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: the past few weeks.

comrades and lovers--i return with photos!
i'm sorry for the long break. at a few parties over the past few days, several friends (and even vague acquaintances!) from high school have told me that they like my blog and/or photography. shamefacedly, i realized i haven't updated this thing since the fourth! there have been quite a few pictures fermentin' on my camera, spanning the time between posts. they are all green. maybe this is because they have been sitting on my camera for so long that they have started to get moldy. take a look.
the below four photos were taken at that time of the day--the late afternoon haze on a summer day when the light is golden and every picture you take is amazing. check out the cool "flare" effects caused by my dusty, uncleaned lens.that's my dad. it's his birthday on monday (july 20th). you should facebook him and tell him happy birthday! his name is chris.i'm friends with him. that's right--he's my dad and my friend!

happy birthday, dad!

title: jun 27

i uploaded some pictures to flickr planning to post them here, but forgot about them completely! i visited the marina in trenton where nathan's parents are fixing up their boat for a cookout type thing last weekend, and it was a totally beautiful day. i got lost for like 2 hours trying to get there, but when i did arrive i ran around frantically taking pictures.
the marina is right next to a coal plant which captures the sunset beautifully. it also buzzes every 15 minutes or so. it's at this point that i realize i am really, really from new jersey--i was going to describe the coal plant as "majestic". it's an impressive structure, but it ain't majestic.

flickr did a really good job of arranging my photos on my front page:
does it grab similar colors on purpose, or is that just luck?

title: apr 19

beautiful. beautiful beautiful beautiful! the weather has been kickass, causing me to forsake my work and run free about the city. with spring my head gets pulled in every direction, full of ideas and choices and impulses. this is why this post is tagged with almost every tag i've got--i'm all over the place!

let me tell you why i love the "selective color" feature in photoshop. no, better yet, let me show you. this is, after all, a photo blog.horray for cool jellies! i took a trip to the new england aquarium on sunday, where a (heavily sponsored by soveriegn bank) exhibit of jellies was going on! the underground rooms were packed with hideous, screaming children (as was the rest of the aquarium), but you wouldn't know it from the looks of these guys. they're all "oh, yeah, i'm just glubbin' along."
did you know that to reproduce, they just spray their sperm and eggs all over the freakin' ocean and hope the stuff runs into each other somewhere in the great blue? squishy. insert "salty ocean" joke here. GUH.

p.s.: check out the cool new bar of links i've created right over there ---->
it has a bunch of links to my friends' blogs, which you can and should enjoy to the full extent of the law. i would also like to take this time to pee my pants over the fact that we are coming up on 500 hits, and a decent amount of them are not from my mom and dad's computer. thank you, boys and girls!

title: mar 28

today i went on a photo adventure with my dear friend jordan of best friend for lifelong. we tooled around by the esplanade, taking photos and talking. MIT was out there sailing. i edited a lot of my photos this time around because we were talking about it. what do you think?
i also recommend checking out his blog for both funny posts and his take on today!