Views from the bridge.

Over this three-day Labor Day weekend, I walked each morning to the Kensington Parkway bridge over Rock Creek, with a telephoto zoom lens on a full-frame digital SLR.


Saturday morning:

Sunday morning:

Monday morning: 

(click any image for full-screen)

"... the essence of the thing ..."

"To become some other thing, you have to not be that thing in the first place, and, if you are that thing, then it is hard for you to really believe that anyone else can become it, since the essence of the thing is having been it all along."

-from The View from a Bridge by Adam Gopnik in this week's issue of the New Yorker.

"He's silent, wherever he is." [On metaphorical terrain.]

"By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast* in the storm."

-From page 402 of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon.

______
*From the Oxford English Dictionary:

"Science."

What little we have ever understood
is like an offering we make beside the sea.
It is pure worship when pursued
as its own end, to find out. Mystery,
the undiminishable silent flood,
stretches on out from where we pray
round the clear altar flame. The god
accepts the sacrifice and turns away.

"Science" by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960-2010.


h/t: The Writer's Almanac

On going wide (& tall) without schlepping.

When I travelled Down Under this month, I did not bring a "real camera," but I was able to shoot wide

The Cove, Sydney, Australia. May 13, 2012.

and tall

Town Hall, Sydney, Australia. May 14, 2012.

using the iPhone "Pano" app (click photos for larger versions).

Zip Code 10048.

[Photo by Jon Thaler; Nikon 35mm f/2 on D700.]

Once upon a time...

[View from a Southbound Amtrak train, yesterday.]

viewpoint

We were standing at this spot for some time, gazing at the breathtaking scenery, when our guide asked, "Are you ready now to go to the viewpoint?"

The Chileans do not say "scenic overlook" - they say "viewpoint". And, boy, are they onto something.