An autumn sunset at the County Complex in Newark, NJ.

Late at night in a local clothing store in Montclair, NJ. Taken on the eve of Hurricane Sandy, no less.

Some early autumn shots from Wawayanda State Park, NJ.

So the lady upstairs in my apartment building is very much into planting plants around the building, and . . . . FULL STOP — I need to make a quick comment on how popular it has become to start sentences with the word “SO”. I hear it all the time on every radio station that I listen to. I’d like to know, to use another modern colloquialism, “what’s up with that” . . . ANYWAY, so one of the plants that this woman has on the apartment grounds is a jasmine plant. Her husband recently explained to me that this plant only blooms at night.

Well, actually the flowers open up after sunset, but they stay opened until maybe 11 am or so; they don’t just swoon as soon as the sun rises. They aren’t THAT poetic!! Thus, I could have taken this shot in decent mid-morning light. But there is something about flowers blooming at night that deserves notice. So here’s a late night shot of my neighbor’s night-blooming jasmine plant, in all its nocturnal glory.

Local dojo on Sunday morning. And if you need to know who Shakil is . . .

Rubble at a demolition site in Newark, former electrical goods factory. Where hundreds of people were employed, once upon a time. That was back when Newark had enough decent jobs for anyone who wanted to work. The world certainly has changed since then.

“Well you can tear a building down, but you can’t erase a memory . . .” (Living Color).

I’m a little sad today, as my digital camera has bitten the dust. I pulled over on my ride home from work yesterday, wanting a shot of an interesting warning sign on the fence around a demolition site. My trusty Minolta Dimage Z10 was in the trunk, so I got it out and walked over by the site. The sun was at my back, so everything looked good for a quick photo shoot. But when I pushed the button to power up, all was silent; no reassuring little ‘beep’. I peered into the viewer, and all was dark. I re-tried it a couple of times, but nothing. Dead as a doorknob.

When I got home later, after a nice dinner out with my brother, I replaced the batteries, hoping that it was just a bad battery issue. But no dice, there was nothing but darkness and silence where once there was light . . . a celebration of light, a capturing of light by thousands of little photo sensors. That would be no more.

I probably shouldn’t invest any feelings into a modern piece of plastic and microcircuits. I was probably lucky to get 6 years out of my Z10. It’s time time to move on; my next camera will probably cost less and do more (image stabilization would be nice to have). It also will probably be smaller and lighter, an important consideration in a suspicious world, where standing there with a big camera over your face is a sure way to invite questioning from the constables and even jumpy local residents. As a photographer trying to get close to things that security-conscious forces might not want you so close to, it’s best to keep one’s camera hidden out of sight as long as possible. I.e., pocket-size cameras are a photographer’s best friend in a post-nine eleven world.

And yet . . . this particular piece of plastic and rare earth elements seemed special to me. It helped me to create some interesting images. It helped me to be creative. It helped to preserve something of the essence from a lot of interesting scenes that I came across. Or so I thought, anyway.

So I’ll miss my way-behind-the-times Z10. In a few days, after a decent mourning period, I’ll get back on-line and start searching for a new camera. Maybe I’ll have it by next weekend.

This is a picture of my erstwhile main-picture-taker, along with the last shot taken by it. I was trying to capture a scene in Newark on a side street near downtown, where a few days before I had noticed something almost ethereal about the way the sun and morning haze was outlining the iron fire escapes. A few days later, when I took this shot, the sun was dimmed by a layer of high clouds and the mood was not the same. I was hoping to come back with my Z10 next week, on a clearer and brighter morning; but that will now be left to a newer generation of digital picture taking thingies.

Atque in perpetuum, Z10, ave atque vale.

Street art on University Avenue, Newark NJ.