Before Race Day

Ready for the Race!

I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.

A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.

I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.

I saw this when I was doing a boardwalk run this summer. I’d been visiting Coney Island for nearly 20 years at this point, but the recent revitalization has been impressive to see. That includes ideas like this art that bring happiness and joy even when Nathan’s is closed.

Went to Brooklyn and had Grimaldi’s for the first time.

Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!

Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.

[caption id=“attachment_4690” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“July 2011 - 1024x768 - desktop for square monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4691” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“July 2011 - 1680x1050 - desktop background for Widescreen Monitor”] [/caption]

And once again we return to Brooklyn for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #129 is:

Danielle’s family lives off of the last stop for the Q or B trains (as of this writing). So it’s a great place to photograph if you want to have an empty subway car. It can get really busy in the summertime with people headed to the beach, but usually it’s pretty empty at that stop.

To Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn for today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #146 is:

One of the main bonding activities between my father-in-law and myself (and other members of Danielle’s family) was going fishing. Danielle’s father has almost always owned a boat and used fishing as his method of relaxation. For quite a number of years, I joined him on his Fourth of July fishing trips. Usually along for the ride were Anh Dat and one of Co Sao’s sons. For the most part, no one spoke and we just fished. It’s only because of weird conditions in recent years that I have stopped going. The penultimate time I went, it was actually freezing on the 4th of July (but only over the water). I had to borrow a sweater and I was still freezing. The water was also very choppy and it was the first time I got seasick. The last time I went, the water was so choppy that even Duc started getting seasick. So I skipped a year or two and then he sold the boat, so I haven’t been fishing in a few years. This photo is a panorama of the area where he docked his boat. It was near a movie theatre, Jodan’s Lobster Dock, and a TGIF.

See it online here.  This month it’s mostly from a trip to NYC.

And I continue to through my Top 200 most viewed photos on flickr.

Photo #197 is:

Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is one of my homes-away-from-home. I’ve been going there to visit the family that became my in-laws for about 10 years. It was so exciting to find out that they lived so close to the famous Coney Island. I’m certain there will be more photos of Coney Island as this project goes on. It’s one of the easiest places for me to shoot because it’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk if I’m in a hurry vs a 45+ minute ride to Manhattan. Although I’ve never ridden the Wonder Wheel, I’ve always had a fascination with it because every time the fair came to Florida, I’d ride the Ferris Wheel. I am not sure if I’m forgetting some memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever done the cliche riding of the wheel with a date, but maybe I can somewhat buck that by riding the Wonder Wheel with the wife. Along with the Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel is one of the oldest and most iconic structures at Coney Island.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.

In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.

This is part of my NYC Tet Travelogue.

See part one here.

See part two here.

?this was originally written on 14 Feb 2010

Life sure is strange.  This morning I was sure I’d be buying a Holga today.  After talking to Danielle, it even seemed that SHE would get one too.  She wanted to have one loaded with color film and one loaded with black and white film.  Then she asked a few questions.  I can’t remember the exact words, but it got me thinking.  Do I REALLY want a Holga?  I mean, the biggest attraction for me was the ability to medium format film.  As I mentioned on 12 Feb, it’s a connection with the past and a chance to shoot with better film than I ever did.  But the more I looked at other photographers’ Lomo results, the more I wondered if this was how I wanted to re-experience film.  What put me off the most is the fact that the results are so random.  I don’t understand how people go on vacations to places as far away as Asia with a Lomo as their sole means of capturing their experiences.  They could be getting completely blown out photos the whole time and come back without any photo memories.

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]

One in 1,600,000.  That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family.  And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lovers on the Boardwalk”] [/caption]

A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk.  This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate.  This time around I took some iconic photos from the area.  In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.