Iron City

you guys are going to have to bear with me. i had troubles reformating my laptop and didn't have time to get a bootleg copy of the Adobe Suite for PC. in short, my photos on this road trip are not going to be edited. this may not bother you, but i am definitely going bonkers.

so, after crashing with some bros that already had a hotel room, it was off to Pittsburgh. Tim just moved there from Raleigh and the city was a convenient halfway point on my way to Guelph for my best friend Robin's wedding. like i said, it's wedding season. i arrived Sunday afternoon and kicked it with Tim for a few hours. he had to leave for St. Louis early in the morning, but left me a key to the house and free day for roaming the 'Burgh.

please understand that both sides of my family are from PA and when i say 'from PA' i mean, 'from Steeler Country'. none of that Philadelphia nonsense. if you don't get it, i've got to leave it at that.

[Carnegie Science Center and Heinz Field, complete with Duckie]

in addition to not having Photoshop to edit my images, i've also been disappointed with my writing so far. blogs used to flow much better for me. what happened? then i realized that it used to be a lot more personal (and useless) before i did this documentary thing with pictures. somehow i've got to use this blog as a precursor to my senior exhibition. that is a forewarning that i might start babbling.

back to Pittsburgh. it is such a beautiful city in all the ways that i like. it's plopped down over the hills, naturally splitting into different areas by the rivers. i don't think i've ever seen a city so affected by geography, the land being the essence of the development. Tim's roommate, Lyndsey, didn't have many options for getting around the city. we talked about the T and the bus system, but after trying to decipher the schedules for downtown, Oakland, Southside, Mt. Washington AND trying to fit them together... yeah, i just walked.

their place is on the very end of Southside at Handler St. (hike up through some woods and you can look down on the practice field!) and i've been down Carson St. before, so that wasn't a problem. i went across the 10th St. Bridge, the way i had driven in the day before, and ended up by the county jail, which i had mistaken as an apartment building with a lot of gymnasium noise. silly me. more on the beauty of the city: i'm an artist. i love edgy and grunge. there is not more appealing of an envrionment than a blue-collar cityscape.

[steel steel steel]

there is also the age factor. Pittsburgh has been around for a while and seen plenty of ups and downs; it's had the time to establish a character. i never took Latin, but i think the courthouse was built in 1884. in the bridges alone, you have a timeline of the city displayed by the dated engineering and aesthetics.

[the Pittsburgh courthouse]

after walking a good bit downtown i went back across the Smithfield to Station Square and got on a cheesy boat tour. i can only walk so much in one day and definitely wanted to at least view the other parts of Pittsburgh. the Point was very impressive. just looking at it from a visual standpoint, it is a very dominate composition.

[the Allegheny, the Point and the Monogahela]

wide angle city shots make me happy, but the goddamn cloud shadowed the skyline and the boat was turning the corner too fast. it may not sound like much, but the sun reflecting off the PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) building covered with, oh, glass windows is quite nice.

i really wanted to go up the Duquesne Incline for photos of the Point (and do that again at night), but it was again the walking issue. i got off the boat and it was almost 5pm and the Mon Incline was right across the street.

[downtown and Southside from above Station Square on the Monogahela Incline]

from left to right are the Smithfield St. Bridge, the T and the Liberty, Birmingham and Hot Metal St. Bridges. aerial shots of Pittsburgh are amazing. the Monogahela River is known to be dirty and Lyndsey said that one of her friends took a picture from a plane that showed, where the Mon merges with the Allegheny, the Ohio River was distinctly split through the middle in two different colors for a good distance. anywho, Mt. Washington, at night, with the fisheye... so i can get the city lights draping the hills.

this town touches my heart in so many ways. i wish i was a settle-down type. Pittsburgh would definitely be my top choice. it kinda always has. there are a lot of things from my past that are so deeply rooted, i didn't even realize how much they affected me on the surface. the South is great. i call it home, but Pennsylvania is who i am. got a little growing up to do, though, i suppose. i'm itching to investigate the Continental Divide and it will be my next long-term destination. big mountains are my lover. yet, Portland is good-looking AND might be a better provider. we'll see. ;)

KKΨ wedding

wedding season is here. KKΨ is an honorary music fraternity serving collegiate band programs across the country. this past weekend two of my brothers (not literal, it's still a guy and a girl) tied the knot in Roxboro, NC.

[Tbird in the parking lot]

[the new Mrs. Wade]

it was great to see so many of my brothers again. being a service frat, we're dedicated to volunteer work, so of course people were showing up the day before the wedding helping the bride Liz with preparation. we also know how to have a good time after working hard. ;)

[classic KΣ chapter]

our night was topped off with the treat of having Jason's funk band, Hot Politics, play at the reception. first, he's a charter member of our chapter in the fraternity AND they are quirky enough to have a euph in their ensemble. we all got the chance to bask in our music geekdom and share a day of celebration. congratulations to Doug and Liz!!

[Jason Bullock on euphonium]

First Born Community Development Center

i stumbled across this organization when looking for volunteer work during darker days. First Born is run by people who go to a church together, but independent of the actual church... complicated subject that is not the purpose of this post. basically, my pictures were taken for the group's presentation at a sponser banquet. what they do is put together boxes of food to be donated to low-/no- income people in the area with diabetes.

quick lowdown: the South is full of people with diabetes. it's also very rural, so travel is a factor for the poor. food products for a diabetic diet are often more expensive or hard to come by. i mean, these people have all sorts of foot problems, so it's not like they can go out and tend their own expansive garden. First Born Community Development Center has a very well-orchestrated program for helping these people.

first, the food is not just canned goods from door-to-door donations. there are plenty of those, but there are also heaping palettes straight from a warehouse, in addition to several 50lb bags of onions and truckloads of cabbagge. local grocery stores give them meat that is pushing expiration dates in order to be frozen and distributed. my guess is that companies benefit from donating food products and that's how First Born can afford to supply food for almost 300 people a month. like most other non-profit stuff, they also get props for gearing towards people with a disadvantage. hence, they receive grant money from our local (and substantial hospital). the end result is a box with well-rounded canned food, juice, grains, sugar-free sodas, fresh produce and bread, a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk and a bag of frozen meats every month. that is the start that so many people can't afford. some are shipped out to remote areas, but the majority are given out on a first-come/first-serve basis requiring registered eligibility. the paperwork is a necessity for record and adds a level of fairness in distribution, since there is obviously not enough for everyone.

i am very impressed with how many bases they have covered in this game. i'm sure most people don't consider the magnitude of what the organization does and how well-thought through their strategy is. when i was done filling my hours of community service, i just kept going over there. it may not be as often, but it helps just to have me spend an hour a day sorting out their massive amounts of random donations or reorganizing their mess of filing cabinets. that evolved into me taking photos for them. i hope my photos chip off a piece of the iceberg that is big enough to be of interest. please, please, please click on the images to see the entire album. the people running First Born are good people to the core and do nothing but work hard to spread their service.

i'm back to contributing small piddilly stuff until they need me for something bigger. i would love to see First Born have a webpage and if anyone is interested in designing one, please let me know. that will be my next personal project, pending my inability at finding them someone much better than me. =)

off to Ocracoke

finally, something that might be interesting. my good friend Luke is currently living on Ocracoke Island and had been wanting me to come visit for a while. this place is the gem of North Carolina's Outer Banks and you can only get there by boat. i got the idea that i would take my bicycle since the ferry ticket is a mere $3 and the island isn't but 12 miles long. when i let word to my Greenville friends, it turned into another group adventure to add to our list. much thanks to Luke for letting me ride up to his house and stay two nights with a posse of five. Three where fellow photo students (omg, the number of cameras that went) and another old friend, Katie.

[throwing popcorn on the Swan Quarter ferry]

we ended up riding separate, the girls taking the earlier boat and the guys coming in the evening. the beach was the first stop, but the sun came down hard really quick and we opted to chill at the house and meet the roommates. let me just say: 8 boys in a four bedroom house.

[beautiful Aileen lounging on the porch]

we picked up Nick and Bayardo from the dock and proceeded to cook-out, followed by night swimming at the beach. the skies are so dark and clear out there that i couldn't find many constellations because of the thousands of stars that i normally can't see. we were not lucky enough to experience it on this trip, but sometimes the plankton in the water have a bio-luminescent glow that can light up the whole ocean. at most the wet sand by the surf sparkled when we stepped on it.

Katie had to leave on the afternoon ferry the next day, but her short-lived vacation was still a blast. me, her and Luke have known each other for over ten years and i really value the time we get to spend together. that left four photographers, each with their own camera. it may have been a bit intimidating, but we went out on our own excursions while the house went to work.

[photo majors doing what photo majors do]

Luke joined us after getting off work and we headed out to the beach again. i must say, i am jealous of being able to jump in the ocean after a long day.

[a 'Bayardo moment' playing paddleball]

a little more history on Ocracoke: they were all about pirates long before Pirates of the Caribbean came out. it goes back to the days of plunder and booty in the Graveyard of the Atlantic when Edward Teach (Blackbeard) went to his hideaway in the woods of Springer's Point. in case you didn't know, Blackbeard was pretty badass. he would braid his beard with fuses and light them before battle so there would be smoke smoldering around his menacing face. we tried to catch a sunset photo op since the Point is on the sound side of the island, but clouds blocked the horizon and denied us of all the pretty reds and purples.

[Springer's Point at dusk]

we had to catch the 7am ferry to get back to the mainland with time for people to get to work, which meant getting up at the buttcrack of dawn as Luke was leaving to open the coffee shop. needless to say, if you go to the complete album, there will pictures of us passed out on the boat.

[the photo crew heading home together]

go check it out. i recommend it as a top choice on the east coast. especially Ocracoke Coffee. the owners Jackie and Garrick are awesome people, as well as most of the locals.