title: home to boston

this is the view from my room on the 11th floor. if you want to appreciate the beauty of a city, 11 stories up is the place.

title: venezia di notte

i have been having some strange experiences lately. nathan is playing assassin's creed 2, which takes place in the vital parts of renaissance italy: florence, venice, rome, and even san gimigano among them. it gives me a constant feeling of deja-vu. i have never seen a game so accurately depict reality before. they bathed florence in the right light, detailed all of the intricate decorations of il duomo and st. marco's (which, incidentally, you climb all over), captured the insanity that is rome. we have been joking that i got suckered into paying for the real tour when i could just have done it in the game. of course there's no truth in that; italy must be lived to be understood.

i took the classic college student course through italy: venice to florence to rome. from florence i also visited san gimigano, which was probably the most beautiful place i've ever been to. and i've been places.
the train ride from munich was staggeringly long, but tempered by the stunning magnitude of the snowy alps passing by the windows, good friends, and a card game called scopa (heard of it?). we stepped onto the platform in venice's central station at night, and wandered in awe for quite a while after checking in to our hostel (which happened to be a 3-bedroom-apartment-cum-hostel). we actually did get lost, but that's supposed to happen in venice. enough yammering, here is a visual description:
often the camera will distort the colors of the night, but i promise these are accurate. venice really is green at night. it's eerie and peaceful; feels thick with ghosts who dance and laugh and cry and kiss and kill each other. i will share with you how bright venice can get in my next post.

title: nighttime in paris

we come at last to the end of our paris series!
i took a small break in between posts to go to belgium. no big deal.
the last day i spent in paris was a monday. at night the city was deserted (parisians have to sleep too), and alex and i walked around with a cheap bottle of wine and all the time in the world. an interesting fact about this night: it is the first time i have peed on (not in, mind you) a foreign country. don't worry, i managed to avoid peeing on myself. check this first photo out extra close: alex took this little baby at night without a tripod. he has the steady hands of a surgeon.
this last photo is my absolute favorite ever. alex's idea, my drunken execution.
coming up are photos from belgium, including bruges, ghent, and my birthday in brussels!

title: amsterdam and back again!

this post is loooong overdue. if any of you have been to my flickr, the photos from my weekend in amsterdam (september 25-27) have been there for a while. i can get myself to edit and upload them, but posting is apparently one step too many! as you probably have figured out, getting the feel of a place is not my strongest point. if you want an all-inclusive tour of amsterdam, better to find it on earthalbum. however, if you're here for a hana's-eye-view...
i don't know how i left that city without visiting the FOAM museum! my friend alex and i did get to the van gogh museum, however, which was really cool. i felt a real kinship with van gogh while walking through the exhibits and reading about his life, and this was despite the moderately large crowd milling around the galleries. we also took a trip as a class to the rijksmuseum (where i didn't get to see the famous rembrandt de nachtwacht because my teacher spent so long lecturing about other paintings! gaaaahh!!!) and the amsterdams historisch museum, both of which were really good lessons in dutch art and social culture.

over the past two weeks, how to accurately describe this city has been buzzing around inside my head. judgement aside, i can absolutely say that amsterdam is food for the senses. if you are paying a little attention, you will find yourself soaking in the strangeness of humanity when you visit.

title: jul 18

i am very wary of night photography. i have a tripod, but i rarely use it because my lens is very poor in low light anyways. i was in the mood to try it last night, though, so nathan and i went to the watershed and i set up my camera (that sentence sounds very inappropriate, young lady). i took a whole bunch of pictures of the sky, trying to capture an image of the stars, and took a few shots at the skyline.
this last one is really freakin' cool, if i do say so myself. you can't really tell from this tiny photo, but if you click here and go to the large version on my flickr page, you can see the evenly-spaced blinks from the plane's red light as it flies across the shot. i promise this is the actual image i took (no stars added), but i completely changed the contrast, brightness, and color settings. as i post this, i have photos of fireflies from tonight waiting on my camera (the draft of this post has been sitting on my computer unpublished all day). this is how things get done in the summer. :)

title: jun 26

my friend mikee is really cool. he can do a really good russian accent, he can mime violence like nobody's business, and his voice is as smooth as belgian chocolate. he also has an old pinball machine in his basement--the kind that's completely mechanized and makes those satisfying dinging noises that all the virtual ones try to mimic. it's really pretty. while hanging out today i took some pictures of it, instead of the party that was going on in the background.
i used nathan's tiny canon powershot 880 and my old powershot a520. the first photo here is my a520, and the second two are his 880. i bought that a520 in hawaii in 2004--it was the first digital camera in my family and it's of the variety that still had out-of-the-lens analog viewfinders on them (making the film-to-digital transition easier for technophobes everywhere). this thing took all kinds of crap from me in my early teens, just learning how to use a camera for more than family portraits and blurry pictures of my dog. i paid for it with allowance money in the form of travelers' checks, with my rudimentary signature on the back. it's kind of like an old friend. aww.

in my humble, unknowledgeable opion, when it comes to consumer digital cameras, canon blows any competition out of the water. perhaps they blow competition out of the water in other fields, but this is all i have any expertise in. discuss if you want. see you in the comments!

title: mar 24

i was recently on a film shoot which went from 10 pm to 4 am. afterward a couple of friends and i explored the city at those ungodly hours of the morning, eventually making our way to the beach to watch the sunrise. i didn't have my camera with me, but i was seeing so many things which were strange and different than they looked in the day. i made a mental note to do it again with my camera. of course, i picked the coldest night of the month to do it (last night). i woke up at 4 am, did some serious bundling, and went out to see what i could see.

i think i was a little jazzed up on coca cola and sugary diner pancakes the time after the film shoot, because i didn't see as many AMAZING pictures this time around. but i really enjoyed the search. the city is really surreal that time of night.
please make it be warm again!

title: weekend of oct 5

going back even further in time, and trying to catch myself up: the weekend before my birthday i visited my aunt muggy and her family in winchester. we went apple picking and to the topsfield fair (a shocking affair, i do declare..). i spent this entire weekend jazzed up on caramel apples. i was too busy eating them to take photos of them. just a few little photos illustrate my first weekend of experimentation with my d80:
the inifite amount of possible explanations for the expressions in this photo is really my only reason for posting it.