Tightropes

James, Zack and Trent are college students who went to high school together.  They found some sturdy trees in Elizabeth Park and strung tightropes between them.

Trent is a fine arts major at Trinity College in Hartford, majoring in photography.  He likes doing portraits.  Take a look at Trent's website.  You might be impressed.

The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Ducks

Usually I show both the reflection and the thing reflected.  This time I thought the water carrying the reflection was the interesting thing.  I was taking pictures of gentle ripples jiggling a reflection when a raft of ducks paddled into the picture and made it even wilder.

You don't think a bunch of ducks is a "raft?"  Don't take my word for it!

Click here for more reflections.


The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Walking Around Elizabeth Park

Mick is another Hartford-area photographer whom I see around, but he is in the big leagues compared to me.  Mick's camera has one of those big honking professional telephoto lenses.  I really don't know how anyone can hold a camera like that steady!


Jordan and Lauren might be brother and sister, though I'm not sure.

And Mike is another photographer who walks around Elizabeth Park three or four days a week.  Mike told me he shoots 1,000 photos a day and has at least a million images.  How can anyone manage so many?

I'm liking this nifty fifty lens!

Thank you for visiting Elizabeth Park Daily Photo.


The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Neighbors

Mike (above) and Jonathan (below) live in neighboring houses on Kenyon Street in Hartford's West End.  Mike was helping Jonathan put some junk in the trash while I was taking photographs down the street.  As vigilant homeowners, they wandered over to see if this stranger was causing trouble.  Satisfied that I seemed pretty harmless, they posed for portraits in front of their houses.

Backroads

Backroads operates hiking, biking, kayaking and other active travel trips around the globe.  I have taken Backroads biking trips to the Loire Valley of France and the low country of the USA, and two Backroads hiking trips in Italy.

Backroads is going to use this photo from my 2010 hiking trip in Cinque Terre and the Chianti region of Tuscany in their 2014 hiking catalog.  Pretty cool, don't you think?

Backroads trips are superb in every way.  Exercise.  Scenery.  Places to stay.  Food and wine (like this picnic lunch).  Hosts and fellow guests.  I am thinking that my 2014 might include a Backroads hike on the Amalfi Coast.

Chester Fair

Chester is half an hour south of Hartford, on the Connecticut River.  They had a nice 

little country fair this past weekend, with rides for the kids, 

animal exhibitions and lots of junk food.

White Flower Farm

White Flower Farm is primarily a catalog and online seller of perennials.  They grow the plants and also have a retail nursery in East Morris, Connecticut, just south of the lovely town of Litchfield.

In one greenhouse, they have a spectacular display of Blackmore and Langdon begonias.  These begonias have colorful flower heads that are bigger than I have ever before seen.


The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

The Twins

Joy on the left and Amy on the right are identical twins whom I frequently see around town.  Joy puts out a West Hartford lifestyle magazine and Amy is a massage therapist.  When I see them together I can tell them apart, but if I ran into just one on the street, I am not sure I could figure out who it is.

Sometime I want to pose them next to a reflective surface.  Reflections of twins?  Four at once?  That would be fun.

The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

I am belatedly linking this to Weekend Reflections, because, after all, identical twins are reflections of each other, don't you think?

Dragon Boats

Last weekend there were two days of dragon boat races at the Hartford riverfront.

I have seen several blogs showing photos of dragon boat races in recent weeks.  So, here are mine!

The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Jules

Jules' new camera just arrived yesterday.  So, she was in Elizabeth Park practicing her photography.  When I met her, she was standing on her toes to take a close-up of a very pretty rose on the top of a bush.

And I had a new lens and was practicing my portrait photography.  I got a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens, a so-called "Nifty Fifty."  This was one of my first shots with it, and I am happy so far.

The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Memory Lane

Here is the end of my recent trip around northern New England.  The trip took me from Hartford to western Massachusetts, to Vermont, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and then down to the New Hampshire seacoast, into the North Shore of Massachusetts, and then back to Connecticut.

I was in my home town 20 miles north of Boston for a few hours.  This house is where I lived for the first four years of my life.  I spent some time talking with the woman who lives next door and learned that she is the granddaughter of the couple who lived there during my childhood.  That was a LONG time ago.

The theme for September for City Daily Photo bloggers is "Pink."  To participate, link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Newburyport

Newburyport is a coastal town in northeastern Massachusetts, with its port along the mouth of the Merrimack River.  This is a view of Newburyport from across the river in Salisbury.  There are hundreds of pleasure boats at this part of the river.  You only see a few here.  Many of the small boats at these docks are the ones that boat owners use to get to their large boats moored further out.

Portsmouth

New Hampshire has only a 13 mile coastline, but the northernmost city along that coastline -- Portsmouth -- was at one time an important port.  The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is still a significant part of the local economy, even though the shipyard is really in Kittery, Maine, across the river.

Strawberry Banke is an outdoor historical museum in Portsmouth, with forty buildings dating from the 1600s through the 1800s.  About a dozen are open to the public.

Before touring Strawberry Banke, I had lunch at a nice small

restaurant.  This is a photo from the deck.

Arethusa Falls

Arethusa Falls is by some accounts the tallest waterfall in New Hampshire.  It is found by climbing 1-1/2 miles into the forest off the highway through Crawford Notch in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

The classic old 1902 Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods is five miles up the road.  It was the site of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary conference at which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were established.

Simon Pearce

The Simon Pearce glassworks is at a picturesque mill site in Quechee, Vermont.  

The showroom is above and the glassblowing workroom is below,

open for viewing.  This young man was blowing, forming 

and firing a glass Christmas tree.

Quiet Pond

An easy walk from the Equinox Resort in Manchester, Vermont, leads to this quiet pond.  

The lower part of Mount Equinox is at the left.  

Like photos with reflections?  Please visit James' blog, Weekend Reflections.

Olympia

I interrupt the photos from my current visit to northern New England to show another place visited on my recent trip from Venice to Athens.

The Olympic games began in 776 BC at a site on the western side of Peloponesse.  The Temple of Hera (above) from about 600 BC was the first permanent building.

The Phillippeion (below) was constructed to celebrate King Philip's victory at Chaeronnea in 338 BC.

42nd Street

Weston Playhouse is Vermont's oldest professional theater.  42nd Street was performed last night.  Brilliant!  I saw it on Broadway a couple of decades ago and in Hartford with a professional company more recently, but the dancing and singing last night were as good as either.  It was hard to believe that I was in a small theater in a small Vermont town and being treated to such a high quality performance.

Weston Playhouse was launched in a renovated church in 1937.  Lloyd Bridges was the leading man in the first performance of that first season.  A 1962 fire destroyed the original facility, but the current Greek Revival facility promptly replaced it.  The current facility has had to deal with floods in the 1970s and 2011, but it has survived all obstacles so far.

A cafe below the small theater serves dinner before the show and offers a cabaret after the show.  The West River flows over a dam next to a grist mill before passing behind the theater.

Northshire Bookstore

What a treat to discover a terrific independent bookstore that appears to be thriving.  Northshire Bookstore occupies an old building just beyond a traffic circle in Manchester Village, a southern Vermont town known (unfairly) for its factory outlet shopping.  The town also has numerous trails for hikers of all abilities and a gorgeous main street of stately white buildings, capped by the Equinox Golf Resort and Spa.

The photo above shows a display of Vermont-focused books.  Nearby is the Sustainability section.  For Love of Yurts.  Going Solar.  Soil and Sacrament.  Does your local bookstore have a sustainability section?

I could barely tear myself away (from the mystery and novel and nonfiction rooms, not the sustainability section).  And I won't confess how many books I bought or how much I spent.  But I will tell you there is a wonderful cafe, and I got an apricot shortcake.

Tanglewood

Tanglewood is the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home in Lenox, in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts.  Tanglewood is a 200 acre estate with broad lawns and meadows and huge old trees.  The orchestra plays inside the austere  open-sided Koussevitzky Shed, where the most knowledgeable fans sit on uncomfortable wooden chairs.

People who enjoy the ambience as much as the music, like me, set up for picnics on the lawn beyond the shed.

Yesterday's afternoon performance was all-Beethoven.  The two principal works were the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat, Opus 19, and Symphony No. 6 in F, Opus 68, "Pastorale."  Lovely.

Convention in the Woods

Kennedy Park in Lenox, Massachusetts, was the site of Saturday's canine conference.  Seminar topics included tolerating one's human in the time between meals and advanced techniques for feigning deafness when called.



Diving and swimming provided recreational breaks.



Dessert was twig.

This and That

It's a dog's life.

Blue hydrangea.

Butterfly.

Sometimes photos seem too small to carry a post all by themselves.

Venice VIII

Here we are back in a Venetian arcade, waiting for someone interesting to walk past the window.

Click here to see more photos with reflections on James' blog, Weekend Reflections.