Are you cool?

This week I visited the campus of Rutgers University and the RU cool room. They certainly are cool, I mean, you can get, at the very least, monitor envy in about one blink. They are also cool for the work they are doing monitoring the eastern seaboard (and world) with state of the art ocean sensing technology. But as usual this is not what I am here to blog about today, especially as they are cool enough to already be recording and publishing all sorts of stuff about all the cool stuff going on, check out the AUV Scarlett Knights glider page, for instance.

The real question left in my mind today, is of course, am I cool. Do we not all want to be cool? It seems to me we are we often stealing or borrowing the cool of others in the hopes of projecting ourselves as cool? My favorite phrase of the summer was certainly, "I'm so cool I make the Fonz look like Henry Winkler." Here I am borrowing it to appear much cooler than I really am. I did however fix a malfunctioning device by bumping my fist on a table this month... so maybe I am a little cool....

Feet!

I do not like them. You might ask yourself, if he does not like the feet, why would he choose to feature them so prominently in this, the current shot of the week? Well the answer is, so I could tell everyone the following:

I do not like feet.

If you are married to me and many of you are not, you already know that I find them ugly. You already know, I think they are a great stocking stuffer. You will also probably already realize that none of this is rational. Some people do not like Bill O'Reilly....some people do not like feet. I happen to not like both, but that's a different blog.

Flaming out

So we have done it. No not that. We had the end of summer party/belated e birthday party, of course. The summer is all but gone up in flames. With it C.O.D's initial summer has come to a close as well.

But as usual, that's not exactly what I am here to blog about. I am here to say thank you to all those people who came to share the day and celebrate the transition to a new season....or another year with e......or to drink beer.....

Whyever you came thank you! I know e and I certainly wished we had more time with each one of you.

Now go forth and embrace the pending fall.

Another just one

We had such a great time at the wedding I thought it deserved recording a couple more of my favorite shots from that day here at the blog. Embarrassingly I was having so much fun shooting shots at the event that I did not learn as many names as I probably should have. Two, possibly Three, of my favorite images from this day contain this man... the unnamed guitarist from Patrick's band. As e has already said this picture looks like it could have been taken 70 years ago and was taken on the fly as I rapidly saw the image coming together. This resulting in me liking it that much more, that it required complete unscripted recognition that a possible picture was about to happen and that it came out this well thrills me to no end!

one

The internet version of benshotme turns one year old this month. This is one of the first bsm images, as it was shot with the first of two new digital camera's, the purchase of which was inspired by my desire to make new photographic discoveries. I landed this image when the camera was just hours old (to me). I had decided to (finally) "go digital" and it has been a personal revelation. Being from Cape Cod I have a new analogy for my approach to photography, for me, its like fishing. I will head out of the house to the water (any place that reflects light), and start casting (pushing the shutter button), sometimes there are keepers (these are the images you see here), sometimes the big one gets away (damn the fleeting moment that is poorly exposed) and sometimes you come home empty handed (but feeling good for the effort). The other fishing analogy is that I do not really enjoy the post processing of images, you know film and print processing, we will call this the gutting and cooking. I had not been shooting much mostly because I found the gutting (darkroom) and cooking (framing, matting, presentation) too time consuming and the stink (chemicals) often gave me headaches (that can't be good). So here we are a year later and I'm still very much enjoying trying to get that next digital byte!

Just one look

Or maybe ~1111 some odd looks. When Carina started singing her way down the aisle with the one hit wonder "Just one look", Patrick's, the groom's eyes welled over. Later when the teary eyed Emily read her poem to the couple, it was easy to see that you were at a special event. Now that we are back here to bog hill and the picture uploading has commenced, going on 15 hours, the specialness has not worn off. E bops around the house belting her rending of Carina's rendition of "Just one look". And I, I will be thoroughly enjoying looking at the over 1100 looks I recorded from this beautiful day trying to determine which ones are fit for public consumption.