Monday May 10, 2010

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – This is going to be a rough week in the photo-a-day department.  My day job is invading this space.  I’ve got round the clock meetings Tuesday through Friday and heavy preparation for them on Monday.  I won’t have much time for posts, so they will be delayed for a few days.  Mostly work dinners that I can’t photograph.  I managed to walk a couple of blocks in the morning on Lexington Avenue I got this.

Lexington Avenue

Saturday May 8, 2010

WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Well I’m going to have to apologize for this one.  I’ve said that I never shoot sunsets.  The problem with them is that they happen every day.  It’s hard to find an unusual angle or an edgy point of view.  What am I going to add to the lore of sunsets?

A few years ago an artist friend painted a trompe-l’œil sky on the ceiling of our living room in Connecticut.  We asked for a Tiepolo sky.  Instead he painted an El Greco – a gray, brooding sky – because that’s what the sky looks like in Connecticut.  Well the May 8 sunset was pretty much a Tiepolo sky – the light was sensational.  Shot with a Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens, four exposures stitched together and cropped to a 2×3 aspect ratio.  I desaturated the blues in Photoshop – they were over the top.  I’ve pasted a copy of Tiepolo’s Allegory of the Planets and Continents for comparison.

Tiepolo sunset
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Allegory of the Planets and Continents

Friday May 7, 2010

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – This afternoon I walked over to the Guggenheim Museum to take a look at the new restaurant there, The Wright (get it!).  The Wright and its architect, Andre Kikoski, won best restaurant design at the James Beard Awards earlier this week.  Link to James Beard Award winners. I ended up not photographing the restaurant, but caught a detail from the Church of the Heavenly Rest (occasionally referred to as “the church of the overly dressed” referring to its Fifth Avenue location) a block north of the museum.  Image taken with a Leica M9 and a 24mm Summilux f1.4 lens.  I took more details of the Guggenheim – I’ve attached one of the images in a comment.

Church of the Heavenly Rest