Found Still Life

by Posted in Miscellaneous artwork, Things Leave a comment
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I went with some friends for breakfast at the excellent Tasty Table in Ossining, NY. While I was there I needed to use the rest room and in there I came across this lovely little cabinet with a number of little curios in it. So I took a picture.

It wasn’t until I got back and looked at it on the computer that I noticed that it wasn’t a cabinet at all, but rather a nice Trompe l’oeil painting. For anyone who may not be familiar with this term it’s French for “to deceive the eye”, an art historical tradition in which the artist fools us into thinking we’re looking at the real thing. Well it certainly fooled me.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XF 35mm f1.4 R

Film Camera 2022 – 2 – Minolta Maxxum 600si – Results

by Posted in Black & White, Cemeteries, Film, Minolta Maxxum 600si Leave a comment
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I like this camera. It’s fairly light and feels solid. I suppose what I like most are all of the buttons and dials. There’s a button or a dial for practically everything you want to do: exposure compensation; flash compensation; drive mode; exposure mode; exposure area; autofocus area; autofocus mode; flash settings; ISO. There’s no messing around with complicated menus here. I also liked the bright and uncomplicated viewfinder: just the shutter speed, aperture; a green light that illuminates when focus has been achieved. I also liked the top LCD where you can change and view settings without looking through the viewfinder. The various settings are controlled by two dials – one on the front and one on the rear.

The were only a couple of minor things that I didn’t like. I found the exposure compensation dial to be rather “fiddly” because you have to press in a small button before you can rotate it. The camera also has a proprietary flash shoe. This doesn’t bother me much because I don’t use flash a lot and in any case I have flashes I bought for my early Sony Alpha cameras, which used the same proprietary shoe. I would also have liked the grip to have been a little deeper.

The pictures were taken at Dale (no relation) cemetery in Ossining, NY.

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Reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”…in Sleepy Hollow

by Posted in Buildings/Structures, Cemeteries, Landscapes, People Leave a comment

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I recently had some family visitors: two adults and two children. The parents had to go into New York City for business meetings. I got to look after the two children. I decided to read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to them. I’ve always loved this story and I thought they might find it interesting.

We’d been reading for about 15 minutes when the parents announced they were leaving. So I decided to ask them to drop us in Sleepy Hollow so that we could continue there. Our first stop was the Philipsburg Manor. Unfortunately it was closed, but we were able to continue reading while sitting by the millpond (see picture above), which is mentioned in the story.

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The girls by the millpond.

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I thought it might be interesting to finish of the story in The Old Dutch Burial Ground (also mentioned in the story) so we crossed the road and passed over the Headless Horseman Bridge, one of two candidates for the site of the bridge in the story.

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The Old Dutch Burial Ground where we sat and finished of the story.

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The girls by a Clog shed.

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After we finished the story I set the girls a challenge: to find the grave of Katerina Van Tassel, one of the main characters in the story. When I first looked for this grave it took me an age to find it. It took them about five minutes although admittedly we were sitting quite close to its location.

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After that we continued into the cemetery and up the grave of Washington Irving, the author of the story.

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Our final stop was at the second possible location for the Headless Horseman Bridge. I much prefer this to earlier one.

We thought of walking around in the cemetery for a while, but it was a very hot and humid day so we decided to go at get some refreshments at J.P. Doyles before heading home.