NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A busy day in New York catching up on my day job and getting ready for a quick trip to Portland Oregon. This with my Leica M9 out a window in our apartment.
On this date one year ago: My best “Hello Kitty”. I think that this is one of my best “Hello Kitty” images of the past year but it wasn’t highly rate by the star system.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – You’ve seen this before – it’s the view out of my dining room window – and I guaranty that you’ll see it again. Hasselblad has finally released a production version of the firmware for its 60 meg back that permits it to be used on a technical camera. (I had previously been using a beta version of the firmware.) I attached the 60 meg Hasselblad back to my Alpa 12 Max camera and a Schneider 36mm digital lens and spent a couple of hours exploring the limits of this combination out of the window of my dining room. Here’s a typical image. This good landscape test image for me because there is a wealth of fine detail and the streets are orthogonal (eliminating focus as an issue). The Alpa Max permits the camera back to be shifted. Here I’ve used this feature to move the horizon down – to emphasize the sky. This could have been accomplished by pointing the camera up, but then the vertical lines would have converged. Technical cameras like the Alpa are often used to photograph architectural subjects because the facilitate composing while maintaining horizontal and vertical lines in the buildings parallel.
On this day one year ago: Cash for your Warhol in Beantown.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is a busy week for me so I’m tucking my daily photos into odds and ends of time. I spent the day in my office but kept an eye out for good or interesting light in the Manhattan cityscape outside of my windows. I’m shooting with my Panasonic GH2 because it’s the lightest and most compact camera that I have and the selectivity of the very long telephotos effectively let me cheat, not having the time or space to actually get close to an interesting subject. Here’s the Bloomberg Building out my office window:
On this day one year ago: A dismal image of the mud season in Connecticut.
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 – 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 YORK, NEW YORK – I spent most of the day in the office. Fortunately in the late afternoon there was a moment when the light was wonderful, so I caught this image looking south from 919 Third Avenue with my Leica M9 and 35mm Summilux II lens. It’s two frames stitched.
On this day last year: Dinner at Le Bernardin.
