Day 12: Hero Statue

2026-02-18

Hello!

I've done a lot of technical work with the website (again).

Specifically: both the 1Day1Photo and Originals archives should update automatically, and adapt to whether you're logged in or not! And by the way, you can bookmark the https://1day1photo.com/ domain name if you prefer — it takes you right to the archive.

This is a continuation of yesterday's photo of the day, but I'll try to be a bit more focused this time.

First, the statue itself. Harriet Tubman herself is casted out of bronze, and the base is made of granite. She is pointing to the North Star as the guiding star to escape slavery through the Underground Railroad. Ten granite pillars and ten stone markers surround the statue, marked with patriotic phrases and family names. Neat.

It's a pretty new statue — it was dedicated in 2006. There's a few monuments and markers on the shoreline near this one, but the Tubman statue seems to be the newest one.

Placing the Tubman statue at this spot specifically seems to have been about logistics rather than historical significance; Tubman never passed through the town. Stations of the Underground Railroad were nearby, but never in that town (as far as we know).

I edited this photo to appear black and white because I hadn't done it before yet, and I wanted to try it out! There wasn't that much color in the scene anyway, and converting it to grayscale allows the focus of the photo to be on brightness, rather than individual color. Shadows of the dark pillars and highlights of the bright trees in the background pop out more. I'm not familiar with today's editing program of choice yet, but for the past few days I've been experimenting and trying new things. At least that's progress.

Today, I watched this show-not-tell montage video of James from New Zealand 3D printing, soldering, and engineering a digital iris. Take a Canon camera and a lens, attach the re-engineered adapter in between, and manipulate effects in real time, using a screen to selectively block light. Because of... physics, I guess... it doesn't completely black out half the sensor but instead dims certain areas and bends other light rays to create animated effects, which might be impossible to recreate otherwise. It's impressive, not least because it very quickly went from "I kind of understand this!" to "I have no idea what's going on".

Thank you for visiting this blog! Special thanks to the newsletter subscribers; you get this photo a week before the internet does :-).

Cheers,
David