streets of philly, e

ball in the dog park

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texasize!

h2o

up in the air

a neuron caught firing i will also add the under-appreciated comfort defying the altitude, and uninterrupted tunes coming through my headphones. i sip my orange juice without ice and rest the cup on a neatly placed napkin.

breaking news!

i joined the crowds on instagram. it is a good place to see good photography of the people i follow. i had a clear idea in which direction to take the new photo account but by the time i was about to shout eureka! i forgot. instaprocrastination. kriza u ameriki; voze se dijane!

yo-semite, day seven (7)

for a more complete scrolling-through experience, please consider starting with the first page of the series. --- we were scheduled to leave the cathedral lakes campsite after finishing a nice all-you-can-eat, face-stuffing pancake breakfast. i already packed up my speedos that had been drying in the moonlight. with the lightest backpacks of the week on our arced backs, we hit the jm trail towards tuolumne meadows. the increase of incoming trail traffic was hard to ignore as well as the 1st-world use of deodorant concealing a few shy drops of weekend sweat. it is a popular trail since an eager hiker can reach the lakes in just several hours from the trailhead by the major park road. and the parking lot at the trailhead was overflowing. another thing overflowing was our joy over a surprise cooler of cold beer. the guides knew how to top off the hiking experience. and it was an experience indeed. nothing more photographically appropriate than finishing an expedition of this caliber with a 2mp cellphone shot. a little bit of el capitan and a little bit of half dome farther east across the valley. a view of the yosemite valley from a parking lot. and if asked what i cherish the most from the hike, my answer would be, omg, those trader joe's sesame sticks the guides introduced me to on the third day of the hike, just spectacular, crack-like little treats!! homepage ->

the tennessee morning after

i am up early on memorial day sunday. the southern sun already feels warm through the windshield. i own the middle lane*. --- * not counting the shoulder. i ignore it, therefore i won't need it.

welcome (back) to tennessee

transversely navigating the mississippi river

i did pass, through ____!

the photo hints at the fact that it was taken on my way speeding out of the town. not originally imagined this way, truth be told (not one of the guiding principles here) but since the photo on the way into the town was caught fuzzy i am glad the outgoing snap ended up clear.

dallas walkabout

reblogged from tina's imagined post

i can has squirrelburger?

enter texas

texas is bound to be da bomb ->

a room with a view

monday morning through a motel room window on I-40, just east of albuquerque ->

mt. si

this piece of elevated rock west of the cascades has been on my hiking list for some time. tina pointed out the forest growth at some point and said it had been a nice hike. the view was all the hike was about, she added. i made my deal with the orogeny last time i was midway going from seatlle back to e-burg. i took this cell-camera photo from the inside of the idling shuttle bus in north bend at dusk. i climbed mt. Ψ one lovely sunday and found myself in the clouds. ivo u oblacima. there weren't any clouds that day. if you have ever hiked with an amateur photographer, or if you are one, then this is a hike to make a group populated with avid hikers survive it. with photo challenges tucked away safely in the woods your only way is a switchback-y 4-mile hike up. i reached the top of 1270 m swaggering the last half hour through partly melted snow. 1 km taller than the tallest (wo)man at the trail-head, i rested for about least 10 minutes feeling tall. # of photos taken? 0. i started to worry a little. i hadn't taken a hike photo in more than a coupe of weeks. what i worried about was what if i just couldn't see the beauty anymore and have become ungrateful. eventually the nature cleared her throat and said: i am here and i am gorgeous! shoot me! i felt like i was back in the balkans, ha,ha! where is that lens now i left at home? mountain peaks at one km above ground are of such nature, helped by the sweat of the steep, long hike, that i often think of how one (me) could digitize the scale of it(her). well, then i realized that all i had was a camera and mediocre photo skills. now i started to worry. if i only had a more expensive camera. so i snap away a few of the cascadia to the east. the west is too hazy to offer an uninterrupted view of settle, the puget and mt. rainier. now i am only half worried. thanks hazy western skies. there is a lot of people on the mountain today. i am guessing that i don't see this many people even in the food court of any particular shopping mall of my choosing. a girl sits down trying to devour a sandwich to compensate for calories lost on the challenging hike. the last mile was all snow, well-groomed by a horde of hikers shoe-skiing down the mountain. a bird all chirpy and fluttery makes a few round-abouts and plunges straight for a bite. the girl is pissed and her boyfriend and i look at each other and start giggling as obnoxiously as only two guys who don't know each other can. so point my camera at the bird while she/he/it was eyeballing another bite. the aperture is left somewhat closed which is where i had it while shooting landscape at infinity a moment ago. i worry the bokeh will be poor. i can't believe the af (not a nikon!) locked in on the birdie through all the twigs. arrested by a quizzical expression on my face after a series of lens (and hood) exchanges i tuck away all the gear and start my descent. i've had better photo-hikes but this one felt just hike-good right. i felt good. my legs are to be sore. i start skiing my way down the groomed trail. sections at the top are quite steep and slick. i wouldn't want to go up or down this trail when it gets below freezing. with jack-tracks installed perhaps. i have them (at home) but i am too much of an intelligent and independent photo-hiker to be comfortable and safe. i think how to photograph the groomed trail. i stop at two places and wait for people to pass by me so i could frame them in. everyone is nice and lets me wait for them. oh, no, i am good, please go on... i'm just...trying to...get something here...aperture...priority... i set the aperture to f/1.4, something i shy away from doing in daylight. such a poor experimentalist(-ator) i am. i want to isolate a section of the groomed trail with the shallow depth of field. you with pocket-able digital cameras: fuggedaboutit! convenience gives you just that. a pocket with a camera in it. if you want to do the stuff, you've gotta carry the stuff up and down the hill. not easily in your pocket. a hiker grooming the trail. this is who you curse as you skid backwards trying to climb the trail i get to the car, eat my 90-calorie dark-chocolate granola bar and drive away towards the pass, away from the sunset. and what's it really like on the top of the mountain, you ask? near "normal" perspective from the top of mt. si looking east towards the cascades

what's my carbon footprint?

somewhere during my latest trip i was pondering this fact, at the time without any concrete numbers attached: - from e-burg to philly by car ~ 4,350 km / 2,700 miles in 4 days - from philly to frankfurt by plane ~ 6,350 km / just short of 4,000 miles under 7.5 hours - from frankfurt to zagreb by plane ~    730 km / 450 miles under 1.5 hours - from zagreb to slav. brod by bus ~    200 km / 124 miles about 2 hours there have been rides to philly airport, from pleso to the "glavni" bus stop, and from the bus stop in slav. brod to podvinje, all estimated to be some 30 km (~20 miles). so deliberately allowing for rounding with abandon and other measuring errors i covered 11,660 km (7,245 miles) in 5 days. that is about 1000 km short of the earth's average diameter. and slightly shorter of one third (1/3) of the earth's circumference. i should have tried harder. was it worth it? find it in the blog posts... and count in the return trip. mladen in an opening in the forest looking out at a small corn field wrapped in fog. brodsko brdo. published without mladen's permission. i didn't even ask him. it's public grounds, and so it's open photo-waters. he owes me a mikado for being a celebrity here on the blog anyway! just all the girls that have been asking me for his cell #! and all the mikado of his i have already eaten! photo captured on my cell phone. it signifies my photo-laziness. all the money spent on slr lenses left at home. i need to spend more money on a cell phone camera. obviously.