bareimage wrote:
Well Coney Island is a bit over photographed. But there are some interesting abandoned parks in the neighborhood. I will go there soon, so guys if any one from NYC, I can show you some interesting places.
PS Alex Karasev, where in Russia are you from? I am from Kiev....
Looking outside right now makes me want to go in Spring (not far off anymore) on a warm and sunny Sunday. I appreciate that Coney Island is a mature subject but there are always new angles and opportunities. And having a guide like yourself would of course be a privilege.
I was born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time) but only lived there my toddler years and my high school and college years. As I was growing up my family moved wherever my dad's military career took him, which included the Baltics (near and in Riga, Latvia) as well as the extreme North of Russia (Kola peninsula, north of Murmansk). My father was an officer of the Strategic Missile Forces. In Murmansk he was commanding a quad of silos (the big U.S. and Soviet missiles flew on the meridian over the North Pole rather than on the parallels like the planes travel - it's a shorter way, plus the poles' ionic noise complicates some ways of detection).
Indeed it is not a great stretch of imagination that that H-bomb Voyager is referring to, could have been sent on its way by my dad. In reality by the time he got to command the big stuff, the bulky fusion warheads were abandoned by both sides in favor of packing as many as 12 compact and individually guided fission based reentry vehicles atop each missile, targeting the respective enemy's command and control infrastructure and VIP hides. The H-bombs targeting metropolitan areas were used by both sides to hold up the "Assured" part in mutually assured destruction, as such remaining the most hypothetical kind of these hypothetical weapons. Still, I was peeved when I saw the U.S. "duck and cover" films - such a cop out. We had proper shelters, FWIW.
Dad's long since retired now, but old habits die hard - to this day when he calls an elevator, pressing the red button with his thumb, very evenly and with a slight twist, sends slight chills down my spine. Completely unwarranted, of course - launch was actually committed by two keys at two stations (spaced wider than a conceivable reach of a person). I must say it was really interesting growing up beyond the polar circle as a pre-schooler in a number of ways.
It was then that I drew my first spaceship - forgetting the oxidizer, as my father had promptly pointed out. Years later I've entered Военмех (Baltic State Technical University) - same school as Sergei Krikalyov - of course I wanted to be a cosmonaut like so many other Russian boys! But economic reality interfered - Buran's amazing flight was to be the swan song of the big Soviet space program as we knew it. Indeed some point out that Krikalyov, having as of this writing logged an astonishing 803 days in space, was technically the last Soviet citizen, as he was in space when Soviet Union ceased to exist at ground level. When it became clear there wasn't a great future in sight for the Russian space program, I had transferred to a computer / robotics field at St. Petersburg Politech. Courtesy of my Aunt who'd lived in New York, we shortly thereafter moved here, and I've completed my studies at Brooklyn Polytech (now part of NYU). Similarities between the schools went beyond the names - they've given me some impromptu tests and basically transferred all my credits except Marxism-Leninism.
After that was a job at Goldman Sachs (IT), all 13 years of it. I won't call it a career as I've failed to make a meaningful rate of advance. Still, they paid fairly well and there weren't any truly dumb or incompetent people I ever had to face there, so I'd stayed on, picking up photography as an outlet for unconstrained creative growth that my job had denied. On the advice of my tax accountant I had picked up some paid gigs here and there so as to write off the cost of my equipment (via the S-corp.) They did not run me out of this town in tar and feathers so I've kept doing it on a very part-time bases. Fast forward to early 2009 - the banking sector implodes and they fire my ass along with many of my friends and colleagues. I did not mourn my job - folks who had stayed had to pick up my duties and others, and even before the reductions many folks were stressing over the workload. I'd reconnected with many old friends, then expanded my photography activities to full-time, which is where you find me today.
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