It was starting to drizzle as we queued up for our train, but no one was complaining about the weather. This time of year, rain is a welcome visitor. It is rain that brings the mushrooms we’re all here to celebrate. When torrential sheets are coming down, it’s hard to be unhappy if you’re a mycophile. Because with every drop that hits the forest loam, you can almost feel the mycelium working its magic and sending up those fruiting bodies we’ve all fallen in love with: Golden and White Chanterelles, Yellow Foot, Hedgehogs, Candy Caps, Porcini, Morels, Oyster, Lobster, and hundreds more edible species can be found in...

The word Jamaica conjured to my mind images of white-sand beaches, endless sunshine, and natty-dreaded Rastas wandering about to an ever-present Reggae beat. The country I discovered was much more complex than that. Topographically it shocked me – ranging from high mountains shrouded in eternal fog, to desert-like coastline spotted with cacti, to massive rivers and thundering waterfalls. Culturally it defeated my expectations – Rastas rarely seen, my surface impression was rather of a kind, if conflicted, culture which put great stock in honor, integrity, and happiness. I was told time and time again that Jamaicans know how to laugh at...

This is a much more complete version of my 2010 grape harvest tilt-shift time-lapse video. I’ve integrated footage from three different harvests: a dawn harvest at Jim Ball, a dawn harvest at Yorkville Cellars, and a late-night harvest at Claudia Springs. I took about 6000 still images over those three days, and this video represents 3,570 distinct photos. They’ve all been altered in Photoshop to give them the tilt-shift effect (contrast increased, saturation increased, and a lens blur applied). This is still very much a work-in-progress, and you can tell by the glitches in this video. Some little jostles of the camera, some...

I usually just push on through, because it hardly seems worth sleeping for such a short period of time – and besides, I like the silence of the night in a new day. It is still pitch black when I get in the shower – 4am, maybe – and there’s something surreal about standing there, washing my hair, while the world sleeps around me. Driving along 128 in the still night, my only companions are truckers – shifting their huge bulk around turns, lit up like a carnival, hauling a hundred pounds of chicken, or gallons of explosives, or mighty giants off to slaughter. It is cold – cold – when I get to wherever my destination in that...