WalkOutside

WalkOutside: This One River

I started with the intention of documenting this nature trail in my town. The trail used to be a Short Line that supplied materials to factories along the 3 mile stretch between 1840 until 1981. I wanted to document some of the more interesting remnants of these old industrial structures.

Taking the time to document this place that I had grown so familiar with, I was taken back to when my friends used to come here a lot, mostly in middle school. I decided to continue up the river as it meanders through our town, visiting other spots we spent a lot of time skating at.

Starting at what was the end of the river for us – we never really thought to follow the river into the woods beyond this bridge, and so this is as far as it reaches.

This wall is the first structure you see walking from the north end of the trail. These “Tree Sweaters” you’ll see along the trail appeared last year. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were made from acrylic yarn.

This bridge was originally part of the Skaneateles Short Line.

From here I meandered away from the walking path to take pictures of some of the other bridges and brickwork on this side of the river – you can see the previous bridge on the right, and the next bridge on the left.

As I was walking through this area I was struck how the snow obscures and partially “erases” the present chaos of the natural landscape. This seemed to emphasize the regularities in these deteriorating human-made structures. It made me think of the effect of missing data from our photogrammetry workshop. The slight **irregularities** in the deteriorating structures seem to match the irregularities of the blank snow, enforcing the cohesiveness of this illusion.

I thought about how the river’s movement was probably the most striking disruption of the blank snow canvas – cutting through it so violently in some parts and tepidly in others.

This waterfall is iconic. This bench is iconic.

I paused here to think about how it took hundreds of years for these stone structures to be deteriorated by entropy and reclaimed to the extent that they have by organic materials. It took less than a decade for this bench to be claimed by the organic material of a shit head with a lighter.

I know who did this – he beat me up before soccer practice in 8th grade. Knowing him, I honestly see this as an act of neuroticism more than an act of vandalism – but there may be an inherent connection between the two.

Natural properties of a filter. This is where Doug found the frisbee.

An interesting feature of these woods is these rows of support pillars that used to hold up mills. They are always arranged in straight lines that seem to cut through the landscape at weird angles – directions that used to disappear seamlessly and intentionally.

The bottom of this area and the next is actually a concrete platform. In the Summer the river dries up and only continues below the platform, letting us walk across to poke around inside these buildings.

Another bridge along the Skaneateles Short Line. This is the southern-most bridge of the nature trail.

This is where the river leaves the nature trail and cuts under roads and behind houses into the village.

We used to skate a lot in these parking lots behind CVS.

This bank was real nice to skate when there weren’t trucks blocking it and people telling us to leave. The river is back there on the left in this picture.

Old Stone Creamery. We clocked a lot of hours behind here in the Summer. I remember the water being pretty gross here but you could jump off the dock and then lay out on that metal pipe that got ripping hot sitting in the sun all day. This is where my friend lost his frisbee. When we saw Doug with it, he said it couldn’t be ours because he found it at the nature trail.

If you go down this hole you can wander through the sewer system beneath the village.

This is the other side of that filter shown in the previous pics. There’s usually a landmass of gunk and trash here in the summer.

The first bridge that the river crosses from the lake.

It was pretty common to run and jump off this boat house in the summer.

[I just found out the whole things on google maps]

Walk Timelapse

I went on a walk up a hill nearby and took a timelapse. It’s about 90 minutes reduced down to 3.5.

I recorded the timelapse with an iPhone in my shirt pocket, which contributed to the jitteriness. It definitely gets very hard to tell what’s going on during most of the uphill portions of the walk, where the horizon disappears and all that’s visible is the ground. The clearer portions of the video are the flatter sections of trail, which on this walk were rather limited.

As it got darker in the trees on the north side of the hill, the camera automatically reduced the shutter speed, resulting in a very streaky and somewhat incomprehensible image. I think it would be cool to exploit this effect more by trying one of these timelapses in an even darker environment, maybe at night.

As for the most interesting thing found on this walk, I think it would have to be this rubber chicken screwed onto a tree by some mountain bikers.

Walk Outside

Discovery: My camera has a fake tilt-shift program on it, and I really enjoy playing with it, it muffles images in a really interesting way.

It also feels very quiet and empty outside, fewer cars, fewer people, and significantly fewer frozen pizzas.

Walk Outside(ish), I needed to go to the grocery store to get food. Walked to one and took pictures on the way using only the fake “miniaturizing” feature.

People things:

Covid-19 shifts

Walk Outside

Documentation of a walk around downtown Burlington, Vermont on a rare 60° day (it’s snowing now.) It’s even emptier than usual as most of the businesses are closed. I wanted to capture the sense of abandonment and muted color palette. I also like seeing how ‘beautiful’ images are created by humans attempting to reconstruct nature.

Complete album (71 photos)

A Walk Outside

walk-walk-walk

I don’t go for that many walks anymore. I am trying to avoid the parks (and even the streets for that matter). It is still p crowded sometimes and I am trying to do my part as case #s jump here in NYC. Yesterday it was raining. In light of my anxiety of being a young person who gets v sick from the COVID I am trying to quit smoking. It’s probably time anyways. Yesterday I was outside for just 10 minutes. I walked to the end of the block taking a photo with every step. This GIF is a lil stop motion of the results. I enjoyed this offering.

77 worms (& 2 slugs)

On Friday, I woke up to it absolutely pouring rain outside. By 8:30, it all suddenly cleared up, and I went out for a walk. There was an absurd amount of worms everywhere. I took pictures of them for about an hour (and was extremely careful where I stepped…)

To sort them:

I asked my computer to sort them into 5 groups via a quick k-means clustering script I found online.
I sorted them by hand, by worm orientation. This was super tedious and it’s not as pretty as I’d like, but it’s as good as it’s gonna get today!

Enjoy! (see if you can find the 2 bonus slugs). I will post the high-quality versions online somewhere…

Fortunately I was able to go out on a walk on Saturday afternoon in the woods of Connecticut and stumbled upon two things:

1.) These wild foam patterns on top of a stream. I’m used to seeing it be clumped together in a corner, but the flow around the rock meant that they made these pretty interesting patterns.

2.) These leaves which absolutely flabbergasted me. There was a bunch of them stuck to rocks along the route in multiple places and I have no idea how they’re remaining where they are, but they’re particularly crispy and act like very very thin potato chips.

A Run Cut Short

I set out to take a time lapse of my run to Frick Park but unfortunately I accidentally hit the stop button when I got to squirrel hill! Nevertheless, here’s the start of my run, every 3 seconds my camera took a picture! I always run with my phone in a snazzy neon pink fanny pack so now I know what my phone gets to see during my runs!

https://youtu.be/4mxwuPQMOrk

A Run Cut Short

A Walk Outside In Crystal Lake

Here are the pictures from my walk the other day. I’m back home and walked around my new neighborhood in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

This discovery was the leftover pieces of the tragedy that happened in my town this summer. My town seems to be in this weird state of forgetting the events, not wanting to be disrespectful, and also having constant reminders of what happened.

I also always forget how red my county is compared to other counties in the area. Though it’s not a direct correlation, the amount of american flags everywhere is striking, you can’t turn your head without seeing one I realized on my walk.

Here are some other things I found on my walk:

I walked around in the woods and discovered some things

There are a lot of woods near my house, so I went walking in them while it was raining the other day and I found and photographed a bunch of stuff. Here’s the most interesting stuff I found.

I think someone ate this deer.

This hole looks very man-made and it’s kinda creepy.

This twig is growing straight through that fungus (or the fungus grew around the twig, I’m not sure which party is responsible for this situation)

When the rain flows down pine trees it makes foam at the base. I have no idea what the science behind this is.

There’s this random stone bench in the middle of the woods, in case anybody is looking for an uncomfortable makeout spot.