Here are some of the action photos of the skateboarders at the newly opened skate plaza at Venice Beach. I went the second weekend it was open and it was absolutely packed with skateboarders. Probably too many for the complete comfort, fun, and safety of the skateboarders. Nonetheless, I managed to get some pretty decent action shots of the skateboarders.
I'm working on putting together a video presentation of the photos and will post it as soon as I get it done.
This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
The Queen Street Santa is one of those pieces of Auckland Christmas iconography that's hard to explain to anyone who didn't grow up seeing it. Standing 18 metres tall, the statue's history is more layered than most people realise: it started life on the original Farmers building at the corner of Hobson and Wyndham Streets in 1960, moved briefly to the Manukau City Shopping Centre in the early '90s, then settled onto the Whitcoulls building on Queen Street, where it stood through the 1990s and 2000s — which is where I photographed it in January 2010, in the photo below. Farmers itself later moved back into that same Queen Street building in 2020, and the giant Santa went back up that Christmas along with them. As far as I can tell, though, it hasn't reappeared since — 2020 seems to be its last confirmed outing, which fits with what a lot of older Kiwis have told me: they remember it fondly, but suspect it's gone for good. The Farmers Santa — Queen St...
I spent last week in the La Spezia/Cinque Terre region of Italy on a Road Scholar hiking trip — the kind of trip where your legs ache pleasantly every evening and you eat more focaccia than is strictly necessary. On the drive to the Pisa airport at the end of the week, someone mentioned we'd be flying out near the Leaning Tower, and it struck me: to my ear, "Pisa" sounds exactly like "pizza." I'm sure any actual Italian speaker would hear a clear difference, but mine apparently isn't tuned finely enough to catch it. The pun wrote itself from there. Leaning Tower of Pizza — Funny Food Pun Illustration Stacked pepperoni slices standing in for stone arches, mozzarella dripping like mortar between the levels, and the whole thing tilting at the same improbable angle as the real tower — built with AI assistance, once the idea had lodged itself firmly enough in my head that I had to see it through. Available on Redbubble Leaning Tower of ...
Mackenzie Country Barbed Wire Landscape — Golden Tussock, New Zealand I took this one in New Zealand's Mackenzie Country, a stretch of high country I don't remember precisely enough to pin to a single back road any more — this was long before cameras recorded GPS data, and the details of exactly where I was standing that day have faded. What hasn't faded is how much I still like the photograph itself. I framed the landscape through a rusted barbed wire fence that cuts diagonally across the frame, golden tussock grass rolling out behind it toward a mountain range, all of it sitting under a heavy, toned sky that gives the whole scene a moody, almost brooding quality. The Mackenzie Country takes its name from James Mackenzie, a sheep rustler who was captured in this same high country in 1855 after driving off around a thousand stolen sheep. He escaped custody more than once and became something of a folk hero in the retelling, and the basin and the pass through...
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