NEW YORK NEW YORK – Another day on the street with my Alpa TC and 35mm Schneider lens. The Bull and Bear on Lexington Avenue in the 50s.
The Bull and Bear
The next in a series of 24 self-portraits taken on February 13, 1999 with an Arca Swiss 8×10 view camera.
4:54 PM Local time February 13, 1999
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I had amazing luck today. I went to the Guggenheim Museum with my daughter and a close friend of hers; we had lunch at The Wright (a restaurant located in the Guggenheim) and walked the Central Park reservoir. I’ve been trying to take a picture I like of the museum for two years; I finally got it. I’ve also being trying to take a picture of the reservoir with the west side skyline in the background, and tall grass/reeds the grows in spots around the reservoir in the foreground; I finally got it. Both taken with my Leica M9 and 24mm Summilux lens, more than justifying my affection for this combination.
Central Park Reservoir
Guggenheim
On this day one year ago: the New School.
The New School
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I went today with a tripod and my large Alpa, the Alpa Max, to explore Riverside Park and the George Washington Bridge. My start was delayed by personal errand – by the time I got into things the golden light was gone and the light was rathe uninteresting. I’ve posted some examples anyway.
George Washington Bridge
Riverside Park
Riverside Park
Riverside Park
Riverside Park
On this day one year ago: Lipstick.
Lipstick Building
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Francesca has a new hat. This and the Triborough Bridge shot at the golden hour (which is particularly golden this time of year) were shot with my Panasonic GH-2. This is my kit for snapshots and for long lenses.
Francesca has a new hat
Sunset
On this day one year ago: kitchen reorganization.
Kitchen
NEW YORK NEW YORK – As you might expect this is an emotionally flat day for me after all of the excitement of the wedding. My mojo is elsewhere. It’s gone into hiding. I hope it’s not gone forever. But I threw my Alpa into a small bag and soldiered on. I caught this at Citicorp Center on my way to the office. Everyone is alone, facing away from everyone else. Everyone is an island. That’s what life is like sans mojo. A lucky shot. Odd how you can do well at something regardless of your state of mind by just doing it daily.
The Alpa (with an 80 meg medium format back) is very demanding of technique when used handheld. At 80 megs of resolution a bit of camera movement was plainly evident in this image. I down-rezed the file to 24 megs – the file size produced by a high end Canon or Nikon – and the jitters disappeared.
Citigroup
On this day last year: a fixer-upper.
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NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I found myself on the West Side for lunch. I captured this with my Alpa on my walk back to the office.
Columbus Circle
On this day one year ago: Lexington Avenue Subway.
Lexington Avenue Subway - 86th Street Station
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We took a walk today in the West 20s shooting an Alp TC and 3mm Schneider lens.
129 West 22nd Street Condominium
Zen Bikes
On this day last year: Early fall in Connecticut.
Terry Tanner's farmstand
SHANGHAI – Back in Pudong for some images from the early morning. This is a travel day, usually a disaster for my photo-a-day project, but my departure time is a civilized noon, so I had time to get out in the good morning light before going to the airport.
Pudong at sunrise
Pudong at sunrise
Street art
20 hours later, but still Saturday, we’re back in Connecticut in time to catch a sunset with my Alpa:
Sunset in Connecticut
On this day last year: Out my window. I’ve taken quite a few of these. I have to resolve to stop it. Or find a new window.
Out my window
SHANGHAI – We have mostly finished our meetings so we spent part of the day as tourists. We went to the Shanghai Museem – Maria and I had been here in April. The collection is good but a little disappointing given Shanghai’s stature. In April we photographed the stairwell – it was the second photograph in my post for April 19. Here’s a link – scroll down to the second photo. stairway in Shanghai Museum. I shot the stairway again, this time a close up of the dragon-motifed banister.
I got bored with the Museum so I took a walk in the neighboring People’s Square. There were young couples with a single child everywhere, a result of China’s one child policy. The Chinese say that single children have six parents (including four grandparents) so they are seriously doted-upon. See the image below.
Finally the Shanghai municipal government’s building is located on the People’s Square. it was finished in the 1990s. It is clearly meant to be imposing but only succeeds at being tedious – typical of civic architecture everywhere in the world.
All images taken with my Panasonic GH2 and 1 14-140mm zoom lens.
Stylized dragon
One Child Policy
Government
On this day last year: East 51st Street.
East 51st Street
SHANGHAI – We traveled yesterday to this remarkably photogenic city. We stayed on the Pudong side of the river at the Park Hyatt Shanghai, located on the upper floors of the Shanghai World Financial Center. From an architectural standpoint the SWFC (as it is known) is one of the better and more appealing super tall skyscrapers. I regretted not having my Alpa kit and the time to use it. Here’s what was possible with my Panasonic GH2.
SWFC
SWFC and the moon
Pudong
Pudong
On this day one year ago: Grand Central Terminal.
Grand Central Terminal -ramp from the lower level
HONG KONG – A long day of meetings. I managed a walk in the park in front of the Mandarin with my Panasonic GH2.
My personal workout includes a stretching and flexibility routine that draws on elements of yoga, dance and sports stuff but I could work full time for the next 10 years at it and I wouldn’t achieve the level of discipline that this woman has.
Lotus
On this day last year: Tight crop on large lips in the East Village.
HONG KONG – It’s been a few years since I’ve been in Hong Kong. You would have thought that central Hong Kong was built to it’s maximum density, but there’s a project to “reclaim” land from Victoria Harbor. This made the walk from our hotel (the Mandarin Oriental) to the Star Ferry to cross to Kowloon about 300 yards longer than it used to be – the ferry terminals have been moved. All images with my Panasonic GH2.
Landfill
Shopping in Kowloon
Housing
On this day last year: Tea at the V&A.
Victoria and Albert Museum
HONG KONG – Out my window at the Mandarin Oriental. Five frames stitched taken with my Panasonic GH2.
From the Mandarin
On this day one year ago: Out my window at the Berkley. Interesting. Same shot out of of hotel window one year apart. Just different cities, Hong Kong vs. London.
From the Berkley toward Hyde Park
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Walking on Park Avenue with my Leica (and 90mm lens) I caught Lever House and the Racquet Club in spectacular light. Two frames stitched.
Lever House
On this day last year: An angle on the Seagrams Building in lovely light.
Park Avenue sunrise
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A heavy day of meetings. I managed to get outside with my Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 12mm lens to catch a few images on Lexington Avenue.
Todds
On this day last year: New Milford Connecticut
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Cramer and Anderson, law firm, New Milford
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took my Leica to the office today and captured Ray Bari Pizza in pretty good light. In the late afternoon I was back uptown with my Alpa, a 47mm Schneider XL lens, experimenting with a center filter on the lens. A Center filter is a glass filter that’s darker in the middle – it compensates for the natural light fall-off that wide lenses have, but requires increased exposure. I found that the necessary 2 stop increase in exposure made the Alpa much harder to hand hold so when I need the center filter I also need a tripod.
Master Tutor and Homework Coach
Ray Bari Pizza
On this day last year: Second Avenue Subway construction.
Second Avenue Subway
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More rain. Really. A lot of rain. I walked around with my Leica and a 90mm lens looking for rain themes. The Leica isn’t billed as being “weatherproof” but it does tolerate the rain, especially if you sheild it with a coat or your body when you’re not shooting. A couple of examples:
Rain
Exit
On this day last year: Andy Berkman.
Andy
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Another walk around day with my medium format outfit. This is the steps from the 23rd Street station on the Lexington Avenue subway, taken with my Alpa TC and 35mm Scheider XL lens.
23rd Street Station
Water tank
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I walked around the Village this afternoon with my Alpa TC. There was wonderful Edward Hopper light – just enough haze to open up the shadows – the IQ 180 back’s color rendering actually got the light right. Here are a couple of examples:
The Village
Woody does Edward Hopper
On this day last year: Travel day. Yuck.
Out of Africa
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took my Alpa Max and a light tripod to Central Park to shoot with my Schneider 120mm lens. The Max and the !20 were a delight to use. On reviewing the results the light tripod was a disappointment – in the future I’m going to need to use a serious tripod with this lens. I’m fighting a battle with myself to avoid an overly composed look when working on a tripod, and generally loosing. Here’s an example:
Belvedere Castle
On this day one year ago: Sunset on the Maasai Mara. I actually just posted this – I had taken the picture but hadn’t posted it in the confusion of pulling the Africa materials together.
Sunset
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – This afternoon I walked the Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan side. It was seriously crowded. I shot with my Alpa and the 72mm Schneider lens. Framing continues to be a challenge. Out of the 30 or 40 images I thought this was the best point of view, but it’s flawed because I didn’t recognize it at the time so I didn’t take the time to wait for the optimum moment in terms of the pedestrians. Near misses for me two days in a row. Here it is:
Brooklyn Bridge
On this day last year: wildebeest migration. I had so many images that I did three posts for the day. Here’s a crocodile killing a zebra.
Zebra kill
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I walked to the office today with my Alpa and the 72mm Schneider Digitar. I’m experimenting to see if it’s possible to hand hold the camera with this lens. (Longer lenses are more demanding in terms of camera movement than shorter lenses.) The light was just ok. There’s a no name spec building at the Northwest corner of 57th street and Lexington Avenue. I played around with the plaza in front of it, and finally realized that the shot for the day was looking straight up. You’ll see that the framing would have been better if I had included the full circle on the sides of the frame. The Alpa finder is kind of approximate – based in this fairly disappointing experience I’ll be trying some of my Leica finders on the Alpa to see if I can get more accurate results.
Anyway . . .
Look up!
On this day one year ago: Maasai village.
Maasai boys
NEW YORK NEW YORK – So what’s so technical about a “technical camera”. Here’s a link to last week’s post on my Alpa TC but it just looks unwieldy and it lacks a lot of things (autos focus and automatic exposure) that we take for granted on a pocket point and shoot.
First, what’s so technical about these things? Well last week’s Alpa TC is actually the little brother of the Alpa Max, a camera that permits the back and lens to be shifted relative to each other, and permits the lens to be titled relative to the plane of the sensor with longer focal length lenses. The ability to shift the lens upward to look up while keeping the camera level permits great flexibility in composition while keeping vertical lines properly parallel (if you tilt the camera up they appear to converge). Of course once you move into shifts you are committed to working on a tripod. In my setup composition is done through live view on the IQ 180′s lcd panel (live view is common in consumer cameras but for technical reasons is hard to implement in medium format digital backs). Working with the Alpa Max is fully the digital equivalent of working with a view camera and 4 x 5 film (the debate on the “quality” of film vs. digital ended a long time ago – on a resolution basis the IQ 180 is fully comparable to r=legacy 8 x 10 film, but the look is different).
Here’s the Max with the lens shifted upward relative to the back:
Alpa Max
Alpa Max
This setup (the tripod and the need to fiddle with a complex camera) forces one to work slowly. It leads to consciously “composed” work. Some of my best work is actually shot off-hand and intuitively. The challenge for me in working with a large camera is to keep the images interesting (getting them to be perfect is not that hard). The following capture with the Max has the character of thousands of other images captured with similar equipment. This bothers me a bit, but I suppose it shouldn’t – it’s really no different that the millions of “mom and pop at the beach” snapshots that all look the same except for who mom and pop are.
Central Park
I’ve included a grayscale conversion of this image that further emphasizes how this method of capturing images nudges you in the direction of traditional landscape.
Central Park
On this day last year: A travel day. A travel day last year, on our way to Nairobi and a date with some wildlife.
John and Nancy Novogrod
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I spent the day with my Leica with my 12mm Voigtlander lens attached. That’s right, 12mm on a full frame camera. This lens is really, really wide. Int’s a miracle that it even forms an image. You don’t need a viewfinder – just assume that it gets everything. What’s in focus? Everything, because of the extreme depth of field. I put a small level on the camera when I use this lens – if it’s only slightly off level vertical lines converge wildly because of the extreme wide angle perspective. This lens has a serious issue on a digital camera: there are wild color casts across the frame, and there are two plus stops of “cosine vignetting”, light fall off toward the edge of the frame. I’ve learned how to solve this problem with my Alpa – that’w why I reached for this lens.
Anyway, here you go:
Flatiron Building
Vase
On this day last year: Landscape
Warren, Connecticut Woods
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We had violent thunderstorms today. As it was starting to clear I took my AlpA TC, a 72mm Schneider XL and a light tripod to the roof of our building, and then to the Central Park Reservoir. The lurid colors are real. The fact that the landscape is soaking wet enhances colors in the brilliant light that followed the storm. The first color images is stitched from two separate images; the second color imagefrom five separate images.
Storm clouds
After the storm
After the storm
On this day last year: Starbuck’s.
Starbuck's
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – It poured rain all day. Given the weather we had decided to stay in New York for the weekend. I didn’t get out except to walk the dog. There was no one on the streets of Cargegie Hill, our neighborhood. What do you do on a rainy Sunday? Well I spent the better part of the day updating my website with a slightly new look and much better and more flexible software.
I took my Leica out while walking the dog. The camera is a 1954 design and weather sealed cameras weren’t in the picture then (modern high end designs from Nikon and Canon are completely weather proof – I’ve taken them into the shower to clean them off after they were splashed with ocean spray). But the machining tolerances on the Leica are very tight so it’s sort of weather resistant, but you have to use common sense.
A shot a bunch of rainswept streets and a few pedestrians with umbrellas. The best of a fairly poor lot was of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Here’w what I said about it on November 24, 2010:
This building was originally built as a residence for George F. Baker Jr. by Delano & Aldrich, the firm that became the ‘society architects” in New York after Stanford White’s murder in 1906. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is a splinter of the Russian Orthodox Church formed after the Bolshevik Revolution – it is now reconciled with the main body of the Russian Church.
Taken with my Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens. Two frames stitched in Photoshop.
Rainy day
On this day one year ago: Water skiing on Lake Waramaug.
Lake Waramaug
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Alexander’s fiance had her wedding shower today, so he and his future father in law and I went to lunch together. We went to The Red Rooster, Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant in Harlem. Here’s what The Red Rooster’s website says about itself:
We named our restaurant after the legendary Harlem speakeasy that was located at 138th Street and 7th Avenue, where neighborhood folk, jazz greats, authors, politicians and some of the most noteworthy figures of the 20th Century – such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Nat King Cole and James Baldwin – would converge . . .
After lunch we walked down Lenox Avenue to Central Park, me carrying my Alpa TC, Phase One IQ 180 back and a 47mm Schneider XL lens.
This is not 1975:
Black Muslims on Lenox Avenue
Grandma's Place
The Blood of Jesus
The self-same Lenox Lounge referred to on the Red Rooster’s site. Note the patched bullet holes in the facade.
Lenox Lounge
And finally, a Mostly Mozart concert in Avery Fisher Hall. Take with my Blackberry.
Mostly Mozart
On this day one year ago: A boring out my window. The photo-a-day guy was under real pressure here.
Out my window
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A busy day at the office. A carried my Leica around with the 24mm Summilux strapped on it. Here’s some light and shadow on Park Avenue near my office:
Shadow on Park Avenue
On this day one year ago: Another not very good image
Theatre
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I took a walk in the Union Square area with my Alpa and the 35mm Schneider. Partly cloudy, but occasional burst of fine light. this is made from two images captured, hand held, and stitched in Photoshop. Remember that I’m shooting with an 80 meg back so the resulting file is very large. Stitching with this very wide lens results in a highly distorted image, which I corrected in Photoshop – a process that involved significant hard labor.
Union Square
In the evening Alexander and his fiance, Laura, came over for headshot for their wedding announcement in the New York Times. This is the one that the liked – taken with my Panasonic GH2 and on camera flash.
Laura and Alexander
On this day one year ago: Elio’s.
Elio's
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I explored the UN area with my Alpa TC today. Poorish light – intermittent high clouds and a very bright sky. Some of the better ideas I had were in the deep shade in Stuyvestant Town, but the images are poor – the TC simply needs a lot of light or a tripod. Anyway this is the best thing to come out of the day:
Trump
On this day last year: Sao Paulo.
From the Emiliano
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