WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’ve spent the day here having what feels like a speed bag workout with my day job. Not much time or space for photography. At around 8:00 I decided to see what I could do handheld with my Leica Monochrom around the house in near darkness with my 24mm F1.4 Leica Summilux lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK. I love shooting Manhattan at night. My Leica Monochrom and a fast 24mm Summilux f1.4 lens let me produce very interesting night images working without a tripod. I spend a lot of time shooting straight up.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Finally, some cold weather. Actually really bad weather. We had planned on going out to dinner but the roads were terrible so I pulled together dinner out of what was available. This is what it looked like outside, taken with my Leica Monochrom and a Leica 18mm Super Elmar lens. A 16 second exposure on a tripod. Sixteen seconds was too long to be outside – the wind was howling.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is the best time of year to photograph Manhattan at night. “Night” happens early. It’s dark by 5:30 0r so so the lights are still on in most offices while the exteriors are dark. This opportunity continues through mid-January, but at least now it’s not freezing cold. I’m working without a tripod here with a fast lens, my 24mm f1.4 Summicron, and relatively high iso (5000) on my leica Monochrom. Shooting up in Manhattan is a regular theme here. Here you go:
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I periodically go back to school on photography. It’s a great way keep to technical skills fresh, to get work critiqued and to meet new friends. Today I started a ten week class on landscape at the International Center for Photography taught by Benjamin Dimmitt, a landscape photographer who does a variety of subjects and has a particularly lovely body of work on primitive Florida. The first assignment was to shoot “out your window”, literally or figuratively, in a comfort zone, at various times and in various lights. Of course I shot out my window, something that I’ve done frequently here, at various times over a 24-hour period. You’ll be seeing more of these over the next few weeks.
So . . . I put my Alpa Max on a tripod, selected a 72 Schneider lens (the “normal” formal length for this format) and fired away. The results where ok, but the most interesting thing going on seemed to be the sky so I switched to a wide lens (the 32mm Rodenstock) to get more of it. Because of accidents of meteorology the night images came out as the most interesting.
Out my window
On this day one year ago: Citcorp. I photograph the Citicorp building and its neighbors a lot: Citicorp Center images. I love their bulk and the surprising angles and reflections. It’s also convenient for me. My advice to urban landscape artists: Look up!
NNEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day of meetings. II got home and still hadn’t taken my picture (except one iPhone image from a meeting but I decided that it would be unprofessional to post it to the web. So I set up my Sony Nex-7 on a tripod in the dark with a wide lens (the 15mm Voigtlander) and did an image of out living room, draped with drop cloths, illuminated only by the light coming through the windows.