Regular readers know of my love of cellphone pics. (To see cellphone pics from previous months, click here.) The gallery below has 60 photos from my phone taken during June and July.

Alas, I have sad tidings: around the beginning of July, I dropped my phone (again). Suddenly, the camera could only see life from a psychedelic perspective. Now my cellphone photos look like this:

No, they don’t all look like photos of Caffe Pergolesi on a Saturday night. But they do look like the strangest dream I’ve ever had about ordinary, everyday stuff. They show what the world might look like if my soul was suddenly trapped in the body of some other species- possibly a species nobody knows about because it’s invisible. Sure, these photos are kind of interesting, but after just a few I find myself feeling queasy and uncertain about my grip on reality. And I simply cannot lose my grip on reality, not during WEDDING SEASON.

You can see a few more of these trippy photos at the end of the show below.

The bright side of all this is that I now have one more reason to buy the phone Patrick uses, the one he described in this post. But first there are a few lenses I want to acquire. As soon as I can fully justify a new phone purchase, cellphone pics posts will begin anew! Until then, what you see here will have to suffice.

So long, Samsung t439 camera, you fragile beauty…

CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE IMAGE BELOW TO GET STARTED.

Hi there Red Bat fans! Patrick here. For today’s blog post, I thought we’d move things out of the U.S. and get into the world at large. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling over the last few years, and I’ve got something of a back catalogue of landscapes and urban photography from different countries.

The inspiration for this was that while cleaning out my closet recently (in an attempt to de-clutter my life), I found an old pair of boots…boots with stories to tell. They carried me through South Korea, Japan, England, Scotland, Canada and a ton of places here in the U.S. They’ve passed over a lot of ground in many different parts of this world, and I had my camera with me every step of the way.

The first installment of Places My Boots Have Been is the first trip I took out of the country (save for an ill-advised trip to Mexico of which we will not speak). My best friend since high school now lives in South Korea, and I visited her in September of 2005. We had many adventures in Seoul, then skipped over to Tokyo and had some more there.

Before I get to the photos, I should tell you about one of the more amusing things that happened to me in Seoul, as it directly involves my boots. First of all, I don’t speak Korean. Let’s just get that out there at the start. Second, my friend Sora had to work while I was there, so I had some free time to explore the city. Third (and most importantly), I made an enormous miscalculation about the bus system in Seoul. I assumed that I could get on a particular bus (the blue 273 line), and I’d get a nice little round-trip tour of Seoul. So I packed my backpack with about 25 pounds-worth of gear, including a 17″ PowerBook, my Canon 10D with 24-70mm 2.8L lens, and a few other sundries. I thought maybe I could stop by some of the more historical areas scattered throughout Seoul, snap some photos, and do a bit of post-processing over a Frappucino at Starbucks. Yes, there are plenty of Starbucks in Seoul. Strangely, their Venti is our Grande. Everything really IS bigger in America.

Anyway. There I was, on the bus. It was maybe 9am. I had a bus pass loaded with enough money to get me to the end of the line, which I assumed would be a loop. Unfortunately, it really WAS a line. I started to get a little nervous when I noticed the city starting to thin out and get a little mountainous, but I assumed we’d start heading back soon. The next thing I knew, I was the last person on the bus, it was pulling into a dusty depot, and the driver was politely gesturing that I should exit the bus as soon as possible.

And that’s when my REAL Seoul adventure began. I was somewhere on the edge of the city – I didn’t know where. It was about 90 degrees and humid. I had no money with me. I had nothing to drink. I could not use my Visa card at any of the ATMs. I had no phone. I didn’t speak the language, so I couldn’t ask someone for money to call a phone number that I didn’t have, and I couldn’t ask someone for directions (or a ride) to an address I didn’t have. It was noon. I was supposed to meet my friend back at her apartment at about 3 or 4.

So I started walking.

I walked, and I walked, and I walked. I’ve never walked so far in my life, and it wasn’t just walking. It was a very fraught sort of walking. The only method I had for determining how to get back home was to rely on my memory of landmarks and bus colors. These were things glimpsed from a moving vehicle going in the opposite direction, and I frequently wasn’t paying particularly close attention. I didn’t have a map, and I only knew two bus stop numbers – the one in my friend’s neighborhood and the one of the place where I wanted to take pictures.

I made numerous wrong turns, but when a place didn’t seem “familiar” to me, I’d backtrack and start again. I was in a constant state of sustained heart attack coupled with vast injections of fear-based adrenaline, as I honestly had NO IDEA if I would be able to get back to the apartment using my notoriously poor memory, or if I was going to end up in the wrong neighborhood, in the wrong end of an alley and at the wrong end of something stabby.

So I just kept on walking.

SEVEN HOURS LATER, I noticed some things that were much more familiar to me, having seen them on previous walks through my friend’s neighborhood. I’d actually made it! The relief I felt at that moment has not been matched before or since. My friend was very angry at me for making her worry so much, and flabbergasted that I’d managed to make it back without assistance. I think she was about to call the police and start putting up posters. I seem to recall drinking about four gallons of water and sleeping very well that night.

We just recently figured out exactly how far I’d gone, so I took the liberty of putting together a map for your viewing pleasure. My friend’s apartment was in the bottom left, and the bus took me to the top right.

I didn’t stop to take any photos along the way, because a) I was trying to get back as quickly as possible, and b) I was concentrating pretty intently the whole time, because I didn’t want to lose the very thin thread I was so desperately clinging to. I DID take plenty of photos at almost every other moment during that trip, and here they are without any further ado:

Click here for the slideshow!