The Festive Fence of Franklin Avenue.
Archive for December 2008
I found this Christmas light-laden house in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis. Most of the bigger houses have just a few flourishes of lights, but this one really caught my eye.
See the little Christmas bear in the front yard? He’s riding a sleigh and is set on a fountain.
I shot this last picture of the Christmas bear and Christmas lights with my new f/1.4 lens at 1.4 and 1/50 second hand-held while laying on the ground. I wanted to use the shallow depth of field to get the lights out of focus on both sides of him. Not sure if it really works, but laying on the ground in the snow puts a definate time limit on a composition.
We’ve got a blizzard moving in this morning with 6 inches expected. Hopefully I’ll get out and bring home some new photos for y’all.
Carols, Celtic & Christmas Classics, SimpleGifts featuring Billy McLaughlin has only two shows left all others are sold out!
I was out looking for Christmas lights Sunday night for the blog and decided to head North for a while. I’ve been busy with work and with all the holiday stress, a nice drive in the country sounded relaxing. I got a ways out of town, not really sure how far. I left the highway for narrow farm roads. Though I had never been that way before, I felt drawn in that direction.
Soon after passing an abandoned gas station, I saw a flicker of lights on the horizon. I was sure they weren’t Christmas lights, they seemed bluish-green and seemed to be moving across the trees in the distance. As I approached them, I pulled over and dug out my camera. They were hard to focus on, the auto focus kept slipping, so I switched to manual. Still not able to get it to work, I changed to a longer lens. Once I had the lens on I looked up and was startled to see the light approaching across the field toward me. I immediately aimed my camera at them, but just as I did, my camera shut off and wouldn’t come back on. I panicked and tried to start my Jeep, but it too would not work.
The lights pointed at my car and all around me lit up like daylight. It was at that very moment that I felt an overwhelming calmness mixed with déjà vu. They were so brilliantly blue and calm. I wanted to fall asleep and run at the same time.
It’s now 4 am on Friday morning and I have no idea how I got home. I’m sitting at my desk, but I have no recollection of how I got here and what happened since Sunday night. I only have vague impressions of… Well, of not wanting to go outside.
It’s as if I woke up one morning and it was 11 degrees below zero out and I had six clients breathing down my neck and no time to work on my blog. Sorry folks, I never meant to take so much time off from the daily blog. I let the shocking trauma of a cold snap in Minnesota keep me hiding inside working. I finally broke free and headed out last night shooting. This odd little snowman bathed in blue light inspired me to new heights of yarn-spinnin’ & leg-pullin’.
I’m back on track with pictures of lights until Christmas. I let the fervor of the holidays get to me. Just have to remember to keep my stick on the ice and my eyes on the sky.
On the first day of Christmas my Mitchster gave to me, an Angel in Rice Park Square.
Today I am working on a Christmas piece for Morgan & Craig, owners and trainers of Balance a fitness studio. This is a portrait I shot of them for the piece. Learn more about Morgan and Craig and Balance fitness studio here.
Remember when I went to 11 Caribou Coffees in one day? I just learned that I have been solidly trounced in this behavior. This guy took on Starbucks in Manhattan — check out this video, turn down the volume first, the ‘opening riff’ is a little jarring, but the video is pretty funny.
Click on the photo for an enlargement!
Click on the photo for an enlargement!
Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates
By Rob Stein – Washington Post
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.
The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person’s husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.
“You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. “But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious.”
One person’s happiness can affect another’s for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the “infectiousness” of that emotion appears to be far weaker.
Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person’s emotions can influence another’s — laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one’s spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.
When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.
The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.
The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier.
Read the rest of the story at the Washington Post: Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates
