philly

I can't believe I just read this article in the City Paper about a group of anglers fishing right here in Center City. Craziness. And not only are they fishing the banks of the Schuylkill, they're catching 20+ lbs. carp in there. And a bunch of other different kinds of fish with photos to prove it.

I believe the photos are from the entire Delaware Valley region, but still. They've got shots of carp to catfish to trout to bass to eels and even a skate.

I couldn't imagine eating anything out of the Schuylkill, but they don't either. They catch and release. But still. Crazy.

Crazy I say.

Philadelphia Fish Guys.

Whether you like the new Comcast Center or not, most everyone is interested in it in one way or another. It will change the city for the better or for the worse. Who knows. The guy who has spent more time in it aside from the people actually constructing it is Brad Maule of PhillySkyline. He took his third hardhat tour of the structure and has the photos to prove it.

My personal fav from this series is #8.

Well done Brad.

Spreading the Love is the title of this piece which was live painted at Freshout Media's first Canvas Clash installment atop of Whole Foods on South St this past Saturday. It was cool to see the artists work live. I wanted to introduce myself to them as I've been fans of theirs for some time now, but I didn't want to disturb them while they worked. And after they were done, it looked like they were tired from painting in the sun all afternoon, so, I didn't bother. Next time.

I took a few shots from the afternoon of some breakers, other art pieces and the cache of spray paint cans which can be seen here.

On an unrelated note, I think I'm going to change my web host. Any suggestions?

Vincent Laforet is the New York Times' first national contract photographer – he was formerly a staff photog for five years. He's been everywhere. Shot everything. Take a seat and take a look at his latest photo essay for the NYT special sports mag PLAY here. It's an audio slideshow of images shot with a tilt shift lens on one of his camera bodies. Tilt shift photography is a trip. What happens is that the plane of focus is literally shifted from a 90° point to something else. Architectural photographers use it and are able to get perfect (or near perfect) parallel and perpendicular lines. In other uses, a sliver of the image can be in focus and that sliver is not a straight up and down or side to side focus, but a diagonal one.

The slideshow is awesome by itself, but I ventured over to his website – which hijacks and resizes your browser and I fucking hate that poorly designed bullshit – to take a slightly deeper look into his work. I ended up at this page over on Apple.com talking about his digital workflow. The digital workflow is a relatively new beast and the technology to deal with it is getting better. Nowadays, from what I can gather, (digital) photographers are being asked to be the photographer and the photo editor. For newspapers, magazines and other publications, they must shoot, download, edit and transmit photos back to the office, but not all 2,000 or however many images s/he took out in the field, but a selection basically ready for print. Laforet had the luxury of asking Apple's engineers (cool) to develop some kind of workflow to allow him to shoot more and edit less. And they came through via scripts which is downloadable here.

Pretty cool.

I don't work for a newspaper on crazy tight deadlines and I don't use Apple. But it's pretty cool.

Some tilt-shift goodness on flickr. There's tons of Photoshop'd tilt-shift in the mix too.

I'm watching the second democratic presidential primary debate taking place in Manchester, New Hampshire. Right now, it's in the Q & A phase with questions from the audience town hall style. I predicted that every single one of the people asking questions would be white. Right now, I think it's 6 for 6. Let's see if I'm right.

The debate just ended. And it was either 9 for 9 or 10 for 10 including the question from the WMUR blog.

Look at that loaf of bread. To quote Tiny Elvis, "That's huge!" I bought that loaf on Saturday at the Rittenhouse Farmers' Market. It's about 3/4 the height of your average wide neck nalgene water bottle. It's not the best fresh bread I've had, but it's pretty damn good. And it's all of $2. Better than any white bread you'll get from a mass produced bread in the grocery store.

I've been enjoying eating thick slices of it with strawberry spread, no toasting.

I've had a better fresh loaf from Countryside Bakery. I bought a loaf of that bread up at the Fairmount Farmers' Market a couple Thursdays ago – I'm going to get another loaf (or two – one to freeze) this week; once again for $2.

Buy Fresh Buy Local!

It's a long process, but Lady and I are slowly becoming [non-patchouli smelling] hippies. We don't own a car, we buy local, we reduce-reuse-recycle more. But this week, we're going to do a little more. Read more over on lady's blog about our low impact week efforts and more of what we've been doing in the last three years.

It very much helps to have a band of friends who are like-minded and are already doing many things themselves.