Panic! in Seattle

This is the first shot I've taken this year that I thought I would throw up on the photo blog. It's quickly growing on me. At the time when I took it I didn't like it. But I'm in this colorizing phase where I'll take turn my color photos into black an white and then selectively add color to various sections of the photo...such as the red lettering above Pike's Market in Seattle.

The colored letters spell "panic" not for any other reason than I could do it easily with the available letters. That, and I really like the song Panic, by The Smiths. In case you're interested, Pete Yorn does a great cover of the song on his "Live at the Roxy" album. But I digress.

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Work Shall Set You Free

This is a picture of the front gate of one of the first concentration camps set up to imprison and eventually murder political prisoners of the Nazy regime, including Jews. It in the city of Dacau, which is a suburb of Munich in the south of Germany.

It's ironic that the inscription says "work shall set you free" because rarely did that happen. This was a sobering place, especially when you consider the conditions in which they were all forced to live...and some die.

I thought this shot looked better in black and white than in color. And something about skewing the composition fit with the mood of the day. I darkened the photo up a bit to make the iron in the bars stand out a bit more.

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Salvaging a Bad Day

I moved to Tokyo, Japan in September of 2000 for a 10 month assignment with work. My previous experience with being in Tokyo was as an intern in 1998 and I lived in the middle of nowhere and had no money to explore. So I was eager to get out of the city this time around.

2 hours by train outside of Tokyo is a place called Nikko, an alpine get-away that used to be a retreate for the Shogun rulers of Japan in the 1600's. It's full of temples and is one of the neatest places in all of Japan.

Well, on my trip up to Nikko, it was raining and it was crowded and it was a miserable experience. I had wanted to visit Lake Chuzenji, pictured below, but all I could see of the lake was this bridge. I couldn't even see a huge waterfall nearby. I could only hear it and feel the mist. The fog was so thick I couldn't even see the stupid waterfall.

I like this picture becuase it's simple and it's bleak...kind of like my day. If the fog were any thicker and the bridge any longer I would half expect the bridge to just vanish like those baseball players when they walked in the corn in the movie "Field of Dreams." The other reason why I like this picture is because it was one of the first few sets of pictures I took with my first digital camera. It was a 1.3 megapixel camera from Olympus. The thing took a few seconds to capture an image and a few more seconds to recover so you could take another image. In hindsight, the image quality wasn't anywhere a film camera, but the "cool" factor was certainly high.

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