TORRINGTON CONNECTICUT – Back to Torrington for the Center Congregational Church. This is an oddity – the only stone Gothic revival Congregational Church that I’ve seen I’m my travels in this part of the state. Here it is. Two frames taken with my Alpa Max and cropped to fit the form factor of the church. Torrington by the way was the birthplace of John Brown, the radical abolutionist who merits a line in the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Center Congregational Church Torrington
TORRINGTON CONNECTICUT – This afternoon I drove to this former mill town on the Naugatuck River to photograph churches. The light was right to collect two of the large Catholic Churches in town, St. Peter Church and St. Francis Assisi Church. The light was wrong for the Central Congregational Church – I’ll be back tomorrow morning for it. The large Episcopal Church, Trinity Church, is very tight to a narrow street and accordingly very hard to photograph. Anyway here are St. Peter and St. Francis Assisi, taken with my Alpa Max and an 80 meg Phase One back. These subjects require full use of the camera’s rise and shift features. The St. Francis Assis (the second image) is two frames stitched.
St. Peter Church TorringtonSt. Francis Assisi Torrington
NEW YOEK NEW YORK – I spent some time this afternoon at Yancey Richardson looking at photographs, primarily by Andrew Moore. The experience was energizing. When I started this daily photo effort over two years ago I expected that a number of longer term projects would emerge. Looking at Andrew’s work and paging back through mine I’ve decided to push on the churches of Litchfield County project. I see a couple of phases, starting with taking an inventory of facades, making high quality prints as a means to get closer to the ministers/rectors/priests, doing more in depth studies (which I’ve only done at the Washington Congregational Church at this point), teasing out the narrative (which I have some ideas on but need further work to refine) and then more follow through studies.
But today I’m not in Litchfield County so I point my Alpa Max out our window into good light. I’m working to achieve technical mastery with this tool – it’s the key to creating the kinds of images that I’m looking for in Litchfield County. By “technical mastery” I mean that my hands do the right things without an need to think about anything but composition.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A friend, Bill Beekman, has collected a treasure trove of Virginia Woolf first editions, letters, manuscripts, autographs and photos. It’s all on display at the Forbes Galleries, starting with an opening tonight. Here’s Bill and his wife, Bunny, being photographed by a friend, and the same friend trying to photograph me with a very pretty white Nikon point and shoot. Taken with my Ricoh GRD IV, aka the “party animal”.
Bill and BunnyGood luck shooting me
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I met Francesca at Columbia for afternoon tea. I caught this image of the Italian Academy. Not a brilliant piece of work on my part. I struggle on overcast and rainy days. It’s a matter of disposition, I suppose.
The Italian Institute
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I meet monthly for breakfast with a group of college classmates. One member of our group is the headmaster of an independent boys’ school – we meet in his office, which seems kind of appropriate on many levels. Here’s a picture of Andy, captured with my iPhone in video mode, using an app called Video Stills as a frame grabber to sort out individual video frames as stills.
Andy
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – So I spent part of the day walking around with my iPhone in video mode. I isolated stills from the video using a “frame grabber” app on the iPhone. Here’s an example from the Shake Shack on 86th Street.
Shake Shack
