Friday October 28, 2011

NEW YORK NEW YORK – A great day for late fall light. I found myself at Columbus Circle with my Alpa. This was an easy day for me, photographically. The subway image prints at 24×36 nicely and has a vigor that I’m trying to achieve in every image, but actually don’t often realize.

Subway
Subway
Columbus Circle
Columbus Circle

So dear reader, here is my self-portrait from 3:58 AM on February 14, 1999. We’ll come to the end of these soon enough. I generally disapprove of blogs that feature pictures of their creators, but since we got off on the subject of appropriation in art in an earlier post I just thought it would be interesting to post my own examples.

3:58 AM February 14, 1999
3:58 AM February 14, 1999

Thursday September 30, 2010

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Feeling a bid dull today so I did a radical equipment change: I put a 16 mm Karl Zeiss Hologon on my Leica M9 and took it with me as I went about my daily business. This is an odd lens. It was not made for Leica so someone made a custom mount for it. It really isn’t suitable for digital because its exit pupil is too close the the sensor, creating all sorts of problems, primarily vignetting and truly weird color shifts. The later problem means that its use is limited to black and what. It’s pluses are that its depth of field is from real close to infinity – so you don’t have to focus. Because its very, very wide most people just point it without looking through the camera – you pretty much get everything you see. This is a rare enough lens that I’m pretty sure that I’m the only photographer walking around New York with a Holigon attached to a Leica.

Anyway, here we are on the Lexington Avenue subway this afternoon.

Lexington Avenue Subway - 86th Street Station