o, on April 30 of this year, several of us participated in the annual Victory Boulevard Restaurant Stroll, which as you may know is like a giant block party except that you pay for admission and get to sample the fare at different eating establishments. As we made our way down the hill from Todt Hill Road to Jewett Avenue, we heard several people mention that Schaeffer's was not participating this year, despite their name being on the tickets we all held with little tear-off tabs for each establishment we visited.

After we made our first few stops, I took full advantage of there being no line in the liquor store next door to one of the restaurants that had a tremendous line; the liquor store was having wine tastings, and so why not? I had a ticket.

Of course, after that I was holding out for my visit to Schaeffer's. Surely it was all hearsay that they would not participate, but then I realized they had no reason to advertise their business any longer as they had planned to close. So sad, they had the best pastrami on rye sandwiches. I don't think I ever ordered anything else there.

As we stopped at the closest restaurant to the tavern on the stroll, I asked the crowd I was with if they wanted to go into Schaeffer's for one last drink. They were not the least bit interested because they were not participating.

Well, I never! Pass up a chance to have a shot at Schaeffer's for what might be the last time? Not me! I was looking forward to going, so you guys keep moving and stuffing your faces while I sit for a few minutes, bring my alcohol level back up, and document my surroundings, thank you.

The bartender, whose name may have been Tom but I don't remember now because it's fully nine weeks later, appeared to be a bit on the melancholy side that day; I told him I was aware that they were closing and that he must get really tired talking about it all the time. He nodded his head sadly in agreement. I asked if he minded if I took some photos. He was all right with that.

Looking back at all the photos I took, I can't help but get a little sense of my own mortality, as the memorabilia spans decades of owners, bartenders, and patrons who have long passed. There are photos that, by the look of the hair and the clothing, look to be taken in the 70s. There's a pencil sketch of someone that it not labeled, but I'm betting he's a patriarch.

I asked Tom if they had any plans to auction off any of the memorabilia, or if items were already spoken-for. He said that some of the collection would remain private, but that many items would be available. He was kind enough to offer me a business card before I left.

My last visit to Schaeffer's was the one I will remember the most. I don't usually make it a habit of going to bars by myself, but I'm glad I did this time. In hindsight, I should have bought a sandwich to go that day and saved it for my next lunch, but I'll just have to savor those memories of pastrami gone by. ​

My family is all IUOE and I would love to give this sign to my brother for his birthday.
​How much?

I have a GoPro Hero 5. There was supposed to be a controlled atmospheric event this week that involved colored gas at night in the clouds, so I set it up after being alerted to the event by my good friend, Patricia. The gas launch was canceled, but I got a pretty cool video.

I had the good fortune to be invited by producer Tina M. Davido to attend the Atlantic City Boxing Hall of Fame  Inaugural Ceremony this past weekend. I still have a lot to write, but here's a video and some photos to get me started! 

Have I? I ask this question because I need to reassess what I'm doing with my time online.  I'm a photographer who has been trying to push her work on her friends and family for too long, all the while hoping that they would share my work with the same enthusiasm that I had for sharing it. They liked it enough, but it just doesn't seem as if I was getting the message across that I wanted you to look at my website, comment on it, and share it. 

Why ask now? Because I have been in denial for a very long time about a sad, sad truth, and that is that I am entirely too focused on Facebook, and not enough about LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and the Adobe forums that I am entitled to use with my subscription to their Creative Cloud Suite.

At one time not too long ago, my Facebook feed had good articles that were shared by friends and colleagues. Since Zuckerberg and Friends have changed their algorithms so much, I find I mistake a lot of what might actually be good stuff for Facebook Ads. Not only, but I think that people are just sharing a whole different kind of status these days.
I'm to blame for a lack of good content as well. I don't post anything of merit because it seems to go largely unnoticed. People don't even read it; I can tell. I might get a like on a good article, but only shares if someone is getting hurt by being stoopid.

​FB has become a vast wasteland, and it's a shame. The only real thing it is good for anymore is finding my friends and keeping up with them. Otherwise, it's become as useless as FarmVille - another social pocket that became too greedy too quickly. Zynga, the creators, even admitted they wanted to keep you hooked so that you wouldn't leave. It was a great artistic outlet - I had fun building marvellous landscapes out of nothing - but they never rewarded you with anything worth your time. I didn't need any more chickens, thanks. I wanted more interesting things with which to decorate my beautiful estate. I was out when they flat-out admitted they were robbing us blind of our time. Deleted my iPhone app and everything.  pfft.

But, I digress, as I'm wont to do.  No one cares about FarmVIlle anymore, least of all me. I've found newer, better creative outlets, and rediscovered some old ones.

Photography has been a huge part of my life since I was in my mid-teens, and I never went any further with it career-wise than as a photo hobbyist. I had a steady, reliable job that didn't pay the greatest salary, but it was close to home, and I had great health benefits and perks. Besides, I was called upon to take photos and design graphics for the department quite often, and I was happy for a while. 

After leaving the healthcare industry last year, I was seriously considering buying into a leading paint-and-sip franchise. What I learned along the way was that yeah, sure, I could have done it, but I became interested in photography again and was kind of relieved when after almost a year of due diligence and real-estate searching, I backed away with the blessing of my business partner. 

After that, I became involved with a local 'portfolio review' meet-up, and what I learned from them was that I was wasting my time going to portfolio review classes and that I needed to build a portfolio. My work was worthy, but I really needed to get back into the mix.

I found some Meet-Ups in Manhattan, and one of them brought me to Pace University and a series of classes that were all overviews of what could be done with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop, and the proper lighting and exposure in the first place. Why fix 500 photos for color and lighting when you can get it right the first time and not have to edit those particular things at all? 

These short overviews led to my eventual enrollment in a new continuing education program at Pace that they were building based on the feedback from the meet-ups. The certification in digital photography and retouching I will be receiving in September will make me very employable, and will also help me to become certified in Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom. 

For now, I'm doing the best with what I have and doing what I can do to be productive and be one of those people who write the interesting articles that used to get shared all the time on Facebook. I think the LinkedIn people appreciate it more, anyway.
​
I still love you, FB.

Visit my blog page at Cathleen's Scene, and my Photography page at CathleenGillingham.com

I have been hanging around with cameras for a very long time.

In high school, photography became a very serious hobby. I had my own darkroom in the basement, and undoubtedly took thousands of black and white photos in those days. I wound my own unexposed film into 35m cans back then in the late 70s.

I wish I knew where all of those negatives were, and as far as the photos that came from them, most of them were given to people who asked for them. Their logic was that I could just make myself another one. A lot of people don't understand how much goes into creating a photograph, but I gave the photos away anyway. Hopefully, the person who has all of those black and white negatives somehow reads this, and they are returned to me. If not, what I don't remember doesn't always hurt me.

I found that the same thing would happen with the color photos that I processed after I no longer had access to a place where I could develop my own negatives and photos, and so I eventually began ordering doubles so people could have what they wanted. I've always been about sharing my work.

And then digital cameras were born!

I have been shooting digital for 17 years.  I acquired my first digital while attending a certification program for visual communications at Gibbs College. It was awesome! Unlimited photos! No film! No chemicals! No mess! It was a miracle.

But, it was also a burden, because I'm a serial shooter, and I just took shot after shot after shot...

As you can imagine, I have hundreds of thousands of photos in my archives. Negatives, prints, digital images. Movies. Birthdays. Bridal showers. Weddings. Baby showers. Newborn photos. Christmas parties. Work. Street. Everywhere. Everything. Everyday, Every day. If you've seen me at a party, I probably have photos of it.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that finding photos, labeling them, sorting them, archiving them, editing them, uploading them, and sharing them takes a great deal of time. Everybody wants to see the photos I took, but there's a huge time factor involved.

​"Cathy, did you ever develop those photos from my birthday?"
"Cathy, where are the photos from the retirement party?".
"Cathy, could you take photos for me and then just send them to me?"

I could create a list of steps necessary to produce and share an album, but that's time consuming, and I have to get ready to visit John where he's rehabbing after his hip surgery. Poor baby.

My brand of photo processing and editing is a lot of time-consuming work that requires a specific skill set.  I financed my own college education for digital communications and editing at the turn of the century (I love to use that phrase), and also currently enrolled at Pace University for a certification in digital photography and Photoshop. I cannot even begin to tell you how invaluable the information is that I have so far received here. It will make me very employable.

But there within lies the conundrum.

How am I to sort, edit, label, etc. and share all of my photos with everyone if I do not have the time to do it because work and life get in the way? I am not employed right now at any specific place because I want to start my own business of creating photo books and oversized pieces of art for sale, and have returned to school to learn as much as I can. My hopes are that in September I will be able to take classes in digital illustration again.

In the meantime, it's shooting, homework, and creating. I've also begun posting to LinkedIn; I think it's worth my while to try to make some contacts outside of healthcare.

May rolled in to me on the shores of Cape May this year. We got there Friday the 29th, and greeted midnight Saturday amidst old movies on TCM and Justin Timberlake memes on Facebook. It's gonna be May, all right.

The night before we left, I had a production shoot on the "Late Night With Johnny P" show. As always, the show is recorded in front of a live audience at the beautiful CTV Staten Island studios. Great guests, including actor and comedian Sean Kanan, comedian F.U.D.G.E., the magic of Timothy Paul (who was also really very funny by the way), and kicking some rock and roll ass, Killer Joe and the Late Night Band. It was a great show, and as always, I

I take a lot of photographs. A LOT. It's a sickness that has exacerbated since the advent of digital photography, and the purchase of my first digital camera, an Ixla, back in 1999. Oh, and now that I have been able to take photos with my cellphone for well over ten years now, I take photos of damn near everything. I take photos of clouds. I take photos of trees. I take photos of random stuff like fruit in the supermarket, or buildings in Manhattan. I take photos of things going on around me. I take photos.

My first iPhone was a 3s, and then I went to the 5, and then the huge brick of a 6+. I'm still trying to get used to holding it and taking photos with the volume button without putting the phone in sleep mode by mistake because the designers at Apple moved the sleep button from the top to the side. Awkward! Anyway, for several years now, I have had to upload all of my photos to the iPhoto/Photos library and delete the photos on the phone to free up storage space. I would back the photos up though my old MacBookPro to an external hard drive. I got used to that for a while.

On January 28, the CTV studio audience for "Late Night With Johnny P" hosted by Johnny Potenza was standing room only. Johnny's guests that night were Ramones drummer and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Marky Ramone, one-time Miss Staten Island and current Miss New York State Jamie Lynn Macchia, and comedian and host of VH1's That Metal Show Don Jamieson, and of course, his usual house band, Tony Traina and the Late Night Band

The Staten Island Polar Bears take their Annual Super Bowl Sunday Swim to Benefit St. Jude Childrens' Research Hospital

So, this happened again, but this time the tide was dead low. Jilly-O had checked the tides ahead of time, and sure enough, it was really necessary to wear water shoes that day as she suggested. The waterfront beach at the Lemon Creek Fishing Pier was a little rocky - especially after Hurricane Sandy destroyed the berm there some more, but it left plenty of room for the dozens of spectators on hand to watch the swim, which has been scheduled every Super Bowl Sunday at 1pm since 2001. The drainage in the parking lot is worse than ever, and there was a lot of flooding as usual because all of the melting snow, but these polar bears like the icy water. The conditions were perfect.

It is traditional to go to B&E's Pub before and after; before to get a little false courage; afterward everyone dries off and goes back to the bar for a full spread and the game.

I was told that the table of food was accidentally knocked over before the swim even began. I'm not sure how they dealt with that disaster. It's not easy to clean up trays of baked ziti and chicken marsala from the floor, I'm sure.

This year was not quite as big as in the past. This year is the 15th annual swim, and each year the crowd seems to get smaller and smaller. Some people are not physically able to do it, some people have passed, some people have moved away, but nonetheless we had the swim because it's fun and because the proceeds go toSt. Jude Childrens' Research Hospital.

We also used to have our Annual Super Bowl Party and box pool at Anderson's Annex, but Hurricane Sandy was the storm of which memories were made - including the destruction of our beloved tavern. Things change, time marches on, and we must create new traditions while keeping the old ones alive.

So Facebook made the magnanimous gesture to give us all a synopsis of our photo posts that have our friends tagged in them, and called it Friends Day today. It's just a ploy to get you to stay on Facebook all day today.Nope, sorry, can't do it. I've seen two or three, but I just can't do it all day, as hilarious as I'm sure some of them are.

However, since Facebook doesn't have my analog old-timey photos taken over the years, I decided to take out the boxes of photos that I just recently sorted out and make my *own* Friends Day video. It's really just a tease to those of you in here - and NOT in here - because there is SO much more than this!

My apologies to anyone left out - I had another pile aside I was going to use too, but they somehow did not make it into the pile you see here. I'll just have to make a follow-up another time. In the meantime, enjoy, and know I love every single one of you! Happy Forever Friends Day! Cathleen