NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I spent the morning visiting galleries in Chelsea. There was a terrific Hiroshi Sugimoto installation at the Pace. Pictures of “lighting” manufactured by a telsa coil and a few of his much earlier “beyond infinity” seascapes, shown below. My largest regret in life is that I didn’t buy one of these images years ago when they were first offered at $3,500 each (well it seemed like a lot of money at the time). Here’s a link to Sugimoto’s seascapes.
I also spent some time with Elizabeth Kabler, a friend of my daughter’s and now a friend of mine, at her gallery Skylight Projects.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – You’ve probably noticed that I’m a gear nut. Apart from the camera problem that’s pretty well documented on these pages, I have an issue with telescopes. I actually own telescopes with apertures (a measure of light gathering capacity) from 3.5 to 18 inches. I sorted out telescope gear in Connecticut last weekend – basically getting organized to use a smaller, quick-to-set-up, scope in the cold winter darkness here. I have two choices, a 4 inch Astrophysics Traveler and a 3.5 inch Questar Duplex.
The Questar is a charismatic object – it offers perfect optical performance in a design that is thoroughly rooted in the 1950s. Here’s a modern review of a Questar. In digging through my gear I found a Questar to 2″ adapter (the Questar stuff is sui generis), a 2″ to Nikon F adapter, and a Nikon to micro four-thirds adapter. By golly maybe I could put all of these together and mount my Panasonic GF1 on the Questar. Based on sad past experience any Nikon F mount body is way to heavy to balance properly on the Questar, but the GF1 is compact and light and has good image quality. I brought the Questar and all of the small bits an pieces to New York to see if I could take a picture through it.
The Questar is a 1300mm f14.6 optic. With the Panasonic camera that’s the equivalent of 2600 mm in 35mm terms! I fit the various small parts together and it seemed to work as planned. Shooting citiscapes out our dining room window was impossible – the air was too unsteady for photography through a telescope. I finally set up in one corner of our kitchen and shot a fitting on a water sprayer in the far diagonal of the kitchen. Here’s the result – the Panasonic GF1 through the Questar, six focus-bracketed images stacked with Helicon Focus software, and minor clean up of focus stacking artifacts in Photoshop.
Here’s a picture of the kitchen sink (taken Tuesday) – I’ve circled the fitting that’s the subject of the previous photo:
And finally, the real reason for this post, a still life of the Questar with the Panasonic GF1 mounted on it, shot Tuesday with my Leica M9 and a 50mm Dual Range Summicron (a design contemporary of the Questar):
This has been a very active day, photographically, so this will be a long post. This evening we went to a benefit for the Center for Fiction at the Racquet and Tennis Club. The event honored Binky Urban. For more pictures from this event follow this link to my flickr page.
Anyway, I captured some available light images with my pocket Panasonic. Here’s a picture of Karl Marlantes and me. Karl is the Author of Matterhorn – the best Vietnam book ever and his first novel. He was awarded the Center for Fiction’s prize for best first novel. I preceded him in Vietnam by about a year – we were both Marines. Since I’m in the picture it obviously wasn’t taken by me. Rachel Cobb is our guest photographer for the day.
Since Rachel took this where’s my picture for the day? Here’s a portrait of Rachel – in satisfaction of the one picture a day requirement:
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We had a dinner party for Michael and Penny Hayward, visiting Australian friends. This image was caught with my Nikon D700 and an 85mm f1.4D lens. For more pictures from this dinner see my flickr account: Dinner party for the Haywards.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We had a reception for James Beard Foundation members this afternoon at Má Pêche, David Chang’s midtown outpost. Here’s a link: Má Pêche, and a link for the James Beard Foundation. I caught this in the mens’ room with my small Panasonic GF1. The lighting in the main room was interesting but poor for photograph. You can see that I was getting desperate.
WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Warren’s “downtown” consists of the Rooster Tail Inn and four shops. One of the shops, Privet House, belongs to Richard Lambertson who has assembled a sensational collection of eclectic stuff. Travel and Leisure piece on downtown Warren. Anyway this is from Privet House’s substantial collection of things for dogs, Shot with my Leica M9 and my new 35mm Summicorn V. II.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Breakfast with my son, Alexander Campbell, at the Brasserie, the other restaurant in the Seagrams Building (besides the iconic Four Seasons). Back with my ultra wide 12mm Voigtlander lens.
WASHINGTON D.C. – The James Beard Foundation sponsored a food policy conference, focusing on issues surrounding sustainability, at the Pew Charitable Trust’s offices in Washington. After the conference, taken with my Leica M9 and a 28mm Summicron lens.
