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For Students:
The latest financial aid news here

Sighting of New Blue Line Cars.

The first trip for the new Blue Line cars.
 

The Declaration of Independence.

State House rally draws 500

Grand Opening of the new ICA in
Boston draws capacity crowds

New England Press-current titles.

How to Search for College Scholarships Using the Internet (Plus, Which Sites Are Winners)

Commentary

Commentary blog

• The mess in Financial Aid: The Boston Globe's take-editorial (6/21/06)
   
• The state of higher education, Boston Globe article (6/16/06).
  

  Our take...
   

• Some thoughts about the Health Care reform law in Massachusetts.
   

• Di Masi and his stand against taxing business more...our take.
   
• On Julia Wilson
   
• Hastert must resign!
  (He did!!)
• Hastert...Pt II
  (coming)
  
  
• Taxation
   
• State of the Union Speech 2005.
  
  
• Thoughts on Bush and the 2004 elections.
  
  
• Terry Schiavo, and what the Congress has done...
   
• Our economy.
  

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Information:

Pictures and essays:

Our pictures...please use only this link, as we rebuild our photo albums.
Album 1
Album 2
Album 3.
Album 4
...and the subway

Pictures of New York...
and the subway

The biography of
Robert Ramos ...
click here to read it. (2 parts)

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For aspiring authors:

In Memoriam:

Most of the navigational links on the left have been fixed...sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused.

About our photos...

The pictures in our photo gallery capture a wide slice of time, from 1975 until today. 34 years worth of photos. Not the earliest of my pictures…but far enough back to be able to see the changes in the Boston subway during the time. Enough to see the changes in the rolling stock; from Pullman and St Louis Car, to Hawker-Siddeley, Siemens, and Bombardier, and to Breda, and Kinkisharyo. The pictures remain a link to Boston’s past and history…and to my early years here.  

The lost photos of Boston I took between 1976-1990 were last in a storage room in Blythe, California, at Excel Self Storage. The contents were auctioned off some years ago, in about 2004, or within a year of that time. There were at least 100 photos, all black and white, save for perhaps a couple of color photos that were enlarged, of my old neighborhood in Dorchester, Massachusetts, of the subway, and of Mexico. All were valuable to me and represent pictures that I cannot recover in their original form, for time has permanently altered this city. Whoever has possession of the pictures…I ask not for their return, but the opportunity to digitize them, so I can once again have them in my possession. You obtained them legally, and I respect that. I’d like no more then to be able to get their digital copy; it would mean a lot to me. Full postage costs will be borne by myself, including their return; e-mail me at the e-mail address above.

I am happy to share my photo collection in this manner. Aside from my profession, I am also an artist; photographers are considered artists. I come from a line of artists who were good in their own right. My mother was an accomplished artist who won the Boston Globe silver key award in 1953, at the age of 17. The following year, she won the gold key. My father was a photographer who worked in various aspects of photography for a number of years before retiring from the activity. His pictures are among the very best I have ever seen…as good as anything taken by Bourke-White or Eisenstaedt. I tried to follow in their footsteps…with limited success. My pictures have won college awards, and have been the pages of the Suffolk Evening Voice, and now, the Gatepost, the student newspaper at Framingham State College.  

I owe him a particular debt, for teaching me photography 40 years ago this coming December. His Yashica MAT-124, a 2¼ inch twin-lens reflex was my first camera. It didn’t take me long to learn how to use it…but it did take me many years to master the finer points of photography to the point where I could produce consistently good photos under situations where my father was reluctant to shoot.

I took hundreds, if not thousands of photos using a Nikkormat, a Canon, a Yashica MAT-124, and a Nikon F2 Photomic, easily one of the best cameras I have ever handled.  

Photography never gets old…and neither does the ability of the photographer to learn new things from the craft. Digital photography represents an exciting new frontier for photography; one that also contains special challenges when it comes to saving and storing these photos. What amazes me most about digital photography is the sheer flexibility of the medium. Advances in technology have allowed the digital photographer to get good pictures in places that would have been impossible to get a few short years ago with either film cameras or the earliest digital cameras. Subway photographs that would have been impossible to capture without either flash or a slow shutter speed can now routinely be handled with even an entry-level point and shoot digital camera—and with stunning results. Moving subway trains used to be a real challenge in the days of black and white film; they couldn’t be captured sharply without either using flash, or pushing the film to at least ASA 800…and even then, only slow moving trains could be captures using available light. Now, subway trains leaving the station at full speed can be caught almost motionless with a digital camera set at ISO 3200. Even the unthinkable shots…subway tunnel pictures taken with the train in motion, can now be had, under the right lighting conditions; soon, they will come to the pages of New England Press’s photo gallery.

Enjoy them…I had a lot of fun getting these pictures.
Sincerely:

Mark Murphy
New England Press.

To our photo gallery...

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