NEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day with a lot of photo opportunities. My landscape class went to the North Woods in Central Park to shoot. I was distracted by a conference call on my cell phone and never really got into the moment. I captured this with my Alpa Max and a 48mm Schneider lens.
North Woods
I rushed home from the North Woods to dress for Francesca’s graduation from Columbia Law School. Since her degree, a JD, counts as a doctorate, she gets stripes on her sleeves and a floppy hat. Very cool. Celebrated with some friends at DBGB on the Bowery later in the evening.
Francesca Graduates
On this day one year ago: BlaciRock. Not much of a picture.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – My Birthday. I spent four or five hours around midday in Central Park in the Ramble. This is an area in the park that is essentially wild (not really – it was planted to simulate wild by Olmsted and Vaux). My landscape class shot in this area last week – I had to miss the session so this is my catch up work. I found the light harsh and the area oppressive and sinister – perhaps as a result of its reputation for being dangerous earned in the 1970s and 1980s. Images are taken with my Alpa TC and Phase One IQ 180 back.
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).
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took a walk today in Central Park looking for storm damage with my Alpa TC and 35mm Schneider lens. The camera provoked a number of conversations. There were a lot of tree limbs down, but nothing very dramatic. I needed up shooting a pretty conventional rocks and trees image but the high resolution medium format files make it seem important:
Central Park
I’ve taken this picture before, actually quite a few times. Here for example is an olive tree from the Pelopnnesian Peninsula taken in 1970 with my twin lens Rollei 2.8F. The tree was probably a couple of thousand years old when I shot it. I hope the intervening 40 years have been kinder to it than they have been to Greece in general.
Olive tree 1970
Here we go with the “Its all about me” part of this post. I’m now actually embarrassed that I started out posting these things, but having started I need to finish. Here’s 7:01 AM on February 14, 1999.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I had amazing luck today. I went to the Guggenheim Museum with my daughter and a close friend of hers; we had lunch at The Wright (a restaurant located in the Guggenheim) and walked the Central Park reservoir. I’ve been trying to take a picture I like of the museum for two years; I finally got it. I’ve also being trying to take a picture of the reservoir with the west side skyline in the background, and tall grass/reeds in spots around the reservoir in the foreground; I finally got it. Both taken with my Leica M9 and 24mm Summilux lens, more than justifying my affection for this combination.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took my Alpa Max and a light tripod to Central Park to shoot with my Schneider 120mm lens. The Max and the !20 were a delight to use. On reviewing the results the light tripod was a disappointment – in the future I’m going to need to use a serious tripod with this lens. I’m fighting a battle with myself to avoid an overly composed look when working on a tripod, and generally loosing. Here’s an example:
Belvedere Castle
On this day one year ago: Sunset on the Maasai Mara. I actually just posted this – I had taken the picture but hadn’t posted it in the confusion of pulling the Africa materials together.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – So what’s so technical about a “technical camera”. Here’s a link to last week’s post on my Alpa TC but it just looks unwieldy and it lacks a lot of things (autos focus and automatic exposure) that we take for granted on a pocket point and shoot.
First, what’s so technical about these things? Well last week’s Alpa TC is actually the little brother of the Alpa Max, a camera that permits the back and lens to be shifted relative to each other, and permits the lens to be titled relative to the plane of the sensor with longer focal length lenses. The ability to shift the lens upward to look up while keeping the camera level permits great flexibility in composition while keeping vertical lines properly parallel (if you tilt the camera up they appear to converge). Of course once you move into shifts you are committed to working on a tripod. In my setup composition is done through live view on the IQ 180’s lcd panel (live view is common in consumer cameras but for technical reasons is hard to implement in medium format digital backs). Working with the Alpa Max is fully the digital equivalent of working with a view camera and 4 x 5 film (the debate on the “quality” of film vs. digital ended a long time ago – on a resolution basis the IQ 180 is fully comparable to r=legacy 8 x 10 film, but the look is different).
Here’s the Max with the lens shifted upward relative to the back:
Alpa MaxAlpa Max
This setup (the tripod and the need to fiddle with a complex camera) forces one to work slowly. It leads to consciously “composed” work. Some of my best work is actually shot off-hand and intuitively. The challenge for me in working with a large camera is to keep the images interesting (getting them to be perfect is not that hard). The following capture with the Max has the character of thousands of other images captured with similar equipment. This bothers me a bit, but I suppose it shouldn’t – it’s really no different that the millions of “mom and pop at the beach” snapshots that all look the same except for who mom and pop are.
Central Park
I’ve included a grayscale conversion of this image that further emphasizes how this method of capturing images nudges you in the direction of traditional landscape.
Central Park
On this day last year: A travel day. A travel day last year, on our way to Nairobi and a date with some wildlife.
