NEW YORK NEW YORK – May Day. Not a big deal here in the US. I went on a hike with my friend John Novogrod. I’ve discussed on these pages in the past the difficulty that I have with Eastern landscape. Deciduous forest rather than the desert, cactus and sagebrush that I grew up with. I find it difficult to organize and really see. Here’s a better than average try – three frames stitched.
On this day last year: Egg crate building. Blah. Whatever. Meh. Yes, Woody, you can do better than this.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Today I did homework for my rephotographing New York class. First I took the subway to 154th Street to find a house at 857 Riverside Drive (which oddly doesn’t face the Hudson River up here) that Berenice Abbott photographed in 1937. A poor jpg of Abbott’s original is the second photo below. The original is rather casually put together. The light is far from optional, accenting a bush on the far right and the house is obscured in shadows – it really looks like a snapshot. Number 857 was wedged between two larger apartment buildings -you see the building on the right, and the shadow of the building on the left – the sun was behind her left shoulder. I suspect that she shot number 857 because a wood frame house was unusual in Manhattan even in 1937 – I found no similar house in the area walking around for an hour or so.
Remarkably the house is still there. It’s had the gingerbread stripped off and has been badly “modernized”; it’s in the course of a further “renovation”. It’s clearly inhabited: someone has put cat food out in the foreground on the right. Abbott took the photograph literally pressed against the building to the left so she could show the view though the Charleston-style gallery on the left side of the house through to the river – a view that is now obscured by a building and a mature tree. So here you go: 857 Riverside Drive:
A second project for the day. James Van Der Zee was a photographic chronicler (among other things} of the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous image, and perhaps the most famous image from the Harlem Renaissance, is the second image below: a marvelously-turned-out couple in raccoon coats posed in front of a massive Cadillac on a street that is thought to be west 127th street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. There are various guesses at the exact location. One of them places the image at 247 West 127th Street, the site of the current PS 154 – the third image below. I’m not certain that I believe – I can just make our the first digit of the address on one of the buildings and it looks like it starts with a “1”. There is a row of a half dozen brown stones a few feet down the block; I managed to shoot a couple in their SUV in front of it.
On this day last year: Silver man.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A foodie day. A friend and I sponsor an annual Edwardian dinner so here we are after a great deal of wine. Still standing at least. Leica Monochrom and 35mm lens.
Halal dog? Same camera.
On this day last year: Joe Kanon.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spend a lot of time looking up here. Why don’t more people do this? What you see sometimes amazes. Today “amazes” maybe an overstatement but a not bad image as I was emerging from the subway at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue. Taken with my Leica Monochrom camera and Leica 24mm Summilux lens.
On this day last year: This would have been better in B&W.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A picture of a Leica taken with an iPhone.
On this day last year: New Milford 9/11 Memorial.
NEW PRESTON CONNECTICUT – More extreme stuff with the Leica Monochrom. I spent the day shooting at ISO 5000 in daylight. That means stoping the lenses down all of the say and shooting at 1/4000 seconds, Needless to say every thing is sharp, the image is contrasty so there is no need to add contrast in post and there is noise in the shadows. Noise can be reduced by binning – downsampling the image to one quarter of it’s size. This leaves a pixel deficit for large high resolution prints, which can be fixed by stitching multiple images. So here we have three images exposed at ISO 5000 with my Monochrom and an 18mm Leica SEM lens, three frames stitched and downsampled in Photoshop to reduce noise. Note the nice shadow detail and crisp rendering on the spray. This is fun.
On this day last year: Macedonia State Park. Hiking last year in Connecticut, tuning up for our trip to Switzerland. A crumby picture. I really have trouble with these Eastern deciduous forests. Keep shooting, keep shooting, keep shooting . . . Maybe I’l figure it out some day.
WASHINGTON CONNECTICUT – More infrared so watch out for gimmicks. On the golf course today with my Leica Monochrom, 35mm lens and infrared filter. It was a sunny day so this produced an extreme infrared effect with a black sky and white foliage. As noted yesterday the effect is more subtle in the winter so I usually don’t shoot infrared this time of year – but I’m checking to see how this works with my Monochrom. This requires extremely high ISO – this image was taken at 5000. This results in a good bit of digital grain which can be minimized by processing – particularly by downsizing the image. This is three frames stitched:
Another:
On this day last year: John and Alexander.
