Ryan's Blog

I remember seeing this double rainbow over I-80 when my dad and I were driving back to college before my senior year. While I was organizing some old digital photos I found this shot and I was surprised by how vibrant the color was. The pavement is as black as I remember it, the sky as deep blue. I made a global levels adjustment in Photoshop, but I didn’t do anything special to highlight the rainbows. Thought you might enjoy the shot.

If you want to see the original, I put together a side-by-side comparison. It might look like I pumped up the blues, but the original has a yellow color cast.

Posted by Ryan at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I took this picture about a month ago but I haven’t gotten around to posting it. It struck me as a funny juxtaposition between Small Town America and Big City, U.S.A. While it might be unfair to compare the front page of the Post to the B section of the Standard Examiner, another moose did make an appearance on the front page two weeks ago. I don’t have a shot of that so you’ll have to take my word for it.

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One of my favorite parts of walking through Chilean cities was the eclectic street art and graffiti. Especially in Valparaiso and the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago, areas brimming with color, I thought graffiti added to the streets’ quirkiness. Graffiti is often characterized by its free-form, unplanned, random expression, but many of the examples I saw were a kind of internal contradiction: stenciled graffiti—spray paint confined by plastic templates.

Some of the specimins I found were so entirely whimsical or strange that it was hard not to be charmed by them. Here are three of my favorites:

Men on pipes and tightropes This piece has probably the best placement of any I’ve seen.

An international outlaw. So, uh, where is he?

I love you umbrellas. I’m not sure why I like this one so much, but there’s something charming about the non sequitur replacement of “you” with a picture of an umbrella.

You can check out the rest of the graffiti photos I took over at Flickr (or in a slideshow!) Much of the graffiti expresses political messages, some of which may be particularly offensive to Americans. But I figure that if you’re not offended or shocked on a regular basis, then you’re living an insular life and you don’t really know what people around the world think. That said, take these photos with a grain of salt.

Posted by Ryan at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The road from Lima to Cusco takes 20 hours in bus. Well, only 19 hours, 57 minutes, but the numbness in our legs told me to round up.

It’s the rainy season, but the frequent drizzles and fog seem to wrap the city in a mythical myst. It fits: we’re in the heart of the Incan Empire.

While Roy and I were eating lunch it started to rain, for maybe the twelfth time today. I commented that there must be a rainbow somewhere. When we stepped out into the plaza de armas, he pointed it out.

Posted by Ryan at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Once you put something on the Internet, you really can’t predict who will see it or what will happen to it. A year after I wrote about having LASIK surgery, a stranger emailed me to ask how it went. Parents who have children studying abroad in Chile write me every so often when they stumble across my site. Jast the other day I got an email from a woman who apparently read my account of making strawberry jam. She mentioned that there are many unique South American fruits that make for good jam and suggested that I look at recipes in her jam cookook. When you live on the Internet, the motley crew that knocks on your door is astonishing, and rather charming in its own way.

If that is true for what I write here on my small-time site, it is magnified by several orders of magnitude on Flickr, the photo-sharing site that receives nine bazillion times more traffic. I had been a Flickr member for just a couple months when a woman asked if she could use some of my Disney World photos in a book about scrapbooking Disney vacations. Then I got an email from a book publisher in Argentina asking if they could use my photo of an empty classroom in an English textbook. A few months ago a creative director wrote me from the Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian to ask about using my photo of a man riding a bicycle with his cow on a mural in their bronchoscopy ward. Even though I thought I understood the far reach of digital media online, I was still pretty flabbergasted by each request. How did these people select my pictures?

Continue reading "Oh the places Flickr goes" »

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Some years ago Photoshop entered the public consciousness. Before, it was known only by the designers and photographers who used it. These days everyone knows about Photoshop and expects it to work retouching miracles. Photoshop’s ubiquity has come at the cost of increased wariness of photos’ credibility. Now when you see a beautiful or impressive photograph you wonder how much is reality and how much is digital magic.

Once you have used Photoshop for awhile, it’s easy to recognize certain tell-tale signs that something has been added or changed. At many postcard stands in Chile you can find cards from Alex Huber. The first time I saw one I was all but certain that it had been Photoshopped. I thought the moon in this photo had been added.

The giveaway is that the moon is far too large in the picture. Unless you use a long telephoto lens, the moon appears tiny in photos. And when you use such a lens, you can’t get the panoramic perspective that you see in this picture.

Continue reading "The many moons of Alex Huber" »

Posted by Ryan at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

For some time I wanted a mini-tripod for my camera. Though tiny, they’re useful for getting sharp pictures in low-light conditions and for taking timer-delay pictures when there’s no one else to take the picture. They do come with some of the typical limitations of tripods. You need to have a usable, mostly flat surface to set it up, and getting the tripod to hold the camera straight can be challenging. I live with tight purse strings and my tripod needs weren’t all that pressing, so my acquisition never went through.

Continue reading "My trusty Gorilla" »

Posted by Ryan at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent a couple hours yesterday designing and setting up the headline displayed at the top of this page for the Torres del Paine special feature that begins later this week. There are six images that rotate through the display. They are all posted here so you don’t have to reload the page several times to see each one.

Continue reading "Torres del Paine rotating images" »

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This Christmas tree stands in downtown Santiago’s Plaza de Armas just in front of the city cathedral. Merry Christmas!

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Last weekend we had our second retreat of the year, this time in El Quisco. El Quisco is a small town west of Santiago that sits on the Chilean coast. It’s on the beach, though that’s nothing special for a country that has 4,000 miles of coastline. And since Chile is so thin, you can never be farther than 150 miles from the beach. In terms of sheer quantity, the country is a beach lover’s delight.

Here’s a snapshot of the surrounding area where we stayed at El Quisco.

Posted by Ryan at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After torrential winter rains, our normally barren backyard turned green. When our neighbor Gina saw the yard she remarked, “What a pain!” I told her, to the contrary, that I thought it was kind of fun to have a green backyard. “Nope,” she said, “all the tall grass and weeds provide a haven for mice and rats.” OK, so it’s agreed then: a pain. If only I knew….

Continue reading "I'm just a lawn machine" »

Posted by Ryan at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As a child, my dad always brought home entertaining and informative cautionary tales from the emergency room. It’s a wonder that I didn’t grow up more scared than I did. One of the many lessons was this: don’t ride a bicycle while walking a dog on a leash. The dog’s erratic movements can quickly set the rider off-balance and lead to a crash. Knowing that, you can imagine my concern when I saw the following scene outside our house:

The other day Elizabeth and I were walking down the road and we saw this man biking down the road, leading his cow to a nearby pasture, and singing happily to himself (or better yet, maybe to his cow). These are the kind of things you don’t see just anywhere. Though I do think someone should warn the poor sap about the dangers of biking with a cow on a leash.

Posted by Ryan at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last time you heard about my dog Memo, I was mad that he went and got his ear ripped up in a fight. He’s a feisty one, plus he’s old so he doesn’t listen to me when I tell him to behave. Typical. For his own good, we’ve been keeping him closed in at home. It’s sad to close in a dog who’s used to roaming, but he keeps getting in fights, and worse, losing. This has brought its own challenges because Memo is better at getting out than we are at keeping him in. That’s a different story.

Caitlin and I took a hike up Pocuro Hill on Saturday morning and thought it would be good to bring Memo along. He was excited about our field trip, though generally impatient with our progress as a group; he ran ahead to hurry us up, and back to see why we were so slow. In the end, we made it to the top and saw that Memo was proudly guarding the summit.

Posted by Ryan at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When we were traveling south in Puerto Montt, we stopped by a shopping mall to pass some time. Roy, Tom, and I hung out at a typically overpriced mall CD store. You know, the kind that sell CDs for $17 when you could get the same thing from Amazon.com for $13 or Apple’s music store for $10. On top of that, CDs here in Chile are ridiculously expensive. I saw a variety of recent releases for $15,000 pesos—about $30.

The expense aside, the store had some intriguing categories for its music.

As if “Anglo Pop & Rock” weren’t enough, there’s also …

Be sure to note that “Black music” includes Eminem.

I’m not sure if these categories would fly in the U.S. today. We got a good chuckle before we got booted from the store for (a) taking pictures and (b) not buying any CDs.

Posted by Ryan at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago we painted our living room, transforming it from a sickly green to a vivid, dark green, by way of a pale yellow. What can I say—we bought cheap paint from a cheap paint store and it didn’t cover our walls. After we were done painting, I washed the paint rollers in our outdoor sink. I washed and washed, but green paint still flowed from the rollers. As I watched the green water flow through the sink, I had visions of the dyed-green river running in Chicago on St. Patty’s. Hopefully you think the same since I’m offering this photo as my online celebration of March 17 this year. Sláinte!

Posted by Ryan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some views you can’t capture very well with a single shot, which is why it’s nice that digital cameras make it so easy to take panoramic pictures. This image is four separate pictures that I tooked with my little Canon camera and stitched together on the computer. The scene is sunset over the harbor at Puerto Montt, where we visited a few days ago. Over at Flickr, you can see this panorama as large as you could possibly want.

Posted by Ryan at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ryan and Tom saw stakes to mark off the foundation trenches while Meg and Matías read the house plans.

I just posted a batch of photos from Habitat on Flickr to browse. Check them out to see the highlights and the lowlights of the week. There’s everything from a gorgeous rainbow arcing over a house to our morale being shattered by torrential rainfall. In some of the pictures (see right), we even try to look like we know what we’re doing on a construction site. Well, win some, lose some.

Posted by Ryan at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the sun set on my birthday, the sky lit up with a spectacular array of color and light. When I see things like this I think, “Hey—I’m in Chile. And life is pretty good.”

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The other day when I left the Institute I saw these bovines in the street. I had my camera, so I snapped a picture. One local looked at me, amused that I thought these cows merited a photo. But I say show me a city with 1,000,000 people where cows graze in the streets and I’ll show you a city that’s not in the U.S.

Posted by Ryan at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday was quite the example of the Morton Salt slogan: “When it rains, it pours.” That, of course, refered to Morton Salt’s special quality in the day whereby you could still pour it when it rained outside (most other salts clumped up because of the humidity). But now I am referring to the torrential downpour we faced Saturday here in Cochabamba. Many streets became rivers. The normally tranquill canal that runs down my street raged. Several hours later, the water had drained for the most part, but some roads were still pretty wet (see photo).

Posted by Ryan at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cliche lovers say you should stop and smell the roses. I’m on board with that. The Maryknoll Institute where I have classes is surrounded by beautiful gardens and flowers. A few days ago I decided to smell them and take a few pictures along the way. One of them was topped with this pollen-munching honeybee. I think the picture turned out pretty well.

Make sure you take the time to do some rose sniffing yourself, even if it’s just metaphorically.

Posted by Ryan at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Between my last class and finals week I went home to have my tonsils removed. They had been causing me some problems, and since my health insurance expires once I graduate, this was the only time to have it done. Now, after a 15 minute surgery and 40 doses of Lortab, I am returning home from home.

My mom booked my ticket back to Notre Dame and specifically requested the window seat on the left side of the plane for my connection through Cincinnati. From this seat, you can look out your window as you approach Notre Dame and see the campus. I took a couple of exciting aerial pictures during the airport approach:

In the meantime, there's work to be done. People keep asking, "How are the tonsils?" Well, they're gone. And while my body learns to deal with that, I'll do some healing, write a paper, and study for accounting. Finals week is here.

Posted by Ryan at 8:30 PM | Permalink