really make them feel like something out of the backgrounds in a Hayao Miyazaki movie.
Stair-stepping Stream, the colors of the pool, and life in and atop.
One thing about deciding to take photography seriously at this point, after years of snapshotting, is that I already have a pretty good sense of what my usual subjects will be and what styles of photography I will gravitate toward. In this case: when I’m around water, I almost get twitchy if I can’t take a photo somehow. Lakes, rivers, streams, cataracts, pools, puddles, the sea: it’s all fascinating to me.
Rushing water: using shutter priority.
These next three photos involve ongoing experiments with Shutter-priority mode. Managing shutter speed is another way of regulating light that reaches the camera sensor, and shutter speed in particular affects how motion is captured. A very fast shutter speed freezes action, while a slower shutter speed allows for blurring of the action. In the case of flowing water, a slower shutter speed turns the same rush of water over some rocks into something gossamer-like, looking like a veil of water rather than a distinct flow. You can see the difference in the next two, taken of the same spot but with different shutter speeds:
This one, I did not get a comparison shot; I just really like how this turned out. Could it be sharper? Sure, as I was free-handing the shot at this point. When shooting with slower shutter speeds, vibrations of the camera itself actually show up in the image as blur, which is why tripods and timers and remotes are tools that help with this sort of photography.
I’m not sure what this rising steam was! Another hiker had passed through just a few seconds before I saw this mist, and I wondered if he had dropped a cigarette there, but I checked and no, he did not. So I suppose this is the mist of water rising from a dead and fallen tree trunk. Getting this was pure luck.
Mossy rocks and the stream. I think, if I were to do this one again, I’d shoot lower–maybe even set up a tripod in the water–so the framing of the shot would eliminate the fallen tree. Fallen trees are a major feature at Chestnut Ridge. They are always in evidence.
Buffalo-Niagara from the Chestnut Ridge Hill
This is one of this region’s best views. From the sledding hill facing north, you can see Buffalo (at right) and, at left in the distance, Niagara Falls, ON. In these two photos you can see two different approaches to editing: the first dials back the saturation while increasing the shadows and highlights, making the area of sunlight in the foreground pop a bit. The second photo is not zoomed at all, showing pretty much the entirety of the view from the Ridge. This one I brightened and dialed the saturation up, quite a bit more than I usually do, even.
By the way, that’s only 13 of the 30 shots that are in the Flickr album linked above…and the Flickr album only contains 30 of the more than 80 photos I took that day! I used to think it was all a matter of composing your perfect shot and then taking it, so you only end up with those perfect shots. It turns out that photographers take many, many more shots than they ever end up using…and that’s OK. It just means I didn’t understand that part of the process. Now, I’m on board.
Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!
Some shots from my photography session down at the Buffalo Outer Harbor this past Sunday:
More photos from that day, with full-size versions, in this Flickr album.
By the way, I think I am now going to start using HUE as an acronym: Happy Unplanned Element. I think Bob Ross (“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents”) would approve. “Accident” still sounds overly negative in my ears, though. So, a HUE is an element in my photo that I didn’t plan on capturing, either because I didn’t know it was there or because I couldn’t avoid capturing it.
Always look for your HUEs, people!
For the last couple of years we’d heard great things about a new-ish restaurant in Buffalo called Compass Run. We finally went there a few months ago and loved it and made mental notes to get back. Last night we did…but the impetus for last night’s reservation was that Compass Run announced its closing a few weeks ago. They’re only open a few more weeks, I think.
Alas!
Compass Run had a Southern-inspired, seafood-heavy menu that featured quite a few celiac-friendly selections. From what I’ve read, the restaurant is closing because the owners, who already run a successful restaurant in Buffalo called Toutant, have a young family and are likely finding the degree of work needed to run two restaurants more than is compatible with that family life. What’s interesting to me is that the site occupied by Compass Run was another restaurant by the same folks, called Dobutsu. We never made it to Dobutsu, but this is something I’ve noticed from afar over the years: people own a restaurant, and they run it for a while with a certain menu, and then they close it, remake the inside, come up with a new menu (or “concept”, in restaurant lingo), and then re-open under a new name. I often wonder if the reworking comes out of an attempt to find a more lucrative concept, or out of culinary ennui, or some combination thereof.
Restaurants open and close regularly; it’s the nature of the business. Only a few manage to stick around for years, and even those will often do so if they find new owners and chefs who are willing to carry on the tradition. Compass Run is closing, but it has a good chance of staying a restaurant–at least, that location stands a good chance. The owners have indicated that their plan is to convert the location into a leasable, turn-key restaurant, so they’ll still have a stake in the ongoing development of that particular part of town. If there is a new restaurant there soon, I hope it’s good and celiac-friendly!
Here’s some of the food we ate there. Alas!
This spring has been odd, even by Buffalo-Niagara standards. We’ve had our usual cruddy spring, but judging by how advanced the trees are right now, it must have been a better than usual spring. We’re usually not this green until around the 15th of May, so we’re a good week-and-a-half ahead of the game. There was an entire week of warmer-than-usual (including our first readings above 80 degrees) a while back…but then that disappeared and we had the more familiar weeks of dank, rainy, and muddy. However, it didn’t get that cold again, and we haven’t seen snow in quite a while. (Not true for people in the hillier country south of Buffalo, but that’s their problem, innit!)
Anyway, we’ve finally reached another extended warm period, with little rain in the forecast. So last night The Wife and I went to dinner at a restaurant that’s right on Lake Erie. We’d been there before, in the dead of winter when it was frightfully cold and windy, but last night was warm and beautiful. As we left the sunset was unfolding.
People around here like to cite Buffalo’s sunsets over water as a particular selling point for our region, and while that’s not going to top the usual concerns people have like good paying jobs and cheap housing and the like, I wouldn’t sell the sunset thing short. We have terrific sunsets here, and yes, if your vantage point is the right one, they’re over water. And while no sunset here is going to make me forget the ones in Oahu anytime soon…these will suffice until I can get back to Waikiki.
Alan Bedenko has the rundown on an obnoxious bit of copyright enforcement going on in Buffalo: a mural artist who painted a mural on donated exterior building wall-space, after saying that he intended it to be the kind of mural people photograph for Instagram and the like, is billing businesses in whose ad materials his mural shows up, and then suing them if they don’t pay up. No “cease-and-desist”, just straight to “Give me money”, and often directed at those with deep pockets. This honestly seems less like “an artist protecting their copyright” and more like “an artist using copyright to shake the money tree”.
I honestly wouldn’t be all that disturbed if the owner of the building where the mural resides decided they didn’t want any part of this and had the thing powerwashed out of existence.
Another couple of interesting points:
Indeed. There are a lot of fascinating and wonderful murals in Buffalo; this one isn’t really even one of them.
The other night we attended a night-time orchid show at the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens. Somehow we managed to live here for quite a few years before we finally visited the Gardens, and even so we’ve not gone there terribly often. But The Daughter bought The Wife a year’s membership for her birthday, so now we can go more often.
The gardens were gorgeously illuminated in colored lights, and it was a lovely cold winter’s night as we arrived. As we walked up, Venus and Jupiter (I think) were visible in the twilight sky, hanging just above the Garden building. Then, inside…wonder.
As the Christmas Blizzard recedes into memory and melting (it’s been well above freezing for days now, so most of the major snowpack that fell during that storm is gone already), I find myself thinking about how fortunate we were to be able to retain power and ride this one out in comfort.
Note my window: for about two whole days, I had no view out my own library, because the winds pushed so much snow through the screen and onto the window itself. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the raging winds outside, this might have actually been idyllic.
(By the way, one great thing overalls can do is give new life to old sweaters which have become frumpy in the shape department!)
I make no secret that my day job is doing Facilities Maintenance at a large local grocery store. At my particular location, there are two buildings. The older building, built in 1977, originally housed The Store until 1996, when the second building went up to contain the new, expanded Store. The older building now houses a few smaller businesses, but my company still owns and maintains both buildings.
The new building, with The Store, is powered from the utility company via lines that connect from streetside poles to the main transformers. The old building was powered by a buried utility line that ran from a streetside pole, into the ground, and under the parking lot until it met that building’s main transformers. In the last few years, I’ve seen both of these power systems fail, each time on the utility side. What happens is that the power goes out in the building, and then the electricians we contract are called on an emergency basis to assess the situation and determine if repair is their responsibility or if it is on the utility side, in which case the power company has to come out.
When the power went because of a pole-transformer malfunction to the new building, it took probably about an hour for our electricians to arrive and determine where the issue was; then it took another hour for the power company to arrive with a crew and a truck with a boom-lift on it; then another hour or maybe two for the repair, after which our electricians were able to re-energize The Store. The outage began early in the day, and we were back up and running before noon.
In the case of the old building, the outage similarly began early in the day–actually, this one was overnight. It wasn’t a complete outage, which made diagnosis difficult; it was hard for our electricians to determine if the problem was actually on the building side or on the utility side, and they had to wait for the utility folks to arrive. It was also hard for the utility folks to make the determination where the problem was, since the main utility line was underground, running beneath half the parking lot and a driveway. Eventually, however, it turned out that the buried power line was the problem and the utility supply line needed replaced. So there were two options here: bury a new line, which would mean digging up a whole lot of ground and pavement, laying the line, replacing the ground and repaving, or, installing a new pole and running a new utility line from the street overhead.
Because of time and expense, they went with option B: a new pole and an above-ground, in-the-air supply line.
This installation still took over a day, with the workers working overnight to install the new pole, run the new line, make the connections, and get everything energized.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because my region has just come through one of the nastiest winter storms anyone can recall, and as I write this, there are still several thousand people without power in the City of Buffalo. Many of these outages were caused by downed power lines, when poles collapsed after withstanding many hours of winds exceeding 60mph. I saw a lot of people on social media screaming about how antiquated our electrical infrastructure is, and why can’t they just bury all the lines and be done with it!
That’s a problem with our public discourse in the face of disasters, isn’t it? People just throwing out suggestions–Bury all the power lines!–as if they’re the least bit realistic or reasonable. No one in these conversations seemed to consider for one second the magnitude of an infrastructure project that would be for an entire city (particularly one that is not wealthy–but more on that below), or if it would even be possible or advisable.
I did a bit of googling and reading, and it turns out that buried power lines are preferable in many instances, but as with all things, there are tradeoffs. Burying lines means, by definition, doing a lot of unsightly digging and then covering up, and lines have to go under existing streets and roads and lots. That is a lot of very expensive and time-consuming work…and durability is an issue as well. While you don’t have to worry about buried lines breaking because their poles broke, you do have to worry about them breaking because of corrosion (even in thick insulation), and when they do fail–as I saw directly just last summer–the options for repair or limited and intrusive.
Another facet of this discussion was the constant refrain that, the power should have been back ON already, dammit! And I get this frustration. While I absolutely salute the electricians and line-workers who have to go out and actually do this work, which is dangerous and often happens in unpleasant conditions, I myself have been irritated during power loss events at the lack of concrete information that our power companies provide. I get it.
But.
From the moment those utility workers mentioned above determined that they had to replace the buried cable to the moment the work was done and power restored to those four businesses, it was fully twenty-four hours, if not more. That’s to restore power to a single building in the case of a failed underground power line.
My point is this: while yes, the power companies should share more information, most people have very little real notion of what is involved with these repairs and how long they take in the best conditions.
Moving on, though…this storm has exposed an awful lot of failure from the conceptual level as to how to deal with a storm like this, how a city in the 21st century should be equipped to deal with a storm like this, and what the priorities should be in the wake of a storm like this.
It’s true that this was a “generational” event. Nothing like this storm has been seen here since either 1985 or 1977, so when we talk about preparation, no one is seriously suggesting hundreds of plow trucks standing at the ready. But the simple fact is that in the community of Buffalo, there simply is not enough community infrastructure to provide vital support at the hyper-local level in the event of a serious weather emergency that significantly delays the city’s and the county’s major efforts. It is simply not acceptable–or it shouldn’t be–in 21st century America for entire families to go hungry during the five or six days they are without power and unable to procure food in their food-desert neighborhoods where no stores even exist to be open in the first place.
It is simply not acceptable, or it shouldn’t be acceptable, that a city like Buffalo, whose national reputation is “Holy shit, the snow!”, should be so resolutely bad at removing the stuff, with no tried-and-true plan of attack. The city had barely finished cleaning up from the last snowstorm, which was just six weeks ago.
It is simply not acceptable, or it shouldn’t be acceptable, for a city that faces this sort of storm (if not with this intensity) to find itself short on equipment every time it happens, all the while continuing to increase its Police budget every year.
It is simply not acceptable for the city’s Mayor to go mostly silent during the event but come out with his strongest language when it’s almost over and when there’s been a small amount of sporadic looting by desperate and hungry citizens in the poorest neighborhoods. And it is entirely unacceptable for the general party line from the entire local governmental apparatus to be, at this point, “Look, we told you the storm was coming, you should have had two weeks of food on hand.” In a city where many live below the poverty line on a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.
I find myself wondering a lot of things: Why were disaster declarations so slow in coming? Why was the National Guard mobilized and dispatched to Buffalo so late in the game, and in such small numbers? Why are Military Police being used to ticket drivers instead of distributing food and medicine, and attending to snowed-in citizens who may have desperate needs at this point? Why are local towns using SWAT vehicles that they have no business owning in the first place for snow removal, which they are not designed to do?
Some people believe that climate change will mean more of these kinds of events in the future. I don’t know if that’s the case, but we have these kinds of events now, and the response has not been encouraging…nor is the fact that the people at the helm have been there for years. If we’re going to be a city in a place where once in a while weather can bring just about everything to a standstill, that’s not in itself a bad thing…but we have to be able to do more, much more, than just tell people “Guess you shoulda bought more food, then.” I find myself thinking a lot today about John Scalzi’s old Being Poor essay, which he wrote in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the appalling chorus of scolds saying things like, “You knew the hurricane was coming, so why didn’t you just leave?”