Camping at St. Sebastian River Preserve

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Some friends and I recently spent a weekend up in St. Sebastian River, a nature preserve in Central Florida. Here are some grossly overdue photos!

St. Sebastian River Preserve

The preserve is a huge square of minimally improved original Florida outback — a flat mix of forests, palm frond bushes and dry fields. The camping is primitive (hike everything in, hike everything out), and sparse enough that you rarely run into other people after checking in at the ranger station.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

The river itself is not particularly scenic. Made canal-straight by the Army corps of engineers or something and adorned with a water regulating lock, it cuts through the park, neatly dividing it in two. The access road runs along the river, and the locals come out on the weekend to barbecue but don’t venture into the park itself.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

There’s a stark beauty to the whole place, but it’s adorned with unusual plants, natural formation, and occasional signs of life.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Here’s a toad peeking through the dry sand.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

In the deeper parts of the forest, peculiar root formations stick out of the ground.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Dried trees and shrubbery.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

The moon comes out at night, and it’s easy to walk around. We heard the sounds of boars occasionally during the day, but they left us alone at night.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Cowboy cooking.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

And relaxing by the fire. While campfires are permitted in designated areas, gathering firewood is not, so you need to bring your own.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

A mist settles on everything overnight, and the early morning is serene and otherworldly, until the sun cuts through the treeline and everything returns to the hot Florida self you know so well.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Blinding.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Signs of fire are everywhere — this ecosystem of course renews itself by burning every few years.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

An armadillo butt.

St. Sebastian River Preserve

St. Sebastian River Preserve

St. Sebastian River Preserve

Photos of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor

I don’t get this: we get to see photos and video of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor in Japan, and we get to see pictures of the drone that took them, and listen to its pilot compare the mission to Afghanistan. (Though this is not a plane-like drone — it’s a pod that looks not unlike the probe droid in Empire Strikes Back, powered by a lawnmower engine.) Yet: “The cone of secrecy around Fukushima extends far and wide. We don’t get to know where they launched from or what their camera targets were. He couldn’t discuss whether their operations center had a roof over it or not, or whether it was a tent. We don’t even know how many flights they made, though he confirmed it was ‘a bunch.’”

Portraits of world leaders

The New Yorker’s portraits of world leaders is a pretty good example of print and online media working together: small images and audio accounts of the photos by photographer Platon, beautiful full-page prints in the mag. The photos are striking, and they’re a profound examination of whether you can learn anything new about a person by gazing into their eyes in a simple still portrait. Conversely, almost all the short snippets of words reveal something startling, and they’re heightened by being spoken aloud.

Down and out in Paris

Paris

I think I’m going to maybe show mainly pictures that have some explanation here, and maybe show the more plain visual ones in a slide show later. But here’s some prettiness just to sort of get us in the mood.

Paris

Let’s start at Notre Dame. Here’s a model depicting the building of the cathedral in something like the 12th century. Without getting into a whole discussion, it’s worth pausing over the fact that, for hundreds of years, the majority of the residents of Europe lived in abject poverty while ostentatious churches were built until they doted the landscape (there are three within spitting distance of ND, e.g.).

Paris

Tourists taking photos! Almost as silly looking as tourists taking photos of tourists taking photos, eh?

Paris

Here’s a random obligatory shot of teh glory/majesty. Impressive!

Paris

So, this was going to be Exhibit B in the case of the charmingly peculiar vanity of the French: a guy who stopped in the street to spontaneously clean his shoes. Dude was going at it, too — I saw him, started to walk away, then changed my mind and framed and took the picture, all while he was working. Exhibit A, more shocking but alas less photographically interesting, was a public perfume dispenser in the men’s bathroom at a highway-side gas station. I shit you not, and yes I do have the photo to prove it.

Paris

Paris is for lovers, and it really is. There are people making out in public everywhere, which I thought was nice.

Paris

Expensive-ass superhero and fantasy figurines.

Paris

In Paris there are no regular shops. There are restaurants (brasseries, cafés, bistros, etc.), flower shops, and clothing stores. Occasionally, there will be a wine shop of a fishmonger, but there is little evidence that anyone cooks much at home or buys anything not directly concerned with delighting the senses. But: here are some hens ready for the rotisserie.

Paris

Mostly I’d go with skipping “the sights” and favor wandering around (which goes for any city you’re visiting really). So here’s random prettiness #2. The tree on the balcony is painted on the side of that smokestack, note.

Paris

In one of the threads on MetaFilter’s Paris tag, someone said “you’re going to live well!” And it’s True. Here’s some side-street cafe cheese, served with bread and wine and followed with espresso. As much as the overall quality of food in London is on average noticeably worse then in the US, the food in Paris is noticeably better pretty much everywhere. Ham and cheese crepes are considered street food here.

Paris

Even the graffiti here is elegant and romantic.

Paris

The Eiffel Tower, natch. A stairs trip just to the first platform was plenty. A nice climb up a few dozen metal flights of stairs is just what the doctor ordered for the mildly acrophobic among us.

Paris

J. random view from the first platform. You could spend all day shooting and assembling a monster 360-degree panorama but ok, it’s breathtaking, we get it, geez.

Paris

At the foot of the tower there are ambiguously ethnic women walking around asking “Do you speak English?”, part of some scam that despite the extremely widely-disseminated warnings appears to be remarkably effective. One of them had a midwestern women digging around in her purse, and brazenly turned towards me as I walked by to ask me. That’s efficiency, right? Anyway, here’s home base of the Women who ask if you speak English.

Paris

Trust me, I’m going easy on you with the pictures of tourists acting goofy.

Paris

You feed these little birds bits of your ham/cheese crepe, and the competition is fierce, so eventually some of them start to try to catch the bits in mid-air, and you can get them to eat from your fingers, which is me doing exactly that here. My dad working the camera.

Paris

I would not mind living here! Willing to learn French!

Paris

I only saw one public ping-pong table in Paris, but what a cool idea. Eastside Garden take note.

Paris

The Musée d’Orsay is a highly recommended alternative to the multi-day requirements of the Louvre. They let you photograph, so lots of the paintings have obnoxious people going around with camera phones tediously snapping photos of every other piece instead of looking, and getting yelled at because flash is technically not permitted, and these people you people do not know how to work their your cameras. This is the Van Gogh room, which was of course the worst-case example. By the way: a roomfull of Van Goghs, plus all your major impressionists, etc! (For Picasso and later, you need to check out the Centre Pompidou, which I only got to do briefly, don’t get me started.)

Paris

If you can’t beat ‘em… a particularly lovely Toulouse-Lautrec.

Paris

And the Musée d’Orsay building is half the fun. It’s a baffling structure of late-19th century origin who’s size is difficult to determine at first (looks manageable on first impression, huge on second impression, but it actually is pretty manageable), and is full of interesting big and small spaces.

Paris

Random bookstore taxidermy action.

Paris

A random sampling of street musicians: Two guys playing Django Reinhardt jazz on Django Reinhardt guitars (with people dancing), a lone violin playing random arias on an abandoned side-street, a one-man band accordion/trombone/drums guy singing (amplified) mauldin old French songs, and a guy playing minimalist tones on clarinet to faint classical CD-based accompaniment for the closing of the museum, and these guys. This is BTW some random side-street staircase shortcut, but yeah, random prettiness #3, right?

Paris

#4; in general, it’s hard to point your camera here and not hit something amazing.

And we’re going to leave it there. Next up: Prague!

EXR mode

“The new sensor in the F200EXR, though, goes a step further. In what’s called EXR mode, it can merge two adjacent photosites, in effect doubling the light collected at that spot on the sensor.” It sounds to me like David Pogue is falling for a little marketing hype. (Getting a good low-light 6-megapixel photo out of a 12-megapixel camera should not qualify as a major step forward. I say compare the new Sony and Fuji cameras to a new Canon, and then we’ll see where we’re at.)