NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well here we are on Groundhog Day. I had an early evening meeting in midtown just off of Fifth Avenue so I took the opportunity to walk over to Radio City Music Hall to capture this with my Sony Nex-7 camera and a Sony Zeiss 24mm lens.
On this day one year ago: /study date.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Met my daughter for breakfast on the West Side. Caught this view of The Majestic as I walked back through the park to my office. Captured with my Sony Nex-7 and my Leica 24mm Summilux lens. The cool thing about having 24 mess of resolution is that when you do extreme perspective corrections in Lightroom or Photoshop there is still enough resolute to print the image large (it took an extreme perspective correction to fix the converging vertical lines on this one – something that I had planned when I captured the image).
On this day one year ago: This is not a good portrait of a friend. Really. But some of the goofballs who follow this blog rated it four stars. Go figure.
NEWARK NEW JERSEY – I landed here on my return flight from Naples. This gave me a chance to drop by the airport customs office and complete the Global Entry process, which should speed going through customs and immigration on my return from foreign travel. There was very nice light for the ride on the monorail that connects the terminals at Newark. Taken with my iPhone, not the world’s best tool to shoot landscape with very high contrast lighting.
On this day one year ago: Macaroni Beach.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Out with my Leica and 90mm lens I caught this in the failing light.
On this day last year: 9-11 memorial.
BROOKLYN NEW YORK – At last a good day of photography. I met a friend for lunch a Peter Luger, still the best steakhouse in New York (and maybe in the universe). It’s just over the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, so after lunch I explored the bridge and Williamsburg in lovely winter light. Williamsburg is an interesting melange of Lubavitchers, hipsters and young urban types – it has a very good subway connection to midtown. The day was good enough to warrant treatment as a mini-gallery in this post. All images are with my Leica M9 and a 24mm Summilux lens. Lets start with an image of a lone runner in the shadow of the bridge overpass:
I’ve done this a lot. For a long time. The distant, solo figure is a recurring theme in my work. Here’s one from 1970 (taken with a
Rollei 2.8 F in Luxembourg):
Since 1970 the cells in my body have replacement themselves many times; I’ve had a world of experience but I still identify with the lonely, isolated figure. Another thought is captured in the comparison of these two images: my work is often symmetrical with correct prospect (which takes a certain amount of control when shooting with a wide angle lens) or is wildly askew. Anything in between just feels like a mistake to me.
One of the advantages of living in the Northeastern US is the brilliant winter light. It was very much in evidence today giving the graffiti a visual kick.
Kind of mixed use real estate here, with car repair shops and the like tucked in among buildings undergoing major renovations.
Here’s the bridge. It wasn’t easy to get this angle. The East River has no accessible waterfront here. I had to trespass through a bridge and tunnel authority parking lot and climb a fence. There are some excellent early 19th century warehouses along here that look like they are in early stages of being renovated.
Finally, the scene under the El for the M train back to Manhattan could have been from 1954.
On this day one year ago: parking space.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – My photography has been feeling a bit listless post Tuesday’s lunch. I decided to shake myself up bit with a radical equipment change. I walked around the upper eastside with a small Panasonic that I had converted to infrared last year. I like IR images in the winter; when there is foliage on the trees infrared renders the leaves as white and they look phony. Here we go with an image in IR false color:
Another, converted to grayscale:
On this day last year: a shot of the El Dorado across the frozen Central Park Reservoir.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I went to a lunch sponsored by the ICP that included a panel discussion by a number of photojournalism luminaries. Discouraging. They all said that its easy to produce good or even very good pictures. It’s the brilliant ones that are hard to come by. Everyone has long term projects and takes assignments in hell-holes at the ends of the earth. What’s the point of my daily photo blog from cosy New York and Connecticut (and various one-percenter hang outs)? What’s the narrative? What (if anything) makes my pictures interesting?
Tough issues. Maybe the narrative is my life; but wouldn’t that require me to get closer (photographically) to the people around me – family and friends? That’s difficult because they didn’t volunteer for this (another issue discussed by the panel) – I’ve had one situation where the subject of a photo asked me to take it down; for now I’ve resolved the issue by designating the post as “private” (if you look back carefully you’ll see one day gap in the public record) – I’ll figure out what to do with it at some later date. The lunch was in Tribeca; I had my Alpa with me (not much good at the lunch) and the light in the streets was flat and poor later in the afternoon. I finally settled on this.
On this day one year ago: breakfast at Kitchenette.
