Labor Day weekend found me in the rolling Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. It was a showery weekend, making for very humid hiking, but making for a moody, misty atmosphere that felt like that state at its most iconic. On Sunday’s hike, my friend did the splits involuntarily while crossing a very slippery stream and … Continue reading Country Roads, Take Me Home
Last weekend I visited this old cemetery located on the far north side of Chicago. Like its better known counterpart, Graceland, it is the final resting place of many famous Chicagoans. On the morning we were there, its leafy, park-like setting attracted many joggers and others just out for a stroll, as well as a … Continue reading Rosehill Cemetery
Most of Indiana is boring. This isn’t a particular knock on the Hoosier state; most of the midwest is rather dull, with long monotonies of flat farmlands blurring endlessly outside the car window. Which makes Turkey Run state park such a pleasant surprise. The road on the way there abruptly changes from straight highway to … Continue reading Turkey Run
lagniappe or la·gnappe [ lan-yap, lan-yap ] noun When editing photos after a long excursion, I usually group and post the shots chrononologically, or according to theme . After a long and fruitful trip, I often wind up with photos that don’t fall into any particular category, but that I still think are good enought to post. … Continue reading Lagniappe, Western-Style
Sometimes, in the rougher stretches of life, the exact right thing to do can be setting yourself an arbitrary, foolish, and daunting task. Times for me were not good in the weeks leading up to the recent road trip out west. When one of my friends insisted we should make the Badlands a stop on … Continue reading The Badlands
On our trip to Colorado, we’d read about some ancient pines on a hillside not far from we were staying. The local guidebook made it seem like it was not far from the main road, but a half hour of tedious driving over increasingly rough terrain had us doubting whether we’d read the map correctly. … Continue reading Windy Ridge
Some of these were destinations in and of themselves, others were just places that grabbed my attention while driving around the Georgian countryside. As a kid, I lived in Poland for a couple years in the 80’s. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I got the rare privilege(?) of experiencing the Kafkaesque wonders … Continue reading Out and About
Abandoned places get overgrown; the town of Pripyat is no exception. But there is simply more here, a case where a quantitative difference leads to a qualitative one. When hundreds of square miles are left untended, the result is that these once-inhabited areas don’t just feel overgrown, they feel submerged. The place where I felt … Continue reading Submergence
The Icelandic countryside can range from the bucolic and pastoral to austere and menacing. Continue reading Landscapes of Iceland
A tense drive on winding gravel roads often hugging steep precipices will eventually bring you to Látrabjarg, Iceland’s westernmost point. The cliffs here are famous here for their birdwatching, but the nearly vertical rock faces themselves are stunning. I’ve made light the theme of this series of photos, but I can’t say that we lucked … Continue reading Látrabjarg Cliffs
T A B U L A R A S A photography 