Terra Galleria Photography

New images: Boston

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I’ve updated my page of images of Boston with new images from March 2010.

Boston was the first city in the US that I visited, two decades ago. Back in those days, as a computer scientist, we had frequent collaborations with the MIT where I came to give technical talks. About twenty images on the page date from that period. Last March, I went to Boston again to give talks, but this time, it was artist lectures about my photographic projects at a university and museum.

Although I had arrived late in the evening, and gone to bed well past midnight (body time 3am with the jet lag), on the first morning, I got up at 5am to photograph at sunrise from the harbor, knowing that this may be the last time I would see the sun during my stay. It turned out that the weather forecast was right. New England was battered for days by the worst rain storm of the winter.

The combination of near-freezing temperatures, rain, and high winds made it miserable to walk the streets. It was a fair deal of extra work to keep the lens dry, but the weak link was often the photographer. I’d often had to enter a building to warm up, however, this lead me to find a few interesting spaces, such as the Quincy Market, or Harvard’s Memorial Hall. The reward was that wet streets created reflections, especially at night, that made the images more interesting than they would have been in dry weather.

In the cities, there is always this short window of time, around sunset, when no matter what the weather is, for a brief moment between grey and black, the sky turns to a dark blue, and the ambient light still lights up the cityscape enough for it not be overpowered by the lights. On a rainy day, this will be your best scenic opportunity. Do not miss it !

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