An ad in last week’s New Yorker (the Travel issue) noted that Texas contained more art than The Louvre. Well, duh! At about 550,000 square feet, the Louvre is an impressive 2% of a square mile. Even with considerable offsite storage, it doesn’t rival the 268,601 square miles that comprise Texas. There are plenty of reasons to visit Texas (and some reasons not to), but its art density is definitely not a particular highlight.
What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
I did some experimenting with basic lighting for portraits over the weekend with my dad. Though we didn’t take a lot of pictures we did figure out it’s possible to get decent lighting for a simple portrait with inexpensive lights (think 100W bulbs). Definitely a lens with a larger aperture (like this one, which I’ve been coveting recently anyway) would make things easier (larger aperture means both better isolation of the subject from the background and a higher shutter speed), but this didn’t come out so bad considering we were just playing around.
I’m continuing to whittle down my collection of stuff – currently up for sale on Craigslist is my old 35mm SLR.
I finally got a chance to check out Metro Rock Gym last night. It’d been almost two years since I’d climbed, and I’m a little surprised I’m not more sore this morning. I enjoyed it a lot, though, and found Metro to be much better than Boston Rock Gym in many respects – it seems roomier, the climbing routes seem better, and perhaps most importantly, the people are much nicer. It’s not in a great area, but it’s not hard to get to, either. I’ll have to go a couple more times before I leave town.
Gotta love spring in Boston – I scraped ice off my windshield this morning but could go out in a t-shirt for lunch.
I went for a nature walk around Arlington Great Meadows this afternoon and took the D70 with me. You can check out a couple of pics here. I had a good time, but I was a little disappointed with the performance of the 70-300mm lens – there’s quite a lot of chromatic abberation (purple fringes around objects). Next time I’m out, I’ll do some experiments to see if using a smaller aperture helps at all.