The Roofs of St. Petersburg

The other end of the buildings (from the gutters) -- in my mind not as unusual as the gutters but cool nonetheless.







With the usual heavy debt to Photoshop and the Tiffen filters.

The Rain Gutters of St. Petersburg

I was in St. Petersburg ~ a year ago and finally finished processing/culling the photos.

The gutters were simply amazing. Interestingly I talked to someone who had lived there for a couple years didn't remember them as being noteworthy -- I guess it all depends upon what you grew up with.











Yes, all of the photos were enhanced. If I remember correctly I used the Tiffen filters on all of thse

Serra at Momenta

I saw a post for the Serra installation at momenta on greg.org.

I found the top nighttime image particularly striking (photograph from greg.org)



However, upon looking at it again, it doesn't have the 'enveloping' quality that I like in a lot of Serra's work
Such as his retrospective at MOMA last year -- which was, if anything better than all the reviews said it was.

Or his pieces at DIA Beacon (photograph from DIA)

Green Bicycle

Thanks to whoever did this green bicycle in Allston.

I pass it almost every day and I enjoy seeing it.

Staten Island

Last fall I chartered a fishing boat from si fishing (I would recommend him and recommend chartering a boat from someone licensed -- too many surveillance cameras in the area to do otherwise) to take some shots of "abandoned ships" in Staten Island -- .kmz file here.

I got some really nice shots, some of which used the Tiffen filters described previously

Some of which had some minor photoshop tweaks

and some of which oddly (for me) just worked as is

urinals.net

I was at Bukowski's in Cambridge the other day, and noticed that they had installed a nice urinal.



It made me remember a site I had visited a few years ago urinal.net, happily it is still around.

There's a lot of urinals on this site, some just noteworthy for their existence
but some are "true works of art" (whatever that means). My favorites are these at the Kohler Art Center.



This one by Clark Sorenson (slightly marred by its use of conventional/old school plumbing)


And then the reward for urinal with the best view

Coffee Table

I recently finished a coffee table. I only do furniture once every few years. The pieces are strictly for personal use so I’m willing to put an inordinate amount of work into them and their functional utility could well be termed “quirky.”

I was pretty happy with the way this one turned out: it is both solid and (semi) functional.

As you can see, this is a pretty minimal piece. I’ve always found that minimalism ups the ante when it comes to fastening and quality of execution. Each joint was problematic. The base is a 6”x6”x30” piece of laurentian green granite. My initial plan was to have 3 square holes waterjetted through the granite and to place the tubing through the granite. After being surprised by the cost of the waterjet ($800!), I had to come up with a different approach. I decided to bolt them on fastened with nuts on the other side (sketch below). However, since the base is granite, I knew that my little hammer drill wasn’t going to get me very far.

I ended up renting a Hilti TE 76 from Home Depot for less than $100 (including drill bits) and was able to drill all three half-inch holes in about 10 minutes. This drill was a truly amazing piece of equipment.

Assuring proper alignment of the post to the base can only happen with a machine cut surface, so I moved the internal nuts an inch up the post and drilled four holes, welded shims on the nuts for a fairly tight fit and then welded the shim/nut assembly to the post and ground it flat -- a flat surface like that is pretty easy to maintain with hand tools.

For me, with my limited welding skills, welding posts to plates always induces warping in the plate (I’m not so bad that I warp the post!). This was a classic “weld and bang it flat” situation, and even after flattening I had complete bond failures when I released the clamps. I solved this by:

1. Better surface prep.
   
2. Clamping everything in place, aligning the post, unclamping, gluing (epoxy) and then reclamping.

Steel was finished with Jax Iron, Steel & Nickel Blackener- from the Compleat Sculptor, a good resource for these types of things.