Childhood Photo Album on Google+

This is me when I earned a living at being cute

I just uploaded onto Google+ some childhood photos of me captured in the neighborhood in which I was raised, South Philadelphia.  This is all genuine guaranteed mid-century stuff.

©Damyon T. Verbo - all rights reserved

The Original London Sightseeing Tour

Wednesday we ventured out, again via bus, to the Original London Sightseeing Tour.  The tour consisted of a double decker bus around London and a boat ride on the Thames to Greenwich and return.  My wife and son started the tour the day she broke her foot but was in too much pain to go on the boat ride.  Together my wife and I would finish what she started.

Source:GoogleMaps

We caught the 276 to Hackney Central then the 38.  We disembarked at Piccadilly Circus, in front of Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum.  There was only a short walk to one of the stops along the yellow route of the Original London Sightseeing Tour.  There were three tours, each with a different route and corresponding color.  The yellow tour hit all the mandatory sites.  We boarded the double decker and were told there was no live tour guide on the buses that day.  We settled for listening to a recorded tour in English.  We didn't expect to leave the bus except for the river tour, so we settled in, under cover, at the front of the top deck.


There was a constant change of sightseers on the bus from stop to stop.  I heard many languages spoken.  The few I could discern were French and German.  On all of our travels in London, many different languages were spoken all around us.  I would guess I heard Russian, Polish, Arabic, Indian languages, Italian and others I couldn't discern.  On this tourist ride I heard mostly German and French, more German and French than I heard all week.

From the top deck of our moving bus we passed most of the following, 

Piccadilly Circus	Buckingham Palace& the Changing of the Guard	10 Downing Street	Southwark Cathedral
Statue of Eros	St. James's Park	Horse Guards' Parade	London Dungeon
The National Gallery	Westminster Abbey	St. Martin-in-the-Fields	HMS Belfast
Nelson's Column	Big Ben & Parliament	Covent Garden	Tower Bridge
Trafalgar Square	Lambeth Palace	Fleet Street	Tower of London
St. James's Palace	The London Eye	St. Paul's Cathedral	Shakespeare's Globe
Ritz Hotel	London Aquarium	Bank of England Museum	Tate Modern
Hyde Park	Westminster Pier	Monument	Speakers' Corner
Wellington Museum	London Bridge

We disembarked the yellow route bus when we arrived at the dock from which we would board the boat tour.  We walked down the long ramp to the rear of the line of tourists waiting to board the boat.  There was no boat at the dock.  It was still out on its return trip from Greenwich.  We didn't wait long before the boat was docked and empty of tourists.

We boarded and did a quick spin around the enclosed lower deck and it's snack bar.  I helped my wife to the upper open deck where the view would be better.  She settled on the first bench at the top of the stairs which was the last bench at the rear of the boat.  The weather was a bit cooler than the day before.  My experience from working outdoors over 34 years, is that whenever you are near water, there always seems to be a breeze.  The breeze put a chill in the air.  I returned to the snack bar and bought some coffee, hot chocolate and a few snacks.  I then juggled the hot drinks back to the upper deck. 

Westminster Clock and Portcullis House

I caught this piper on the Westminster Bridge

London Eye

London Eye and County Hall

There seemed to be quite a bit of time before we launched into the river.   I quickly drank most of my coffee and left my Twixt on the bench under my wife's knee.  I unsheathed my camera and went into photographer mode.


Once we got under way the boat went right across the Thames to pick up more tourists.  That got me closer to the Eye.

With the new tourists aboard, we set off towards London Tower.

There were several bridges to glide under, Jubilee, Hungerford, an unnamed RR bridge being restored, Millenium and Waterloo, before we arrived at Tower Bridge.

 All along the way the tour guide provided a package of pseudo-historical banter, wrapped in an East Ender slang, tied with a dazzling witty ribbon.  I remember tourist bus drivers delivering the same kind of banter in Boston.  I wonder if there is a school of witty edutainment that teaches all the guides, worldwide?  I can see the school offering Cockney and South Side speech lessons and bawdy details lectures.  Of course most of the learning would happen in the evening, after formal classes, when the worldwide students get together at the bar or pajama parties.

However they are trained, we enjoyed it.  I even tipped them at the end of our tour when the guide held out a small galvanized bucket to receive the coins.  There must have a gutsy class, too.

The last leg of the outbound tour was to Greenwich a bit farther down river.  There were some great views along the way.  Many of the new apartments were quite pricey, we were told.

The boat was tied up at Greenwich for five or ten minutes.  By that time it was getting dark.  The darkness was partly due to the overcast and partly because of the latitude of London near 50º N, closer to the Arctic Circle and mostly the time of the year.  On the trip back to Tower Bridge the guide was silent and we spent sometime on the enclosed, warmer, lower deck.  I composed my map and British money image there.

The boat docked again at Tower Bridge to take on more tourists.  I captured a few more images of Tower Bridge.  I underexposed some of the images on purpose.  I wanted to darken the tower and catch the moon in the same frame.  The gull was an added surprise.  I think the gull adds some spookiness.


When we returned to the dock at Westminster Bridge we boarded a tour bus that took us to Green Park where we caught the mother ship, the 38, that took us back home.  We finished what my wife and son started the on their very first day in London.  The end of our visit was Friday.  We had only one more full day in London.  That happened to be my wife's birthday.




©Damyon T. Verbo - all rights reserved

Learn to Pose: Hands

It is very difficult to grab a good candid portrait of someone.  The process of creating a good photographic portrait involves visual composition and posing.  One of the fine details in posing are the hands.  Placement of the hands and each finger can put the icing on the cake.

Source:Doug Box's Guide to Posing for Portrait Photographers

I recommend visiting a site with a lesson on hand posing, an excerpt from the book Doug Box's Guide to Posing for Portrait Photographers provided courtesy of Amherst Media.

Learning to pose will increase the quality of you images.

My Passage Through Time

I have always been reluctant to pose for photographs.  That might sound weird from a photographer but, I don't think so.  I have several images of myself when I was young; baby photos, toddler photos, a photo of me on the back of a pony in cowboy gear.   However, I don't have many photos of myself since I received my first very own camera and became a photographer. 

Credit:AsyaPhotogaphy
 BTW-That is me in black

There are two types of photos of me since I became a photographer.  The first type are captured at formal occasions, such as weddings.  The second type are of posed ID images, such as you can find on credit cards, driver licenses and passports.  I have a fair collection of ID photos at this point in time.  Over the years, I have been throwing these expired IDs into boxes and bedroom drawers.


I planned a trip to visit my daughter in Europe this fall.  I needed a new ID photo for my new passport.  Besides a new photo, I had a choice of several documents that could be used to prove US citizenship for the passport application.  One of them was an expired US passport.  I have a US passport from the early '70s that was used in travel to England, Ireland and Portugal.  I found my long ago expired passport with its ID photo in a bedroom drawer and used it to apply for my new passport.

I must say, the contrast between the two images on my passports is dramatic.  The passage of time is chronicled in those two images.  The most immediately noticeable changes are to my hair and weight.


I was about 21 years old in the old photograph.  Now I am 60.  My weight, as illustrated in the old photograph, lasted for but a split second as I passed it climbing to my current historic overweightedness.  As for the hair, my maternal grandfather died at the age of 86 with a full head of hair.  That was what I hoped for myself.  On the other hand, my paternal grandfather had that horseshoe shaped track of hair that exists above one ear and travels around the back of the head to the other ear.  No hair on top from the bushy eyebrows back to the that bump at the top of the spine.  Unfortunately for me, that is what I inherited.  I must say, that at least I don't have the horseshoe hair with a long grey ponytail cascading down my back as do many old motorcyclists or my maternal grandmother.

The style of photograph has also changed.  The photograph exposed in the '70s was creative.  It was not a straight on mug shot as is the one captured this year.  I was allowed to smile, lean forward and tilt my head.  This year I was told not to smile.  Is that because of terrorism?  Don't terrorists smile?  I can hear someone in the Homeland Security office decreeing,  "Terrorists don't smile, nobody smiles."  If I were allowed to smile and project my head out a bit you might not notice my squinty eyes and double chin quite so much.  Ya think?

Photo credit:FreeMoviesOnline.com

As for the squinty eyes, I have always had those.  I was constantly compared to Roy Rogers and his eyes.  I did work outdoors for 34 years and I didn't wear sunglasses much, either.  Do you think that has anything to do with the squint?  Or maybe, when Genghis Khan marauded through Eastern Europe some of his seed happened to spill into one of my ancestors.  Either way I have squinty eyes.

Photo creditGengisKhanWikispaces.com

I think I will pull together all those ID images I have been saving over the years.  Those ID images may be the only chronicle of my existence.  Besides, once I have them together in one place anyone can find them.  Then my close relatives will be able to use them at my funeral to show my passage through time.

Circe Invidiosa - The Irony

You may know the story behind the JW Waterhouse painting Circe Invidiosa, if not let me cut to the chase.

The sorceress (Circe) is furious (Glaucus has refused to become Circe's lover) and decides to take revenge, not on Glaucus, whom she decides she loves, but on the innocent Scylla. Circe Invidiosa (jealous Circe) prepares a terrible potion and pours it in the grotto where Scylla goes to bathe. As soon as Scylla steps into the pool, the 'water around her groin erupts with yelping monsters'. Seven dogs' heads rise snarling out of the sea. Scylla screams and tries to slap them away. But every blow causes her pain because they are part of her. Her lower limbs have become horrible man-eating dogs.

I was using the JW Waterhouse painting as inspiration for my own photographs.  I mixed up a batch of lemon-lime Kool-Aid, representing the potion whipped up by Circe, which was poured into the pond that was teaming with life.  Life ranging from large frogs and goldfish to invisible microbes feeding on animal and plant wastes.  In the course of the photography session, I fell into the stream of pond water and cut my elbow.  Not much blood exited the wound but a threshold was created.  Mana, the model, and I finished the session wet and having the odor of the pond emanating from our bodies.

As I worked the next day, I felt hot.  I was constantly drinking water, as if to put out the fire.  I didn't have access to a thermometer but I was sure I had a fever.  My elbow as quite swollen and the area from my elbow to my wrist was warm, really warm.  I knew I had a bacterial infection.  Experience!  I took some anti-inflammatory pills before bed.  I needed to seek professional medical attention the next day.  I just finished the ten day supply of antibiotics.

So there I was photographing the scene in which a sorceress is poisoning a pond so that monsters will replace the lower half of an unsuspecting female foe when she baths in the water.  Contrastingly, I had a model pour unsweetened Kool-Aid, some people may call poison, into the water of a pond.  I then cut myself when I fell into the pond water, monsters then entered my body and began to poison my blood.

Ironic, wouldn't you say?

Robin's Nest Near My Window 4

The Birth Head Feathers taken 1July2011

Late this evening, 3July2011, I arrived home after a day away at a family function.  I entered the front door and went directly to the breakfast room window to check up on the robins.  There was one of the chicks standing in the nest looking around.  It seems to had lost almost all of its birth feathers.  I went about the kitchen getting food out to make dinner.

After placing several pots on the stove, I returned to the window.  I had not seen either of the two parents since my arrival and neither was in sight and now two chicks were standing in the nest.  The boldest of the two seemed to be looking directly into my eyes telling me it was not afraid.  Within seconds of my arrival to the window this second time, the boldest chick turned and flew off to my left, chirping as it flew.  The actions of the boldest chick combined with its chirping stimulated the other standing chick to follow.  Neither of the chicks seemed to fly well, since it was their first try. I thought they landed some 15 feet into my yard.  The last chick, which was often hidden and still had most of those birth feather arising atop its head, stayed behind.  I think this meek chick may be a bit immature, perhaps hatching days after the others.

It was twilight before my curiosity got me out in to my yard to look for the robins that flew the coop, as it were.  The light was fast disappearing.  I walked to where I thought they would have landed and began to look around.  I didn't search amongst the plants in the garden but looked on the grass and concrete patio areas.  No sight of the chicks and they weren't making any sounds either.  My biggest fear is that they won't survive.  They didn't get any flight lessons but did they need lessons on feeding themselves?  Do the parents teach them to search out worms and insects or is that as instinctual as flying?  I will look for them again in the morning.

The Boldest Chick taken 16:50 3July2011

Robin's Nest Near My Window 3

I finally started to photograph the robin nest outside my breakfast room window.  There are definitely two robins feeding the chicks.  I believe one is a male, for it has a darker hood and it allows me to get closer before flying away.  The two birds bring mostly worms and I think I saw a bee or something that resembles a medium sized insect.

The three chicks are like asparagus, growing so quickly that if I had a microphone near the nest, I swear I would be able to hear them grow.  They are large enough to fill the nest and the female is unable to sit atop them, perching beside the nest at night.

The post atop which the robins built their nest is less than two feet from the wall of the house on the WNW side of the house.  Two Clematis that climb the fencing surrounding the post give the nest cover.  I believe this is one of the reasons the location was chosen by the robins.  The leaves from the Clematis also shade the nest from later day sun, only allowing some dappled light through to the nest.  This created a situation of poor lighting for photographic exposures.  I had to get out my kitchen scissors and do some pruning.

Female robin over nest internal point of view

Male Robin with bee external point of view

Male robin with worns interior point of view

Three robin chicks internal point of view

I am still thinking of adding a reflector to the house somehow to add even more light to the inner nest area.  A remote controlled battery powered led light suspended above the nest would be even better.  That will be a chore for this winter with installation before the arrival of the robins.

Robin's Nest Near My Window 2

The eggs have hatched.  The chicks are being fed worms constantly throughout the day.  As my luck would have it, my lens broke about 10 days ago and I have not been able to capture one image, since.  My new lens arrived Fri but I have been busy and still unable to photograph the robins.

I went outside this evening to grill some dinner and water the plants on the patio.  I also carried out my camera, just in case I got lucky.  The mother robin usually flies away as soon as it hears my sliding door open.  This time was no exception.  I placed the camera on a table and checked the weight of the potted plants to estimate their need for water.

I turned on the faucet for the garden hose and proceeded to water the hanging basket nearest my breakfast room window and within 2 feet of the robin's nest.  I could see little beaks upraised in the nest.  I was already too late to photograph the eggs in the nest.   One of the parents was approximately 10 ft behind me chirping loudly seeming to let me know I am too close to their nest and chicks.  The robins are not aggressive however, and only chirp loudly from a safe distance.


The parent robins will not approach the nest as long as I was within 20 ft and clearly visible.  I then pulled one of the chairs from the table and chair set within 7 feet of the post and decided to sit still and wait.  One of the parents returned with a worm dangling from its beak and perched on the horizontal support for the hanging basket attached to the same post on which the nest is built.  This may be an acceptable image but I hadn't the camera in my hands, the setting sun was hidden behind clouds and I wasn't ready to capture it.  I needed to move my position a bit for a better composition, besides.  I decided not to keep the chicks from their dinner.   I moved the chair before I returned to the house, so I wouldn't need to move it when I returned.

I hope to capture some acceptable images before the chicks fly away.