Diary of a Pickle Eater.

Boston

It’s true that I miss San Francisco like crazy, almost every day.

But then I see pictures like this.

These are pictures taken by Lisa Rigby of a wedding in the Old North Church-situated in the North End, it is where Paul Revere arranged for lanterns to be hung (you know, “one if by land, two if by sea”) to warn the American colonists of the British invasion.

It’s sad that it takes a picture to remind me, but it is images and history like this that make me think, holy crap. I live in BOSTON. The center of American history, this place that rumbles with the beginnings of our country.

I think it is because I live in Brighton, which is the equivalent to the Outer Sunset for you SFers out there. The North End is far and away my favorite part of Boston, and not only is it clear across town but it is TINY-about 1/3 square mile. The streets are narrow and cobblestoned, the buildings are tall and brick, there are graveyards that abut houses and over 100 restaurants.

If my school were not in godforsaken Chestnut Hill I would live there, hands down.

Pictures, pictures.

Anders bought me photography classes for my birthday, and I have been taking them for the past 4 weeks. As part of the class I have homework (just like real school!) so I’ve been having a bit of fun running off and taking photos every week. The best part of the class is that I’m learning how to actually use my camera-I keep it (mostly) on manual now, and I know what ISO, shutter, apeture all do and how they are combined to get the best possible photograph. This is something that I just couldn’t understand by reading the camera manual alone, try though I might.

I’ve got all the photos up on Flickr (I’ve become disturbingly addicted to flickr in the past few weeks) but following are a few of my favorites.

This was one of my first assignments. We were supposed to take pictures of an object, a landscape, and a portrait. So of course I chose Anders as my subject. According to my teacher, I should have chosen a different background for this picture because this one doesn’t add anything to the composition. Additionally, traditional portraits are supposed to be portrait-oriented, as opposed to landscape-oriented. This may be true, but I say pshhhh-aw. I like it anyway!

For our next assignment we were instructed to purposely under, over, and perfectly expose a set of images. They are up in my Flickr page, but I’m not going to show them to you because they are pretty boring. They just show that I know how to use the camera, basically.

Next we were supposed to take a set of images that were perfectly exposed, using elements of composition that we had learned. I’m not particularly sure what I was going for, but I took a bunch of pictures of these sets of flowering shoes that are found in Alamo Square, right outside of the bathrooms.

Lastly, the only picture my teacher had good things to say about, taken in Boston of the Back Bay Fens.

It is, coincidentally, my least favorite!

<3 Stef