NBM House and Home

Yesterday I needed to clear my head a bit before meeting a friend of mine in Eastern Market, so I decided to swing by the National Building Museum. I didn't have any particular exhibits in mind, but I've never known the NBM to disappoint. By chance I came across the House & Home exhibit. At first glance it didn't seem like much; some displays of rooms and such. The detailed models of city and country residential structures were interesting. But the real magic was toward the end.

Imagine an issue of Dwell magazine that's 10 feet tall and consists of nothing more than full page images of beautiful, modern homes and apartments. Now instead of still images, imagine video, constantly alternating between each side of the magazine, showing people living in the homes, along with some Helvetica-like music. It really was enthralling.

On top of that, one the dwellings featured in the video was MICA's very own Gateway building. My picture above doesn't really do it justice.

If you're in the area of the National Building Museum or the Gateway building, I suggest you take 30 minutes and check them out. You won't be disappointed.

Fort McHenry Radio

This isn't really photography related, but I thought I'd post something about it since I can't seem to find it elsewhere on the Internet. One dark, early morning commuting through the Fort McHenry Tunnel, I noticed that certain radio stations would stay on the air even as I was passing through the tunnel. "Surely not,"¹ I thought to myself; I was underground, under the water. There must be a repeater.

I pointed this out to a friend of mine, and he figured that since the stations coming through were from Baltimore, maybe they had enough power to make it into the tunnel. I had my doubts, but I didn't have any evidence to the contrary.

A few months ago I was driving through the tunnel yet again, but this time I'd left the radio in scan mode since none of my presets had anything good on. Sure enough, the tuner landed on 107.1 MHz about half way through the tunnel. A female voice simply repeated, "This is the Maryland Transportation Authority radio rebroadcast system for bore 3 of the Fort McHenry Tunnel. This is only a test."

So not only is there a repeater for the tunnel, there's actually one for each bore of the tunnel. I haven't done an exhaustive search for stations that they're repeating, but so far I've found 100.7 and 102.7. I'm sure there are more.

I also haven't checked to see if there's something similar for the Harbor Tunnel. My guess is that it's really there to provide emergency broadcasts to people that might be stuck in the tunnel during the regular bumper-to-bumper delays. Obviously it also provides entertainment, probably helps relieve some people's claustrophobia, and may give workers something to listen to while they're doing maintenance.

Ok, that was a lot of words for not a lot of content. The picture above was taken (haphazardly) with a Leica M6 on Kodak Tri-X. Normally I wouldn't post such a poor photo, but it seems to capture a bit of the grittiness of commuting in this area. It's also my only photo that's remotely relevant to this article.

Happy shooting and commuting!

¹Insert Airplane quote here.

From Industry to Charm

Really these pictures could have been taken in any industrial area. These pictures happen to be from Baltimore. I still believe in Baltimore. Between 1950 and 2012, the population dropped from about 1.1 million to around 600 thousand. But I think the city is well over that statistic. Today it's more about the art, the business, the waterfront, the history, and of course, the charm.

If all you know of Baltimore is what you've seen on The Wire, you know nothing. I dare you to walk up Charles Street from Federal Hill to Penn Station and not fall in love.

These pictures were not taken anywhere near Charles Street. At no point was I afraid that some thug would take away my Leica though. Just put that image out of your head.

Forwards and Backwards

Forwards: The trusty, old 4GB Core2 Quad I built in 2008 finally took a turn for the worse. The main 160GB IDE drive was giving all kinds of random read and write errors, and the heat sink simply wouldn't say on the processor. Obviously, both of these problems could be easily fixed piecemeal, but it was time for something new. Four gigabytes of RAM just isn't enough to run Chrome, Lightroom 4, Photoshop CS5, and iTunes. Thankfully a new Microcenter opened up nearby just a couple months ago. A couple days and a few hundred dollars later, I'd built a quiet Core i5 with 16GB of RAM and 120GB SSD. Amazing. I guess I can't really be that amazed with something like an iPhone 4 in my pocket. Now that's amazing.

Backwards: I've had the Leica M6 for just over a year now. It hasn't had a working battery for almost that entire time, which means I've been eyeballing the exposures for a year now. The pictures below were uploaded to flickr without any levels, brightness, or contrast adjustments in Photoshop or Lightroom. They're essentially straight out of the camera. It's a good feeling.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that you don't really need a faster computer any more than you need a "better" camera if you take your time and get it right the first time.

To everyone (anyone?) reading this, I wish you happy holidays and the best of luck in the new year.

Arizona on Film

I already wrote my post on our trip to Arizona a while back, but I've been meaning to post some of the film shots that I took with the Xpan while I was there. I used almost all of my remaining Kodak E100VS in the process. I'm sad to see this film go out of production; it has some of the best sunrise and sunset color I've ever seen. Using it almost seems wrong. However, the Xpan was made for the wide open desert vistas, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to shoot one of my favorite films in one of my favorite cameras. Film can't live in the freezer forever.