What a crazy little mushroom, just hanging out in Rock Creek Park. It definitely looks poisonous, but I am not much of a fungus expert, so I’ll probably never know. An orange mushroom Flickr search lands some really cool pictures though.
In an effort to become more involved in the world around me I have volunteered to help the NoMa BID with their effort to start a small farmer’s market by summer 2009. They are currently envisioning a small market (5-6 vendors) that will be located somewhere near Union Station which will have the ability to expand with time and eventually move further to the north towards the New York Avenue metro station once that part of town (where Constitution Square is located) develops the critical mass of residents and workers.
The photo above is taken at Eastern Market in Capital Hill DC which is by all accounts the creme dela creme of farmer’s markets in Washington (don’t those apples look delicious?). I have discovered more than 20 smaller markets that are active through out the District at various times of the year which was more than I expected. The currently theoretical NoMa Farmers Market would operate one day per week and would either run through the lunch hour or at the end of the day. What time/date do you think would be best for this? If any one of our loyal readers happens to know anyone with ties to running farmers markets please send me their way. Right now I’m just learning as much as I can about how these markets are typically set up and funded, and any insight would be helpful!
Yay produce!
Matt has been working on the construction site at Constitution Square (next to the New York Avenue metro in NoMA) for awhile now, and he takes all these realllllly cool pictures of the construction materials that make me go “whoa what *is* that!?!” There is so much color and texture and rhythm to be found in these not-yet-assembled pieces — eventually when put together it will go something like this. Or here is some time lapse photography. Since there are way too many pictures to post them individually, I threw them all together into a composition I would call blue, green, red: 3 circles, 3 squares, 3 lines
Recently, I succumbed to my ebay addiction and added yet another analog camera to my ever growing family (much to Lori’s chagrin). The newest addition is the 35mm half-frame Olympus Pen EE-S. Because the Pen EE-S is a half frame camera it has a few cool features: you get twice the number of shots out of your standard 35mm roll of film, the view finder is portrait in lieu of landscape, it allows you to compose in-camera diptychs and triptychs. The EE-S takes no batteries and will automatically adjust aperture and shutter speeds based on the selenium light meter that is built into the lens. All of this from a camera that was built in the early 60’s, not bad. Other shots from this roll here.
The triptych seen above is part of WMATA’s “Art in Transit” project which is aimed at bringing community based art to the various metro stations. This project named “Journeys” is at the New York Ave Metro station (incidentally I can see it from my window). Journeys is a collaboration between Barbara Grygutis, a sculptor from Tuscon AZ, and Dolores Kendrick, Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. Delores’ poem is incorporated into the sculpture and can be seen on the walls of the station.
Here is a photo of something happening at Matt’s place of work, a construction site in NoMa. I’m not sure what is going on here, except that I see some concrete and some rebar, which looks straight so I give the workers an A+++ for their job so far.
This morning, just before sunrise, I covertly climbed up on to the roof of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms headquarters to snap this picture of the Constitution Square job site. It was quite a daring maneuver, if I don’t say so myself, but these are the lengths I will go to get a shot. Dedication, baby.
I am of course lying but this is a view taken from on top of the ATF at 5:39a from the camera that Clark Construction recently installed to monitor the site. Here is LINK to see the webcam. Pretty fancy stuff. It was only installed yesterday but eventually we will be able to do time-lapse of the project being constructed. The portion of the site directly in front will be the new Department of Justice headquarters, to the right is a spec office building, and to the back we will have a large apartment building (440 units), a Harris Teeter grocery store, and a Hilton Garden Inn. This should only take a few years….
This morning I fought off my hangover with an hour and a half photo walk-about in NoMA. This developing neighborhood gave me plenty of “urban decay” fodder. The favorite thing that I came across this morning was this converted school bus that now serves as a mobile ribs stand. This was parked in a liquor store (which also has a very funny sign) parking lot right next to the Metro/AMTRAK tracks and I have a feeling that this must be delicious. The bottom right corner of the sign says “I’m as good as the best and better than the rest”. It is on the sign so it must be true. My job site is just on the other side of these tracks so once I get the courage up I’m going to give it a shot. I’ll be sure to report back, this might just be the next big thing in…ummm…food that is served in a ghetto rigged yellow school bus…or something.
Here are the rest of my shots from the stroll.
Tonight we finished the infrastructure of my display at Artomatic. I was unable to get to the site selection process early enough to get one of the true walls that were reserved for the 2-D artists and was asked to be “creative” with my display area. I ended up grabbing a smallish wall that was divided a 10′ wide window. After looking at things for a bit I decided that there wasn’t going to be enough true wall area to display my photos how I wanted to….so I decided to build more. After toying with the idea of a rather complicated wire/tension system I opted to go with a grid of 2×4’s which seemed a bit easier. Lori was so excited that we finished the wall that she decided to do some star jumps.
The NoMA BID and Artomatic hosted the “Blank Canvas” Media preview of the new space for Artomotic 2008 yesterday, and I, as an esteemed member of the media, was able to get a sneak peek of the space. Artomatic will be taking up 8 entire floors of the new Capital Plaza building at the corner of 1st St. and M St. NE. From the press release Artomatic is billed as “a creative community that collaborates to produce and present a free arts spectacular.” 2008 will be the 6th installment of Artomatic since it was started back in 1999 and displayed at the historic Manhattan Laundry buildings on Florida Ave NW.
Artomatic has grown steadily from then and has gained significant media and artistic community attention. The event will run from May 9th to June 15th and over 50,000 visitors are expected. Of the 1,000 artist spaces available to register over 600 visual artists, 80 performance artists, and 80 bands have signed up. The growth of Artomatic has this year attracted bands from as far away and NY and Texas. It should be quite a spectacular event, but of course the main reason you should attend is to see my photography exhibit (and then purchase the prints). Also, they are going to have an “interactive” tattoo exhibit if you are in the market to get some ink done.
The “Blank Canvas” event gave me the opportunity to scope out the raw space, appreciate the tremendous views from the 12th floor, and take a look at the cute little model they had of a typical floor plate. The friendly folks from DC On The Fly were at the event to provide refreshments; I had some turkey chili that was spectacular. These are the guys with the funny little green electric vending carts that have begun popping up around the city.
As a start of the “Blank Canvas” event they had a litteral blank canvas available for visitors to do some painting on. Here is one of my masterpieces and here the other.
I am greatly looking forward to this event.