d.c. move

The D.C. part might as well stand for dark clouds, which accurately describes the skies in Washington D.C. during my recent visit. I trekked east to help my sister and her husband move to their new home. I haven't turned a photo black and white for a long time, but I guess the weather just had me seeing in grey. Or maybe it was all the backbreaking labor! =)

[When converted to black and white these pictures look more like Appalachia than D.C., but, yes, this house is actually in the city!]

my video bag gets a seat on the plane

En route home from the inauguration our flight plan was to go from Dulles to Charlotte, Charlotte to St. Louis. The planes we took were smaller planes, with two seats on either side of the aisle. The overhead compartments were small and so was the space under the seat. So what’s a girl to do when she’s got a bulging video bag that doesn’t fit anywhere?

I talked to the flight attendant and explained my “expensive bag” that needed to stay on the plane with me. Stowing it below wasn’t an option. Lucky for me, he thought the bag was so important that it deserved a seat of its own. (I don’t expect this to ever happen again!) So here’s a little shout out to my favorite US Airways flight attendant. Thank you.

[Sorry for the quality of the photo. I shot it as we scrambled to our next flight, which we managed to make with only about 10 minutes between our landing time and our next flight's take off time. Yes, that's the camera strap in the frame. Uggggh!!!]

the metro

D.C. after everyone went home. Red Line. Forest Glen.

From the Washington Post:

It is the deepest station in the Metro system, located 21 stories below street level. Passengers travel between the platform and the street in one of six high-speed elevators. A one-way trip takes less than 20 seconds.

inauguration day

4:55 a.m. - The bus leaves a Baltimore airport hotel. I'm on board with a group of Ritenour High School students. They've worked hard to get here today. All of them are part of an organization called Partners in Achievement. They work to close the achievement gap between White and minority students.


7:17 a.m. - After walking and walking and pushing our way through massive crowds, we reach the mall. My headphone cord gets stuck on a bush in the dark mass. A student is nice enough to untangle me so I don’t rip the cord. Our spot is pretty close for the non-ticketed area, and we can see a jumbotron well.


8:53 a.m - We wait in the cold.


8:54 a.m. - Still waiting. I pull my fingers out of my gloves and make fists to keep my fingers working. I do a lot of jumping up and down, dancing and other strange movements to keep the blood flowing. About half of the group leaves to look for warmth. We don't see them again.


12:42 p.m. - The show is done. The trash remains. I leave the National Mall, headed for the bureau 1.5 miles away.

2:15 p.m. - I make it to the office after walking south all the way to the Washington Channel and west to 24th Street to get north to 1025 Connecticut Avenue. (For those of you who don’t know D.C., this is massively out of the way.) People fill the streets.

9:15 p.m. - Video is posted. See it here.

public transportation

| warning: image has been oversharpened using Photoshop |

In light of recent photo scandals and ethical debates about how a photo should or should not be manipulated, I want to be transparent and let you all know that this photo, indeed, has been manipulated. I'm not a big fan of messing with photos in Photoshop. I rarely go into anything except basic toning and, occasionally, cropping. I sharpen my images a smidge for the Web. Tonight I accidently typed the sharpening amount wrong and sharpened this picture by 150 percent with a radius of 40. Yikes! Somehow, when I went back to the original image, I wasn't as happy with it as I was with the accident version. We'll just call this one art.

Lesson 4: Don't oversharpen images for editorial uses. You'll probably get fired. Oversharpen them for your blog, but let your viewers know what they are seeing.

As for the public transportation part, this photograph was shot en route from Smithsonian to Takoma Park Station on the Metro. I love riding public transportation. I love watching other people use public transportation. Sadly, I don't use it as often as I'd like to in St. Louis. If I had stops closer to home and work, you bet I'd use it. So I guess I'm one of those crummy, conditional public transport fans that loves public transportation when in cities where it is more integrated- BART in San Fran, Metro in D.C., MTA in New York, the T in Boston. Heck, the metro in L.A. is even better every time I visit. The first photo project I worked on as a freshman at the University of Missouri was called "Faces Going Places"- portraits of people who rode the Columbia buses. I never noticed how much I talked about public transportation until my brother-in-law called from L.A. to let me know he was riding the metro. For some reason, that made him think of me. That cracked me up.

Detroit's public transit wins the prize for coolest name I've heard: PeopleMover