So here's the first batch of photo highlights from my students at Umana Barnes Middle School for you to appreciate and possibly order a copy of.

(Ooh, good thing I wasn't teaching grammar -- that's a dangling preposition!)

Cousin Steph suggested this assignment and the students had a great time imagining their world through a "worm's eye view."

(This was an easier and, I think, equally fascinating counterpart to the impossible-to-organize "bird's eye view" shot.)

Send me an e-mail or post a comment (but please don't include your own e-mail address because I'm told some spam-mail-producers ransack blogs looking for e-mail addresses to abuse) if you'd like to order a copy. All $10 goes directly to the student photographer.

Click on any photo to see it closer to full resolution. How else can you imagine what a piece of paper sees?





And there are plenty more categories to come . . .

My dear friend Jess told me her fiancée Heather was glad to see I had a new post up that wasn't a commercial (she was obviously not sharing my breathless excitement about the iPhone). Then when the photo from Saturday's hike loaded she laughed that it was essentially a commercial for Nalgene water bottles. Or maybe for cold and ice. But anyway it was still a commercial.

So I vowed I'd finally get some photos up that my students took last semester at Umana/Barnes Middle School in East Boston. This is a still life shot by Gloribel, who has a fantastic eye and took some real stunners through the course of the, uh, course.

The thing is, though, that people are ordering copies of these photos through me as a way to contribute to the kids. $10 a pop for 4x6 or 5x7 and all the money goes to the kid. Which makes this, alas, sort of a commercial. Hope Heather doesn't mind. I'll post more in due time. Along with some info about this remarkable school.

PS: The gourds and pumpkin are resting on one of those ubiquitous blue hard plastic school chairs in front of the one corner of the Math classroom we used that wasn't covered with posters from a unit on probability. Nice colors though, huh?

It’s cold. And I’m happy. Not only because I think my brain and body and soul work better when there’s a brisk wind waiting around the corner, but also because my friend Paul is visiting from Minnesota and we went for a hike. My first real hike since moving to Cambridge in August -- impossible to believe but true.


There was boot-deep snow, bright warm sun, slippery sneaky ice and views for miles. This may seem an odd choice for a photo to mark the event, but Paul was stunned and I was delighted to find ice clinging to the inside of our water bottles. Made me downright nostalgic for Antarctica.

PS: Thanks in advance for sending healing energy and prayers for patience to my hardly-ever-not-on-the-go Mom. She had successful hip replacement surgery on February 1st and is now staring down physical therapy 6 times a day. Go Mookie Go -- we love you!