powerzamcam | bloglife » nyc

storytime: a ton of pics from our holiday experience…

super sal — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:36:35 +0000

the holidays gave us a lot of different challenges with getting shots in the right light, focus, composition, and just general picture taking. most of the pics we took ended up being very mundane and can easily be done with a point & shoot, but it was definitely a learning experience. i found myself hitting up digital-photography-school.com before each occasion to get last minute tips to make the best out of our time…i had to resize for the blog and wordpress blands out the pics so check out the flickr for original format and full-size. it would prob be better to let you click the pic for the full size. note to self!

christmas eve in staten island was truly a night i will never forget. so much food, so much family, and so much fun.

the new addition with mom…

with gramps

and with great gramps!

santa even stopped by!

christmas day we spent at my house, there was snow on the ground and i wanted to go out, but never had a chance…

for the first time in my life, i found myself not opening gifts christmas morning and taking pics of my parents opening. hahahaha…

my dad’s such an easy present…

time to start cooking!

and another new addition! this was one of my favorite pics…

sisters

all the kids got my grandma a necklace with each one of their birthstones…

christopher, always goin for the soda!

definitely can’t wait for a wide angle, which will be our second purchase after a flash.

cleanup time!

off to michele’s fam!

so much wasted space to the right

more good food

cupcakes from crumbs in nyc

i like this picture

we have to work on focusing on more than one subject. up the aperture or manual focus? hmmm….

most comfortable position. ever.

went to see the tree in nyc, this proved to be the greatest challenge and sadly turned out the worst pics of the holidays. after reading about using the tungsten setting, i saw how much it really brought out the lights, but with our stock flash and inexperience, we just couldn’t get faces to look natural. we ended up switching to auto so the pics are usable and some post-processing would help, but next year…we will be ready!

almost got it =(

we then went to my sis’ a couple days after christmas…finally get my gifts!

the king in his thrown…

yummy dessert time!

i setup the camera to take pics in one minute intervals, it worked out for some nice candid shots and definitely made gift opening less stressful letting me focus on family time…

we all got moms the beatles collection. very cool i must say…

some post-processing will really make these look much better…

white balance was off.

cheerio!

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new years pics coming up!!

Dirty dog

Kristian — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:03:46 +0000

NYC style

Chicago dog NYC style

Kristian — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:38:21 +0000

Good stuff ….

Going to NYC again :-)

Ankur — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:20:07 +0000

Godzilla on NYC

David — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:46:10 +0000

slate nyc

super sal — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:26:40 +0000

i love not being on the list…

Drag Race NYC/Bike Messengers Are on Crack

Ankur — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:07:43 +0000

Intense…

terminal 5 nyc – nin

super sal — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:20:03 +0000

line’s into the tunnel…dang

Andy Kessler – RIP

super sal — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:36:59 +0000

::sigh::
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NYC skateboarding pioneer Andy Kessler dies at 48

By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 22 mins ago
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NEW YORK – Andy Kessler, a trailblazer during New York City‘s nascent 1970s skateboarding scene and a designer of skate parks who was admired by boarders on both coasts, died Monday. He was 48.
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Kessler died after suffering a heart attack following an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, Moose Huerta, a close friend and fellow skateboarder, said Thursday.
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He was dismantling old wood on a shack in Montauk, Long Island, when he was stung, said Tony Farmer, a skateboarding friend and West Coast native who now lives in Brooklyn.
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Kessler got his start in the 1970s with a loose-knit group of skateboarders and graffiti artists known as the Soul Artists of Zoo York. They skated all over Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Kessler lived. Central Park’s Bandshell was a favorite spot.
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In the 1990s, Kessler persuaded the city’s Parks Department to build a skateboard facility in Riverside Park. He went on to design other skate parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Montauk.
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Huerta said Kessler also developed a zeal for surfing in the past decade.
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“The two groups are completely different from each other,” he said. “But the level of friends, and how he transcended age and demographics with the people he touched, was amazing.”
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Kessler had no health insurance in 2005 when he took a spill on his board and dislocated his femur. When he was unable to pay a $51,000 medical bill, several dozen surfers, skaters and artists — Julian Schnabel, Mickey Eskimo, Zephyr and Wes Humpston reportedly among them — helped raise the money with a benefit party, Farmer said.
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When he healed from the injury, he hopped back on his board, Farmer said.
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“Flowing through traffic, timing lights, shooting reds, dodging pedestrians … dude just had the streets so wired,” Farmer said. “Suffice to say, he was an amazing cat.”
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Huerta, who was too young to have skated with Kessler during the early days, said the sport started as “a counterculture activity” but never carried the cache that California skateboarding did. But Kessler didn’t care.
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“He did it out of love,” he said. “He didn’t receive anything out of it. It spoke to him.”
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In 2008, Kessler was featured in a documentary, “From Deathbowl to Downtown: The Evolution of Skateboarding in New York.” The producers, NCP Films, described it as “an anthropological overview of skating’s epochal shift from the parks and pools of the 70′s, to ramp skating in the 80′s, to the street ascendancy of the 1990′s as seen from a New York-centric perspective.
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It is scheduled for international release on DVD on Sept. 15.
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In addition to his love for the sport, Huerta said Kessler’s first big success was orchestrating the building of the city’s first skate park, near the Hudson River. At the time of his death, he was trying to update the Montauk skate park he had designed about a decade earlier, Huerta said.
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On Friday evening, surfers planned to paddle out together and circle around Ditch Plains Beach in Montauk in remembrance of Kessler, Huerta said. Friends also planned a get-together Saturday at the Autumn Bowl, a semiprivate warehouse facility in Brooklyn that was one of Kessler’s favorite hangouts.
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Kessler’s burial is scheduled for Sunday at Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus, N.J.

nyc up’d their yellow cab game

super sal — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:28:37 +0000

This is NYC

Kristian — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:38:59 +0000

Wow…..

the downfall of society i predicted…

super sal — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:38:52 +0000

last september, i posted about the madness of the uninformed…while i blamed wikipedia for many things, i am impressed that they quickly found and corrected the error…but it’s now a social responsibility they must make on their end.
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article pulled from yahoo! news
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Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote

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Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press Writer
On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT
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DUBLIN (AP) — When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
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The sociology major’s obituary-friendly quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.
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A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they’d swallowed his baloney whole.
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“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
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“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
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So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
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“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”
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Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
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When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called “a golden opportunity” for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
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He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre’s actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
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If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as “too good to be true.” But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
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He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
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“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
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“It’s worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he’d done, and it’s regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so,” she wrote.
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Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote’s lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
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And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia’s own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information — as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances — and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
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“I didn’t want to be devious,” he said. “I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they’re under.”

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here’s my post…click for the full read
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…obey, question humanity, marry and consume, stay asleep… how different was life before the internet?…with this new type of medium has come more responsibility than i realized. when i was in college, the internet was an information source you’d take with a grain of salt, it was known to be a high risk since you’d either get an F or kicked out for plagiarism…not to mention down 50 bucks for an essay some 7th grader wrote. but now things are different. much different. the more i hear about ‘responsible information’ the more it gets me questioning the things i read and what students today are really learning from.
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it’s easy to assume the government plays gepeto for cnn, but what happens when we ourselves are dictating what potentially millions of people will read? for example…wikipedia. before powerzamcam, i taught 5th grade, learned more about the way we think in one year from 24 ten year olds than i did in 16+ years of education. about a quarter of all reports these kids handed in were direct off wikipedia…i’m not questioning the child’s sense to find information by the simplest means possible, but i am questioning the source…i read this on wikipedia’s ‘about’ page:

Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge; this means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link.

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looks like everyone has the chance to play historian now. i read an article a couple weeks ago about a guy that lived and breathed new york, he was flipping out over the fact that the wikipedia article about nyc had numerous historical, factual, and geographical errors. he spent 2 days trying to confirm and update the article…how crazy is that…it took a new york citizen with the tenacity to challenge what he read about the city he loves to correct the information fed to millions of people. and if you don’t think it’s such a big deal…try googling new york city and see what’s in the top 3. something that’s been a factually wrong source was sitting at the top of the number one search engine on the internet! well at least it’s fixed and we don’t have to worry since it’s not world changing.
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…but i guess this is already ‘existing knowledge’ so it’s got to be right.

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don’t say i didn’t warn you…

Babbo NYC

super sal — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:23:24 +0000

I ordered a $30 glass of wine =)

NYC Parking Ticket no way

super sal — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:48:33 +0000

Bastards

Katz NYC

Kristian — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:26:16 +0000

Amazing