WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Torrential freezing rain. A thoroughly grim day:
On this date last year: Sunrise, Litchfield County. Last year’s picture was taken about a quarter of a mile from this year’s rain soaked landscape, on a clear, very cold day. The same cornfield. Weather makes a difference.
LITCHFIELD CONNECTICUT – I spent some time in this historic old village exercising my Hasselblad, taking full frontal images of some of the buildings in town. Here’s the Union Savings Bank Building, conveniently located right next to the historic Litchfield jail. The sign looks sort of temporary. I’m guessing here (I’ll check this out with some of our local friends) that this was formerly the First National Bank of Litchfield, which was merged into the Union Savings Bank earlier this year.
On this day one year ago: Brooklyn Bridge.
WARREN, CONNECTICUT – Every couple of months I have a poker game with a group of old friends. Shot with my Panasonic.
On this date last year: The Metropolitan Opera
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I’ve decided over the next few weeks to spend more time shooting with my Hasselblad. It’s a terrific tool for landscape, urban or otherwise. It’s poorly adapted for quick shooting in poor light so on days when I’m counting on getting my photograph at an evening event I’ll continue to rely on my Nikon or Panasonic.
Here’s the view straight up on the extension of Riverside Drive South from 72nd Street with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and an HCD35-90 lens at 35mm.
On this day one year ago: A not so interesting shot from my dining room window. Every day can’t be great.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Today I had breakfast with a friend near Columbia so I used the opportunity to continue my explorations of the Episcopal Cathedral St. John the Devine – the massive unfinished structure at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street. For more information on this massive undertaking see St. John the Divine. Shot with my Leica M9 and a 12mm Voigtlander lens. The frontal composition obviously has a lot in common with my December 7, 2010 entry.
On this day one year ago: Party for some colleagues.
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.
From this day one year ago: Approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
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:
One more from this event – Karl with Susan Lyne:
On this date one year ago: Sunrise in Connecticut after a storm. This was one of my most highly-praised images of 2009.
