WARREN CONNECTICUT – Another cold day in Connecticut. Taken with my Alpa TC.

Here’s a different treatment of the image that I posted on February 12

On this day one year ago: Experimenting with a pinhole image.

WARREN CONNECTICUT – Another cold day in Connecticut. Taken with my Alpa TC.

Here’s a different treatment of the image that I posted on February 12

On this day one year ago: Experimenting with a pinhole image.

NEW YORK NEW YORK – We went for a walk to Union Square where we did some shopping in the farmer’s market for meals over the weekend. A pedestrian image, captured with my Alpa TC, which demonstrates once again that great gear doesn’t guarantee great images. This is in contrast to the image from one year ago.

On this day one year ago: Vietnam Memorial. For me the most emotional image since I started this project. I was in Vietnam in the Marine Corps. Of my Basic School class of 317 Second Lieutenants I know of no one who finished a 13 month tour of duty – almost everyone was killed, seriously wounded or sent home after their third Purple Heart. Karl Marlantes’s novel Matterhorn captures the experience brilliantly – I highly recommend it. Many friends of mine are listed on this wall. Visiting it is almost unbearable. I’ve reproduced the picture at full web size.

NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spent a few hours sorting out my Alpa Max today. Alpa provides the ability to shim the back adapter to achieve perfect focus. This requires an object to focus on that’s a long ways away; I used the Triboro Bridge out my dining room window. I was also able to work out corrections for the color shifts across the frame that result from putting a digital back on a technical camera. Late in the afternoon the light and the sky turned interesting so I captured this (a two frame panorama):

On this day one year ago: a truly uninteresting IR image of the World Trade Center construction site.

NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took my Alpa TC to meetings downtown. I caught this view of Hoboken New Jersey across the Hudson River. Three frames stitched.

On this day last year: Madison Square at night.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – So I find myself walking around New York with a battery in my inside coat pocket and a wire snaking down my sleeve. It connects to the digital back on my Alpa TC. It’s flexible and is highly compatible with my style of shooting but at some risk that I’ll be mistaken for a suicide bomber. I take a fair number of images like this at extreme angles, but this is one of my favorites.

Here’s another take on the sunrise out our dining room window with my Alpa Max:

On this day one year ago: Another cold day in Connecticut.

NEW YORK NEW YORK – So my Alpa TC has a companion camera: an Alpa Max, which uses the same lenses and the same digital back but is designed for tripod use and allows full shifts in both the horizontal and vertical directions. It’s a so-called technical camera. It permits making compositions by shifting the back up, down, right or left while keeping camera level so vertical lines don’t converge or diverge, an effect that is especially evident when shooting wide angle. So here we are shooting with the Max out of our dining room window at dawn, shifting the back downward to obtain this composition.

On this day one year ago: Episcopal Church, Morris Connecitut.

NEW PRESTON CONNECTICUT – A really gray day. New Preston is a small village near us just off of Route 202. Politically it’s part of Washington Connecticut. The Congregational parish has two church buildings: a traditional neo-classical wooden structure where the congregation meets for most of the year, and a stone church where they meet in August. New Preston doesn’t have a green so both buildings are sited awkwardly – the stone church s literally 6 feet from the edge of the road. Taken with my Alpa TC.

On this day one year ago: a gray icy day in Warren Connecticut. This seems to be a theme this time of year.
