TLDR: Methane Emissions

So, I went down a rabbit hole this morning on natural gas. Figured I'd share a TLDR of what I learned.

A. Methane is super bad. Over a twenty-year time frame, it's 84 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2. It does dissipate faster but it's still a huge issue and we don't really know where it's happening. [1]

B. There's a lot of exciting research happening around measuring methane emissions from orbital satellites. We can now see methane emissions in places we might not have looked and over vast areas. [2] [3]

C. Before satellites, the only way to measure it was to fly over or even walk over to places you suspect might be emitting and stick measuring tools in the air. There are some cool visualizations though! [4]

D. These new capabilities shed light on how often emissions aren't being reported by natural gas companies. Last year, an Exxon-subsidiary claimed there was no way to know how much an Ohio-based well had released into the atmosphere, but these scientists showed it was something like 120 metric tons per hour for twenty days, twice the greatest known leak to date. 100 Ohioans had to be evacuated. It was plugged after the scientists reached out "through diplomatic channels"; I guess they have mutual friends, but that's not really a scalable system of oversight. [5]

E. The Trump administration's loosening of oversight and restrictions for natural gas companies is bad for everyone, including humans and polar bears and birds and anything that drinks water, so like yeah all carbon-based life. Stepping up legislation around climate change should include policy around methane gas leaks, including scientific oversight and heavy penalities for leaks. (Carbon pricing is one way to do this; taxes or fees are also probably a solid deterrent but they're less holistic and have different political challenges).

Props to Tarcisio Reis for pointing the Ohio event out to me, prompting this rabbit hole dive.

Sources:

  1. https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhouse-gas

  2. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/10/1908712116

  3. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL083798

  4. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.html

  5. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/climate/methane-leak-satellite.html

Last Days with the Noctilux

M3, Kodak Ektar100.

I will miss this lens. It had a real charm to it. The bokeh is outstanding, the blurs are soft and beautiful. The color and contrast in the center is just lovely. Shooting it on the M3 was also a delight, just knowing that your focus is going to be impeccable because of the enormous effective rangefinder length.

In the end I wanted to use that money for other things, so I sold it for what I paid for it. Living that Leica life.

Murphy, the Warrior of the Sea

I’ll let Murphy speak for himself.

Shot on Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodak Ektar100.

Walking to work in the morning

Sometimes I bike. Sometimes I take the bus. Sometimes I walk.

Sometimes I also miss exposure. What is it about the M3 that just makes me want to keep shooting it? There’s some magical feeling to firing the shutter on this camera that despite all the advancements made over the past 70 years, keeps me coming back.

New York City: Thanksgiving Weekend in Black and White

I love shooting my 1956 M3 with black and white film. No light meter, no color correction, no nonsense. It’s a perfect way to shoot. And I love the results.

Past Joys

Here’s a song we wrote and recorded this month. Wadia and I on vocals, Pat on the ES-355, Paavan on the keys, and myself on a Martin Backpacker acoustic. This song was written and recorded in a single night, on a single mic, on a single take. I love it. We want to go back and do it with a sexy slow jam 6/8 beat I had been playing around with before on drums. (Maybe I can just record over it myself, that might be fun. But we’d want to drop tempo a bit for that one. Cue GarageBand tempo adjuster.)

Kensho Holiday Party

My company had it's holiday party last night. Delicious food, wild and silly dancing, and I won a raffle! Afterwards we wandered around the seaport because someone wanted to go to a dive bar. It was a balmy, windless 30 degrees and we were dressed right, so I thoroughly enjoyed the cool night air.

Summer in Winter

Winter is when you go through all the photos you took during summer and forgot to actually process and share and laugh at and enjoy. For example, this lighthouse! This was a beautiful late summer weekend in Northern Ontario. From the Wikipedia description:

Weslemkoon Lake is located in the Township of Addington Highlands, Ontario, Canada, near Denbigh and about 110 km (68 mi) north of Belleville. The lake is well known for large and small-mouth bass and lake trout fishing, cottaging, seclusion, and wildlife, making it a perfect retreat for people wishing to "get away from it all."

The lake is characterized by a rocky shoreline, with numerous bays and coves that are home to bogs, and swampy areas. There are abundant islands, many of which are uninhabited or public land and can be used as recreational areas. Notable are the 5 islands, which are a small group of islands in the center of the main body of the lake, a suspension bridge built between two islands, and Squaw Point, which is a treeless area where it is said Algonquin Native women and children retreated to during times of battle.

When heading north on the lake from the southern end, a viewer would notice a lighthouse that has stood since the 1920s and, up until the installation of a large orange flashing beacon placed on top of a 55-gallon drum and mounted to a rock, served to mark the narrow entrance into the main body of the lake. The lighthouse cottage has been said to have been visited by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Wildlife include: common loon, great blue heron, black bear, beaver, moose, great horned owl, lynx, bobcat, and Mud snake.

Snow Day in Cambridge

Cambridge is delightful in the snow. I try to always have a simple camera on me on my way in to the office, one that works. That old Polaroid never gets out of the house because it’s too stressful. Each photo costs $6 or $7, and it’s not exactly 8x10 resolution (although the colors truly are delightful).

An old cemetery. Dark green trees. Bespoke bovine awnings. I had no problem framing the softened sweetness of the quiet morning, just as I had no problem finding a seat on the bus.

This morning on the way in to work, I grabbed my trusty M10 and 50mm Summicron for some snow shots. I’ve found that shooting snow in JPG on this machine often leads to under-exposure, but rather than compensate in-camera, I just did it on my computer.

An emergency call box. A man laying salt behind a snowed-over bicycle. And then I’m there at work.

A morning coffee run reveals its own beauty.

Old Polaroids

Busted out the old Polaroid Land Camera today. The only thing I can justify spending that much money per shot on these days are photos of my mother. So rather than let the film sit in-camera for another 6 months, I asked her to stand outside in whatever she was wearing, whenever the sun started to peek out between clouds. We managed to pull off a few beautiful moments. Tragedy that I separated the developer from the print too soon on the first one though. I’ve included a photo of the developer negative and my Thanksgiving camera family for kicks.