Talking Pictures

Cornerstone

2011-12-16T11:55:00.003-05:00

It's a very handsome piece, dark gray with lighter speckling, three lines of type at the top and the date in the lower right, all carved in a powerfully simple typeface, fittingly called Gotham, and accentuated with silverleaf.

It was with much pomp and PR that the cornerstone for what was then known as the Freedom Tower was dedicated and set in place at the World Trade Center site on July 4th of 2004. And it sat there while the state and the city argued and dithered for almost two years as the building was re-planned, re-purposed, redesigned, renamed and finally re-sited to the point that it was obvious that this granite cuboid would serve no actual purpose and have no physical part of the structure it was intended for.

So on June 23, 2006, with the building now sited forty feet to its west, the stone was hauled away in order for construction of the underground infrastructure of the WTC to begin.

And the twenty tons of Adirondack granite went east, back to the stoneyard where it was shaped and engraved. The company, Innovative Stone, didn't feel it was right to keep it in storage, so they landscaped a plaza in front of their building at 130 Motor Parkway in Hauppaugue where the stone was rededicated on September 11, 2009.

December 11, 2011

The Metropolitan and The Essex

2011-11-10T21:37:00.001-05:00


October 1985

I always liked this picture for the two-tone effect of the almost-silhouetted foreground and background and the way the midtone grays give a sense of distance to the buildings. If the buildings were as dark as the trees they'd seem as if they were both on the same plane. As it is, they're actually on three different planes.

The foreground trees are in Central Park, somewhere around the Wollman Rink. The Essex House and its neighbor to the east, the twin-chimenied Hampshire House, have been side-by side on Central Park South (W. 59th Street) since the early 1930's. Looming behind them (and two blocks south, on West 57th, forming the third plane) is the northeast face of the 78 story Metropolitan Tower, a triangular residential building which had just topped out around the time of this photo, and would be completed two years later.

I had wanted to use this picture back in 2007 for my other website, Images of the Lost City, but was frustrated by my inability to find its location in the park: after twenty-two years the trees had grown to the point where nothing was visible. It would have been an interesting sight, too, since almost as soon as this building opened, another, taller building (though with 14 fewer stories, curiously), the Carnegie Hall Tower was constructed a mere thirty feet to the west. The six-story Russian Tea Room stands between them.

But Wait, There's More!

2011-11-08T01:45:00.008-05:00

November 7, 2011

The Friends Meeting House is on Old Jericho Turnpike in Jericho. Easily overlooked, next to a multi-story professional building on the edge of a commercial area. The cemetery behind it is hidden by trees from Route 25, and about ten feet above the roadway, so you'd never see it driving by. I noticed it on my map, and seeing it was near a few others, decided to see what was there. Walking in I knew right away there wasn't anything to interest me: all the markers were identical, two and a half-foot high dark granite stones, all mostly 20th century burials. The meeting house dated from the 1700's, but any stones from that period must have weathered away long ago. Worse, all the stones faced north, away from the light, and this type of granite is hard enough to read even in good light.

I wandered about anyway, after all, I was here, but frankly, this was a boring place. But there's always something...

Now, I've been to dozens of cemeteries here on the Island, and I've seen every sort of phrasing possible carved on gravestones; from tortured verse on the passing of a child (Lynbrook - "Ah, no more can we list to her laughter/nor see the fond light in her eye/Like a flower she blossomed and faded/T'was God's will that the dear one must die.") to extended descriptions of the manner of death (a 19th century man in Commack, 'by a waggon loaded with hay running over his brest') to the diseases that killed them (Southampton, 'died of the Smallpox', late 18th century). I've learned that 18th century wives were often referred to as 'consorts', and then 'relicts' a hundred years later. I've seen huge stones with space for a half-dozen names yet having but one, often that of a young woman, carved off to one side, with the rest of the stone blank. I've even seen a gravestone for a man who survived a shipwreck.

So here's to Andrew Dott, Jr., the newest addition to my list of odd stones, for the past forty-two years beckoning passersby to 'See Other Side' and read his wife's curious verse:

Quaker Cemetery, Jericho, N.Y.

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Hallowe'en with Harry

2011-10-31T14:48:00.010-04:00

October 31, 2011

I've been to see the gravesite of Harry Houdini many times over the years at the now semi-abandoned Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, and even went there last year on Hallowe'en, but I never had the chance, until today, to see his bust atop the center pillar of the memorial.

The bust was originally a part of the site, which was built by Houdini (born Erich Weiss) in 1916 to honor his parents, who are memorialized in the carvings on the left (mother Cecelia 1841-1913) and right (father Mayer 1829-1892) sides of the half-circle bench. (These were cut from the original stela the parents were buried under and incorporated into this new one.) They, along with his maternal grandmother and four of his brothers, are buried with Harry in the forecourt. The stories I hear was that the original bust was was stolen so often that the family finally gave up on replacing it, and a reproduction was created by the Society of American Magicians and placed here only for the memorial service they hold every year on the anniversary of Houdini's October 31st, 1926 death.

This particular bust, I learned, was created by the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, after a years-long fundraising effort, and installed here, somewhat covertly, on this past September 27. You can read their account of it here.

The Weiss Family Gravesite - October 2011

But last year, when my sister and I came by, there was no bust, in fact, the cemetery gates were locked. We got onto the grounds through the adjacent Hungarian Cemetery. (The Machpelah gatehouse has been abandoned for several years now.) I was here again this past August, and while the gates were open, the grounds were somewhat overgrown in places. While not as far gone as the Bayside/Acacia Cemetery in southern Queens, or the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia, it could, sadly, be only a matter of time.

Grave Marker. Note the small padlock in the letter 'O'

Houdini died in Detroit at the age of 52; he was born 26 years before the turn of the century and died 26 years after. His wife died in Needles, California, in 1943. That date remains uncarved on their stone for the simple reason that she isn't buried here. Bess, as she was known, was born and raised a Catholic, and her family would not allow her to be buried in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery. Or the Orthodox Jewish Machpelah Cemetery would not allow a shiksa to be buried there. Both stories are out there, take your pick. Bess can be found in the Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

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Addendum: I received an email this morning from George Schindler, the dean of the Society of American Magicians, informing me that this year's Broken Wand ceremony will be held at 1:26 PM on the anniversary of Houdini's death, based on the Hebrew calendar (23rd of Cheshvan, 5687), which this year falls on November 20. If you're interested in attending let me know, and I'll send you directions to the cemetery and parking information (Machpelah Cemetery has no parking lot).
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Along the Deuce

2011-09-29T01:29:00.001-04:00

July 1988

I spent four years working on the west side of Manhattan, on 44th Street at 12th Avenue. When I first started there in 1987, the old West Side Highway structure still ran to 43rd Street on 12th; if there were any windows on my floor they'd look right out onto the roadway. The USS Intrepid was docked across the street, a few blocks north of the Circle Line boats. Neither of them drew too many tourists back then, and given the ambiance of the neighborhood, it's not surprising. There were still concerts at Pier 83 in the summer, which was about the height of culture, unless you were interested in the mating habits of the Jersey Johns with the local crack whores.

West 42nd street was still a miasma of filth and abandonment, with empty theaters and quarter peep shows on both sides of the block, interspersed with souvenir and counterfeit stores.

So of course it was one of my favorite places to stroll through; at the shop we'd refer to it as 'the scenic route'. Disney was still almost a decade away from finally conquering it all, but there were other attempts that threatened to destroy the quaintness of it all. And those plans did not go unchallenged.

July 1988

Designs had been announced in the fall of 1988 for a development plan for the Square involving four huge office towers on the north and south ends of 42nd street and Seventh Avenue. Four bland, monolithic structures that were probably doomed to never move beyond the drawing board before the ink was even dry, but lots were being assembled and condemnation was going forward. The owners of some of the theaters began to protest, utilizing their marquees as giant picket signs, as seen above. Of course, the cynic in me still thinks they were more upset that they wanted market rate for their properties, rather than the offers they were given by the city under eminent domain, but it all made for public outcry and, pun intended, good theater.

I never took a lot of pictures on the Deuce, partly out of a sense of self-consciousness, and partly out of a sense of self-preservation. The street was usually crowed when I was there, and with an open camera bag on my shoulder and a camera at my eye, I was a good target. Notice in the second of the two pictures above, the man in the white jacket with the cane? After I took the picture I turned around, stepped back on the sidewalk, and put my camera back in the bag. He'd crossed the street by then, and hit me in the ass with the cane. True story.

October 1988

While I like the first two pictures here for their historical perspective, this is my favorite for its artistic point of view. Early on a rain-soaked evening, with a mix of loiterers shuffling about and pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalks. Peep show marquees reflecting in the wet roadway and lone streetlight arching into the air. You can follow the vanishing point all the way down 42nd street to where it ends at the river, the hills of New Jersey a gray hint beyond.

More ruminations on 42nd Street can be found here.

Manhattan Tower

2011-09-27T11:08:00.001-04:00

March 11, 2003

I cannot for the life of me remember why I was crossing the bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan on this morning in March. I've been wracking my brain trying to recall, and I keep coming up empty. I know I started on the Brooklyn side; the contact sheet from this roll has images from there. I just don't know why, or even how I got to Brooklyn.

And as you can see, I had the walkway pretty much to myself. There was one group of about three people a few hundred feet in front of me, and I had to wait for them to pass under the arches in order to get this shot, but other than them, and a few bicycles, I was alone over the East River.

It was a clear sunny day, late in the morning to judge from the sun's angle, and the classic Gothic towers were lit beautifully. I took advantage of the light, with my main concern being symmetry. The narrow walkway on the bridge was limiting my lateral movement, so a straight architectural composition was my goal.

I still managed a bit of creativity, I think. While the image is far from perfectly symmetrical (note that I wasn't even standing on the center line of the boardwalk), I like the way the cables running from the center of the tower form an asterisk of sorts as they lead down and across the upper third of the picture. The cloudless sky also aids the composition as it seamlessly gradates from light to dark over the middle to the upper third. Clouds would break this sense of flow, making the image jumbled and confusing to the eye.

Finally, with one exception, every line in the picture is a straight line: verticals, horizontals, and diagonals, each vertical and diagonal matched on the left and right side, the horizontal brickwork of the tower complimenting the boards of the walkway and girders over the roadways. The only curving lines of course, being the twin arches in the very center, which help to soften what would otherwise be a very severe image.

Lido Sunflower

2011-09-25T11:02:00.010-04:00


August 1999

My first autofocus camera was the Pentax ZX-5n which I got in the summer of 1999. I remember I was able to afford it because the newspaper I was working for at the time had finally cut me a check for the assignments I'd done during the previous three months. (They really hated paying freelancers.)

One of the neat features of this camera was the 'panorama drop-in', which was a mask that blacked-out the top and bottom thirds of a single frame, to create a panorama effect. I say 'effect', because a true panorama camera would expose the image across two, three and sometimes four entire frames of a film roll, using either a wide-angle lens or a rolling slit-shutter. But those cameras cost thousands and required elaborate tripods, so for about the $350 that the Pentax cost, I was happy with the drop-in mask.

Of course, I could have just cropped the top and bottom of the image in the enlarger when I printed them, but my technique at the time was 'shooting for the full frame', that is, I never cropped any pictures that I printed. I used an oversized carrier in my enlarger that let me print the border of the negative as a frame around the image. Without a masked negative I wouldn't have a black border all around, only on the sides.

There was an inherent problem with this, however. Minilabs at the time were programmed to automatically print negatives shot with the mask as pano prints, which cost a dollar each (or more, depending on the lab), so if I used color film, having a roll processed and printed could wind up costing a fortune. And since the prints were basically just super-enlargements, if you used 400 speed film, you could wind up with grainy, expensive, unusable prints. I had to remember to write 'print all frames as 4x6' in capital letters in the special instruction box when I had color film printed.

That said, this picture works well as a pano, since the area of interest is in the center, and having more sky and road on the top and bottom would just detract from it. This was shot looking west along Lido Boulevard across from the beach clubs back in August of 1999. I'd been driving past this spot all summer, and I really liked the sunflowers that one of the homeowners on Marginal Road (the street to the right) had planted on the narrow median between the streets. I finally took my bicycle out that way to get some shots.

Here's why I think this composition works: on the left you have the empty, open road, angling into half of a vanishing point. On the right a busy scene with trees, houses and cars, the sunflower in the foreground, and barely discernable, the other half of the vanishing point, running behind the flower and pole to join with the left side somewhere off in the distant trees.

Bleecker Street in July

2011-09-24T10:38:00.001-04:00

July 30, 1986

Here's another example of Kodak's Recording Film, on a hot Wednesday afternoon in July. For this one I was standing on the west side of Sixth Avenue at Bleecker Street, between Churchill Square (the Downing Street Playground) and Father Demo Square. The pigeon was probably flying towards Carmine Street, a block to the north, and the Empire State building is, of course, about thirty-one blocks further north (and an avenue east) at 34th and Fifth.

This was shot with my first 35mm camera, a Pentax ME Super. I think I had a 70-200mm zoom lens on the camera, and although I don't know for sure what the focal length was that I was using; I don't think it was racked out to the full 200mm, more likely it was at around 150mm, but after 25 years, my memory of these things is about as hazy as the sky was on this day.

The above image is also cropped from the full scene, and when I first printed this negative I made two versions: one was cropped as you see here, and the other horizontally, with none of the trees showing. I liked the way that one looked, almost like a bas-relief of the pebbly building emerging from the grainy sky. Below is the full image from the original negative.

Looking at the contact sheet, this was the first of only three frames that I shot of this scene. The other two were verticals, the second at about the same focal length as this one, and the last a longer shot (i.e., a shorter focal length, probably at 70mm) to show more of the street. I can't remember if I even saw the bird in the viewfinder when I took the picture; I may have, and then made the second to insure that I'd have what I was initially after, since I had no idea it would be positioned so perfectly, and I certainly wasn't trying to compose anything like what I wound up with.

But serendipity has been a wonderful collaborator.

Drive-In Movie

2011-09-23T12:23:00.003-04:00

Rocky Point, NY - October 1991

Another of my favorite pictures, this was also one of the last drive-in movie theaters on Long Island in the late 1980's. This was taken in the early fall of 1991; I used to spend my weekends driving around the Island, looking for unusual places, when I happened upon this.

A friend's family had a summer house in Rocky Point during the 80's, and I knew about the drive-in, I just didn't know at this time that it had been abandoned for a few years. The sign out on Rt. 25A was barely visible, and I remember having to park in a strip mall about a hundred yards past it, then walking back to fight my way through the brush that had grown up along the entrance lane.

I had to walk some distance, past the entrance booths to finally come upon the towering screen facing what was now an isolated meadow with waist-high grass. I wandered around for some time in this quiet, deserted bowl before I saw the car seat, and knew I had my picture.

Southern Exposure

2011-09-22T14:15:00.001-04:00

February 1986

It wasn't a very cold Sunday afternoon in February, on the ground at least. A friend and I were wandering midtown with our cameras when one of us got the idea to see if the observation deck of the RCA building (and it will always be the RCA building to me) was open. I remember we had to search the lobby for the right elevator, as there wasn't any ticket counter on the ground floor. We took one elevator up to the floor that the Rainbow Room was on, bought our tickets, then went along another hallway or two for the final ride to the top.

Unlike the Empire State, there wasn't any fencing along the parapet, and unlike today, no glass, either. Just a stomach-high (to me) ledge that you could lean on, and over. The deck itself was rectangular, with a raised area in the center with steps you could walk up. A few satellite dishes and small antenna were up there, but the best views were from the wall, where the coin-operated binoculars were.

850 feet in the air it gets pretty windy, and the temperature drops the higher you rise. So while it may have been in the balmy high 40's in the plaza, it was pretty cold on the 70th floor. So we didn't spend a lot of time up there, but I did have a chance to make what have become a few of my favorite pictures from that time.

This is a pretty grainy image, because I was using a pretty grainy film at the time. Kodak's fastest black and white film at the time, Tri-X, was rated at 400 ISO. But working in the printing trade as I did, I knew a few photographers and custom labs and camera stores, so I was able to get hold of another Kodak film, one that wasn't sold in drugstores.

Recording Film had a basic ISO of 1000, but could be pushed (underexposed, then overdeveloped) to upwards of 3200. Nowadays, 3200 is fairly common for even pocket digitals, but during the seventies and eighties it was a specialty item used for surveillance by cops and private investigators. The grain was like gravel, but it had a charm to it, and I found myself using it in daylight as well as for night shots. But like all my favorite Kodak products, it was discontinued towards the end of the decade.

This picture is available on a coffee mug!

2011 LongCycle Championships Photos

2011-03-28T14:01:00.008-04:00

UPDATED - 3-28-11 - 1:00 PM EDT

ALL PHOTOS NOW AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING!

Photographs from ALL flights of the 2011 Kettlebell LongCycle championships and all the awards pictures are now available for viewing. Click on the link below:

Kettlebell Pictures

A sixteen-inch wide panorama print of the group photo above is also available. Click the link for more information.
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The Red Lion

2011-01-21T22:32:00.003-05:00

January 19, 2011

I was in Trader Joe's for my regular grocery run on January eighth when I happened to notice the plants they had in the space between the doors, where you'd pick up a handbasket or flyer or crate of Clementines on your way in. I'd forgotten they sold potted plants in addition to the cut flowers; this being right about the dead of winter here in the northeast gardening isn't at the top of my agenda, although I do have a large sunny deck to fill come the summer.

This amaryllis caught my eye. I'd had an amaryllis before, and I managed to get that one to bloom a second time quite accidentally after finding the dormant bulb, which had been left under a sink for two years.

January 19, 2011 - 11:08 AM

This was a nice-looking one, too. Two stalks, both with healthy-looking buds. For $5.99 I've done worse, so I took it home and set it on a small table in a corner behind a chair where it could get the afternoon sun and the cats would ignore it.

January 20, 2011

I kept the dirt damp for a week as the buds grew fatter, then moved the table (and wound up rearranging half the furniture) in front of the window, so as to get the sun for most of the day. This, along with some extra water, proved to be a fortuitous move, since by the 17th the shorter stalk pushed one bell out from its green bud, fell the next day and began opening on the 19th. This stalk has two trumpets on it; from the progress seen here I should have a good shot of the double flower by Sunday.

January 20, 2011

Setting up these shots was easier than it may seem. There's no fancy lighting or backgrounds, all I did was raise the blinds a bit more than normal and annoy the cats a bit more than usual with my furniture-moving. The light is natures own, filtered through the window screen, and the background is the matte black of the flat-screen TV.


January 21, 2011

I did use an assortment of lenses for these shots, the 50mm, 17-40 and 24-105, mostly at f8 or f11 for added depth of field. Shutter speeds were 1/25 to 1/125, all handheld. The small aperture, the black background, and the high-key lighting combine to isolate the subject. This isolation accentuates the intensity of the color and draws the eye into the detail of the image.

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Winter Water

2011-01-08T00:59:00.003-05:00

Winter Water, Mendon Creek - February 2009

The 30th annual Monkey Island holiday card was mailed from Long Beach, New York this year on the Monday before Christmas. It was an informal format this year (fold on top) with the sentiment 'Twisting through the winter wood, twisting the year away' on the inside. The picture was taken alongside Route 4 near Wheelerville Road between the towns of Mendon and Killington, Vermont.

I really like the way this picture came out, and many people have said many very nice things about it, for which I'm grateful. And not only because I had to climb over a pile of plowed snow on the roadside in order to clamber down the ice-crusted snowy embankment so I could capture the scene closer to the level of the creek, so there wouldn't be the extreme downward angle I'd get if I just shot from the road, which would result in a reverse keystone effect with the trees.

This was shot with the 5D using the 24-105L at 24mm. I used ISO 100 to keep the noise to a minimum, and a shutter speed of 1/80th of a second at f11. The f-stop is the key to the whole picture, a small aperture (and f11 is about as small as you want to go with a wide angle lens, any smaller and there will be distortion at the edges and darkening in the corners) gives greater depth of field, which is how all those trees are in such sharp focus.

Christmas Road Trip: Part One

2010-12-30T17:06:00.004-05:00

Christmas Day dawned with high, thin clouds. It wasn't too cold, high thirties, so, with family obligations obliged the night before, I pointed the car east for a day on the road.

Christmas, New Year's and Thanksgiving Day seem to be the best time for a drive on Long Island; all the idiots are home. Except for the one in the Hummer, who came up from behind me in the HOV lane on the Long Island Expressway (I'd had the lane to myself when I got on) and hung twenty feet behind me as we went 75 MPH toward Riverhead. He wisely left at the first exit lane, which is good. If he hadn't, I was going to simply take my foot off the gas until I hit 55 and he gave me some space.

The ride was uneventful after that, and I made it to my first destination, The Big Duck, by around eleven in the morning. The sun was shining off and on through the clouds, but the overall scene was pretty flat. I hadn't seen the duck done up for the holidays at this, its original location, before. When it sat at the entrance to Sears-Bellows park I made a nice shot that later became a holiday card.

Since I can't do a road trip without including a cemetery or two, I made sure to have a good one along the way. Green River Cemetery in Springs is the final stop for a dozen or so prominent names from the twentith century. I had only one in mind, a painter who lies under a giant rock, who overturned his convertible one drunken night less than half a mile away, killing himself and another passenger.

To judge from the dates on the surrounding stones, Jackson Pollack had this hillock all to himself until the early nineties.

The main point of this trip was to spend some time wandering around Camp Hero State Park, a former Army, then later Air Force base located about a thousand yards west of the lighthouse.

If you've ever driven along Montauk Highway as it rolls through the scrub pine east of Amagansett you've seen the radar tower pictured above off in the distance. The most prominent feature of the site, the SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) AN/FPS-35 antenna was probably the last major structure there, built in 1958 to detect long-range bombers during the Cold War.

The road in the picture leads to the locked gate of a fence surrounding the tower and some other buildings. This part of the park is closed; the military deactivated the radar in 1980, and all operations here ceased by 1984.

This sign was curious; usually when I encounter these signs they don't give such specific indications of the danger involved. I followed the fence from here until I reached the expected gaping hole about a hundred feet along. (There's always a break in the fencing around these places.)

Winter is a good time to explore abandoned sites like this, when the undergrowth has dried up and thinned out, all the better to watch for the inevitable sinkholes and open manholes. The one here, on the right, looked to be a service box for an underground electrical and communications network, judging from the conduits I could see. I couldn't see very much, though, since it was filled with water of an indeterminate depth. Nestled as it was, surrounded by what would be in the summer tall, thick grass, I began to suspect the 'falling objects' that the sign warned visitors of would be the visitors themselves.

I can't find any stats online about the height of the concrete tower, and I wish there were something in the shot above to indicate scale, so all I can do is tell you that this thing is immense. The dish itself, according to what I found, is 126 feet wide and 38 feet high. Using that as a guide, I'm figuring the base is at least twelve to fourteen stories tall. Other than what seem to be vents, there aren't any windows, and only one door, opened, on the north side. (No, I didn't go in. I'm curious, but I'm not stupid.)

Wandering about under this thing was a little humbling in a way: the mass of the concrete, its sheer height, the 40 ton dish atop it all, which, by the way, moves freely in the wind, combine for a very interesting experience.

Then I saw this. At the base of the tower. And I thought back to the 'falling objects' sign. Now I invite you to look again at the dish in the picture above, or in the earlier one. Do you see that triangular nick on the upper right corner?

Now that sign makes sense...

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Cuatro Gato

2010-12-01T16:00:00.001-05:00

Twice now I've sat down to write a piece about Jones Beach, first hesitating for the want of more pictures, then I was waylaid for the second time when, after returning from getting more pictures, I was confronted with the sight of all my children sprawled in the sunshine on the living room floor. This is something I rarely see, all four of them at peace with one and other. Well, at peace given some distance.

The triplets, seen here, were on the rug, the sun streaming through the double windows, the blinds half-raised and open. Betsy (on the left) was half in shadow, and Molly, in the background, was just about blending into the distant shadows. A very high contrast scene, there was no way I could capture this without some serious help from my Speedlite:

Above is the same scene shot with just the existing light, exposed for the highlights: ISO 100, f11, 1/25 sec.

The challenge with a scene like this is not only to get all three cats in the picture with good expressions, preferably all looking towards the camera, but to light it so that everything can be seen without losing the sense of natural light.

I think the first picture has good light; you can tell sunlight from shadow and still see detail and contrast throughout the image. Overall it's very warm; very often shooting gray cats with a flash results in a gun-metal colored result with Betsy, yet here she looks fine.

The difference between the two pictures? Both were shot at f11, but the first one had a shutter speed of 1/200 sec, instead of 1/25, the better to handle the +2 stop compensation of a direct flash.

This is the best I could do to get all four of them together. As it was, to get the first two pictures here I had to crouch down in Legs' bed with him, which he was quite tolerant of.

Enjoy Your Visit!

2010-11-24T19:24:00.007-05:00

This day before Thanksgiving was bright and sunny, cloudless and chilly, with a steady breeze. I was down at Jones Beach, on Zach's Bay, taking pictures for an upcoming story. I began to notice a pattern of negativity, a pattern that began as soon as I arrived:

Three outright prohibitions and one vague one. I mean, define 'loud'. What if I've got a huge boombox and the volume is only set to three, but it's been painted in garish colors, like some Peter Max nightmare? No pets? Okay, dogs I can see, but seriously, my fish isn't going to bother anyone. Does this bar only pets? Meaning, I can bring a brown bear to the beach? No Rollerblading. Hmmm. Since "Rollerblade®" is a registered trademark, as long as I wear a different brand of inline skate, no one's going to bother me?

(Sometimes, when you question authority, you can't help but get sarcastic.)

Okay, this one makes sense. It's a busy road, and there's no shoulder.

But this is the drop-off for the East Bathhouse, you should be able to get in here. (Okay, maybe not in November.)

During the season, and on weekends until this one, they nick you ten bucks for parking, but that doesn't get you the choice spots near the boardwalk. And if you want to read into it, it's not a parking fee, it's a vehicle use fee. Really, it is.

Twice-reminded about the ban on pets here (but still no mention about wild animals) and some additional prohibitions against wheeled shoes: now rollerskates, as well as Rollerblades®, are not allowed. Still no word about other inline skates.

But I just looked at those signs again, and I realized something bizarre. The one on the left seems to indicate that it's your pets that are prohibited from using skates or skateboards.

Of course, speaking of bizarre, or at least, unusual:

Here's a sport I not only wasn't aware was prohibited, I wasn't aware it even existed.

Okay, no fires in the underbrush and bramble, that makes sense. Of course, it isn't a very attractive venue for picnics, anyway. I wonder if maybe they didn't just have the sign laying around, and they were looking for a place to use it?

It's a long, long, wide boardwalk, made of hard hardwood. Maybe it's not really hardwood, it's probably pine, but it's hard on the feet nonetheless. And there aren't really a lot of benches, either.

This sign I really like. It may disappoint park visitors intent upon these two activities, but just look at the face on that fish. Such a big smile! And if you've ever wondered about the expression 'happy as a clam', well...

Less happy are the ones coming to the beach in the hopes of swimming. But then...low tide, November...

Finally, the only 'NO' sign that was ultimately welcoming: the museum/gift shop. Commerce conquers all.

Sunset: The One That Got Away

2010-11-22T11:50:00.004-05:00

I've been pretty good with in my current assignment, capturing the daily sunset, only missing the three or four rainy days in the last month. These sunsets are special to us this time of year, sinking as they do into the ocean.

Unlike my friends on the west coast, I only get to see ocean sunsets during the late fall through the winter. In other words, when it's cold. But since moving back to Long Beach after seven years, and being less than five minutes from the water, I committed to creating a series of pictures, partly to see if I could look at a common photographic theme in a different way every day, and partly to have a specific appointment at a regular time.

But finding that new way to see the sunset every night is getting to be a challenge. The basic landscape never changes: the ocean is always going to be on the left, a wide shot will have the the apartment towers on the right. If I'm shooting from Pacific Blvd, then there's always going to be one rock standing above the others on that groin straight ahead..

What makes the pictures what they are is the weather. That's all. I just have to get there on time. The weather is going to determine if there's clouds or not, and what kind of clouds they'll be. The clouds are going to make the color, the winds and the tides affect the surf, and so on. I check the Navel Observatory site for the sunset time, and make sure my batteries are fresh. If there's been storm activity or the tides are up, I'll bring a telphoto zoom to catch any surfers.

The pictures here are from Saturday, November 20, 2010. It had been a windy day, with high, thin clouds and bright sunshine. By mid-afternoon the sky was lightly clouded over. Coming home from the market, I thought I'd have the night off, but when I got upstairs there was some pale color visible through high, broken clouds. I put the groceries away, grabbed a camera and headed out.

Five minutes later found me on a windswept beach, neutral gray clouds meeting the water, a small open patch of orange a few degrees above the horizon, a patch the sun had already descended below. The sky above the clouds was a rich blue, which threw its color-cast on the sand, making everything especially dull. Like I said, this is a challenge. These two were today's best shots, and I consider them to be among the weakest in the bunch so far. But they taught me something.

I left the beach a block west of where I came on, and walked home along Shore Road, a narrow street with apartment buildings on both sides. I got to Pacific, the Broadway, where I passed three more towers before getting to my block. My point is, I'm walking home through this canyon of sorts, never looking behind me until I look up to see this beautiful rose-colored cloud high in the eastern sky over my house. I realize what I'm going to see if I turn around, so I simply went upstairs and went straight out onto the deck.

November 20, 2010 - Panorama made from 12 frames

Lesson learned. It's a different show every night, so don't leave till the fat lady sinks.

Waterworks for the Water Works

2010-11-19T23:22:00.003-05:00

Without ever realizing it, Brooklyn lost a piece of history last month, a piece of history that wasn't even located within its borders, but that went all the way back to the borough's time as an independent city. A city that needed basic services to fulfill their needs, the most basic of which was water.

Pipelines drew this water from the vast wilds to the east on Long Island, pulled west by pumping stations along the way, the grandest of which stood in Freeport.

November, 2009

Completed in the 1890's, obsolete in less than forty years, the Romanesque building operated until the 1970's as a supplemental source of water for the city. When New York no longer needed the Long Island aquifers as a water supply, the steam pumps were removed, and the building settled into quiet abandonment. Redevelopment plans were proposed and discussed: condominiums, recreational centers. It was bought, sold, foreclosed. Fencing went up, and occasionally a security patrol was posted. Somewhere along the line it burned.

October 1995

The fire was the end of it, collapsing the roof of the western section. The structure was entirely made of timber and masonry, and with the roof gone, water would eventually have its way with the concrete and brick, weakening the walls and supports a little more every day, every month, every year; decades of neglect resulting in piles of rubble surrounding a ruined shell overlooked by a three story facade and tower.

November, 2009

And all the while the nature preserve surrounding it closed in, despite the best annual efforts of the town crews. They usually came in each October to clear all the brush from around and inside the ruins. I think it was done less for aesthetic purposes than to prevent the local freelance vandals from having the fuel to set it on fire again.


October 1995 I made my first visits here in the late 1980's, parking at the entrance to the preserve, a block north of the (fenced off) street access to the site. Getting onto the property was always something of a joke: there was seven-foot high chain link fencing running along the eastern side north from the railroad embankment to where the nature preserve began. From there the fence ran west along the northern edge of the property until it came to the creek, where it turned south, back to the embankment. It was here, after a pleasant walk through the woods, that you could enter the property through holes in the fence and wander freely. In the picture on the right, of the western end of the building, the fence runs through the trees to the left, and around the back. The breaks in the fencing were located here. This picture was taken in November of 2009. I liked to come here at least once a year, if for nothing more than to document the changing graffiti and gradual deterioration of the building, as I noted about a year ago. So when I was driving by last month and saw a crane looming alongside the tower, I knew that gradual deterioration had given way to complete elimination. Well, almost complete: the tower still stood, but that was all. Everything else was reduced to piles of brick and mortar, and the tower would fall within days. It's sad to see it gone, inevitable as it was. The building was nothing more than a crumbling shell, the owner was never going to be able to rebuild it, and it was too far gone for my pipe-dream project of a stabilized ruin, like the castles of the Irish and British countrysides. What I wonder about most regarding all this is the beautifully carved frieze pictured at the top of this article. Even covered in paint it would be worth saving. These two pictures of the main tower were made in November 2009 (intact version) and October 2010 (not intact. So would that be 'tact'?). I tried my best to poke around in the rubble, but the chunks were large and unwieldy, and even though it looked like part of the wall was still standing there, I couldn't find anything but regular bricks. I really hope someone was able to take the time to rescue it.

Surf City - LBNY

2010-11-15T00:50:00.008-05:00

Assignment: Sunset, my current three-week-long and continuing project, is getting to be something of a tedious challenge. While we've been blessed with fairly good weather the last few weeks (barring the odd day of freezing rain and snow), and watching a beautiful sunset on the beach almost every night is a pleasure that many people never have a chance to enjoy, finding a new and creative way to present it often vexes me.

I also realized that I was getting to the beach with only just enough time to find a good spot, either on the shore to catch the sun's reflection in the wet sand, or a more precarious position on the boulders of the groins that reach out into the surf. This was okay through October: I was able to work on things at the apartment till late afternoon, put dinner together, then get my pictures and be home in time to watch Jeopardy!.

With daylight saving back on, I had to get my act together earlier in order to get to the beach and figure out a new way to see the same old sunset. So, since Pacific Blvd. is a surfing beach, I decided to start leaving earlier to try and get some good pictures of surfers.

I was never able to get good action shots of surfers during my earlier years in Long Beach, though not for a lack of trying. My gear at the time just wasn't up to the task, and my ability to both manually focus and advance each frame made sequences like the ones here impossible. While I try emphasize talent over equipment in a photographer's work, pictures like these are situations where high-speed autofocusing and frame rate, along with high-quality glass, make all the difference.

I'd been shooting the sunsets with the Canon 5D, mostly with the 24-105 lens, though I'd put the 17-40 on a couple times when there were particularly spectacular clouds. The day before I made these pictures the water was filled with angry waves and happy surfers, but I had only the 24-105 with me. When I got home I checked the tide tables for the next day which looked toward providing the same conditions.

So the following afternoon, as the golden light filled the living room, I took out my sports camera, the 30D, added the battery grip, then attached that combo to the 100-400mm lens. This is more than three times the longest focal length I had ten years ago. This lens has image stabilization as well, which eliminates most of the shake that occurs at those focal lengths. The camera shoots five frames per second and its autofocus is continuous: as long as the shutter button is held down and the main focal point is on the subject, no matter how close or far away the subject moves from the photographer it will remain in focus.

All these pictures were shot at 400mm, f11, 1/200 second exposure, ISO 320, handheld.

As tedious as those last two paragraphs may have been for some of you to read, shooting surfers is just as bad. Most of the time you sit on the sand and watch them bobbing in the water a hundred meters off, shopping for waves like blue-haired ladies in the butcher shop.

Even though I had this camera with a long lens, I was primarily there for my sunset picture; using the telephoto lens just added to the challenge. I perched on the boulders about seventy-five feet out from the beach, far enough to have roiling water on both sides of me. The sun was still high when I arrived, so I started following a couple of surfers who were going at as many breakers as they could. It took a while for me to get my feel back for tracking a subject, and the camera/lens combo is fairly heavy, but I was able to follow a couple of guys, so I alternated my shots between the sunset in the west, then turning to my left to catch the golden light on the waves and the riders.

Of course, not everyone was as fortunate in their endeavors on this beautiful afternoon as were I and the surfer in the first four pictures in this article.

Now these last three pictures, well, I hear country music in these last three...

...I hear lyrics about windshields and about bugs...

...and ragdolls.

Long Beach, NY - November 13, 2010

Wonderful Whiskers

2010-11-08T17:43:00.005-05:00

November 8, 2010

Molly has the most wonderful whiskers, a brilliant white contrast to her shiny black coat. What's funny is that originally her whiskers were black: about two and a half years ago she suddenly sprouted a single white one, then another, and another, and within a few weeks they were as white as mine. which I like, especially for pictures like the one in the post below, and this one, where the brightness of the whiskers stand out against the darker background.

Here's what I like about this composition: the way it's split in half, with a lighter side and a darker side, but with an ear, eye, and set of whiskers on either one. I love the way the whiskers are spread out and down, like butterfly wings. This was shot with the Canon 5D, 50mm EF lens, f1.4 - 1/100, ISO 400. My focal point was the eye.
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Late-Morning Molly

2010-11-07T20:41:00.008-05:00

So here we have Molly, enjoying the late morning sun, fitting perfectly to the size of her bed. (Well, perfectly after I raised the blinds a few inches.) I needed to be almost directly above her in order to get this shot, and she watched intently as I climbed, first to the ottoman, then steadying myself with my left foot on the chair. Just the way I wanted her.

I don't know if my cats take a perverse pleasure in looking away from me whenever I aim a camera in their direction, or if they simply lose interest in looking at me after I cover my face. Whatever the reason, their sudden disinterest makes it difficult for me to physically attain the results I want.

As my stocking feet sank into the soft folds of the chair, she turned away just as I framed the shot. I made an exposure anyway to check the light. This is one of the harshest lighting situations you can encounter: black fur against brilliant white in the sunshine. I shot this in aperture priority at f8, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/30 second. This blew out the highlights too much, so I moved the exposure compensation down 1 and 1/3 stops, for a final speed of 1/80. I still lost a tiny bit of detail in the upper left corner, but it was acceptable.

Not acceptable was Molly's continuing feigned ignorance of me. None of my calls were getting her attention, though she'd look at me if I took the camera away from my face. Of course, as soon as I replaced it she turned away.

I was finally able to get the picture at the top by standing as described earlier while holding the camera in my right hand (quite a heavy combination, too, the 5D with a 24-105 lens) pointed straight down. My left hand held the tempting carcass of the fuzzy yellow mouse dispatched by Legs in another post a few days ago. This got her attention long enough for me to get a few shots off. The single eye and some whiskers lit by the sun was exactly how I envisioned this scene, being what I saw the whole time I was climbing into position.

Unwelcome Advances: Molly and Legs

I'm not sure if Molly envisioned our session ending this way, however. You see, this particular fleece bed and its patch of sunshine has been favored by Legs for some time now. (Last week, in fact, he was wailing in the living room. I came in to see what was wrong and find him pacing. The fleece bed was about two feet from the patch of sun. I moved it over, he climbed in, and we all had a peaceful morning.)

He settled into the empty space and they actually coexisited for about a minute before Molly decided the top of the armchair had a better view, and was closer to the light.
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Assignment: Sunset

2010-11-07T00:35:00.007-04:00

Four minutes to the sand isn't bad. It's certainly quicker than it's been for too many years, and when the late afternoon light fills the front room of the new apartment I'm torn between reveling in the golden glow and walking the 500 yards to where the Atlantic meets Pacific (Blvd.)

Since the weather's been nice, and the sun has begun making its move to setting in the southwest, over the water, I've been opting for the walk. I figure I'll appreciate the golden glow better in the coming months when I can enjoy it from inside a cable-knit sweater with a glass of warm scotch, and maybe a cat in my lap.

November 6, 2010

I never made many photographs of the sunsets during the ten years I lived here last, though during my first time down here, in 1983, I did once, with my Pentax Auto 110, an SLR camera with interchangeable lenses that used 110 cartridges. It was a freezing day in February, and I think I had a flask of Jack Danial's with me. The camera's exposures were all automatic, but I somehow managed to get some decent prints.

November 6, 2010

Ever have one of those things you always tell yourself you should do, something simple, something stupid, something you could accomplish without ever even going out of your way for, but for some reason you never quite get around to? Well, for me, the last 27 years I've meant to get back to the beach for an ocean sunset.

October 1, 2010

The anvil finally hit me on the head the first of last month, after a day of heavy storms. The rains had ended and the winds finally died down and the clouds to the west opened and the setting sun lit the front room like the beginning of a first act. I got one glimpse of the sky, then I got my camera and coat.

I was only moments too late to include the orb in this picture; I've since bookmarked the US Naval Observatory, but the brilliance of the sky and clouds, not to mention my unwitting model, made for an acceptable shot.

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Legs: Play with Prey

2010-11-04T20:58:00.006-04:00

Rodents beware, especially those hairy yellow mice, the ones with red ears and green tails...

My Protector will start by trying to kill you with kindness, at least, that's the way it looks, but he's actually beginning to asphyxiate you with his toxic breath:

Unconsciousness is sweet, though, since it helps you to to survive the battering that ensues...

...one which involves at least one barrel roll and back-and-forth between the paws..

...ending with a surprise uppercut. Who would expect a cat to be left-handed?

My hero.

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Four Seasons

2010-01-05T11:58:00.002-05:00

The 29th annual Monkey Island holiday card was mailed out in mid-December from Killington, Vermont bearing the above picture and the sentiment inside reading "Wishing you four seasons of Joy". It was in a booklet form this year, with '2009' printed below the picture. Having '2009' printed there may have confused some people; I prefer to imprint the card with the year of issue.

As for the pictures themselves, they were taken three years apart, with three different cameras and obviously at four very different times of the year. This is the Pink Playhouse, a garden shed now, on the Coe estate at Planting Fields Arboretum on Long Island's north shore. The winter scene was the first one I made, in January of 2005, with the original 6.3 MP Canon Rebel. Winter scenes like this don't last long around here, and I'd already lost the snow on the trees, but it made for a nice composition, one I enlarged and framed, and which became the catalyst for this series.

The upper left-hand picture, Spring, is the most recent vintage; it was taken in May of 2008, an early image made with the 5D. Summer, next to it on the right, was taken back in July of 2005 with the 20D, I had just gotten that camera, so this was an early shot from that one, as well. A pattern emerges... Finally the Fall picture was taken a few months later, in November, also with the 20D.

Special thanks go to Sherry, for poking and prodding me into finally assembling this series for the card this year.

December, 2009

Here's an extra panorama of the Playhouse that I made after last month's snow. It was assembled from 18 separate images, and took over an hour to crunch.
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Busman's Holiday

2009-12-12T09:24:00.004-05:00

October 4, 2007

It's nice to be able to sit and watch someone else do what I do, especially when they're given plenty of time to set up, and have the lighting to really illuminate a crowd. So it was a couple of years ago when I was assigned to shoot team pictures on the day of the senior group shot, which was being done by an other studio. And being done very nicely, too

I normally used two lights, shooting them through transparent umbrellas, unlike in the picture above, where the lights are shooting into a reflector umbrella. Both methods have their merits, mine being a softer light spread across a wide area, and the four-light reflector method giving a sharper, more concentrated light.

So my 900 watt strobes are on stands that extend to about fifteen feet high. I'll position them about thirty feet from the bleachers, tilted slightly up, with the left one pointing slightly to the left, and the right one to the right. These units put out a lot of light, and if they were simply leveled at the subject they would be a huge hotspot in the center.

This guy's setup was quite different, as you can see. Four 900 watt units, only they're fired into reflectors. Very nice, as the four lights will cut the shadows, and the reflectors give a nice even illumination. Trouble is, you have to travel with and set up four lights every job. When the school's yearbook adviser told me he'd been setting up since 10:30 I wasn't surprised. Four lights are a lot to assemble, aim and meter for.

I got to have a busman's holiday then, sitting on the stands opposite the kids, watching the photographer and teachers seat everybody, trim the sides, and line up a seated row on the floor. When he powered up his strobes, I discovered I could trigger them with my flash, which made for a few interesting shots, like the one above.

Happy Birthday, Harry

2009-12-07T00:15:00.002-05:00

It's a good thing Harry Chapin and Billy Joel never got into the habit of carpooling, or worse, following one another anywhere, or there might be two graves up on this hill. Billy somehow survives to late middle age, though, while poor Harry never got past exit 40 on the Long Island Expressway one rainy summer afternoon in 1981 on his way to a concert in Eisenhower Park. I remember hearing the initial traffic reports about the accident on WLIR-FM, before we knew who it involved.

(It seems now that my memories of first hearing many of the major events of the late 1970's and early 1980's involved staring at a radio speaker. Elvis, Bing Crosby, Reagan, the Pope, the USA Olympic hockey team, the Pope. All staring at a radio speaker.)

Nassau County eventually named the theater in the park after Harry, though the Interstate Highway Commission opted to keep the designation of 'Exit 40E - Jericho Tnpke' for the highway ramp.

Harry spends his days and nights now just below the top of the highest point in Huntington Rural Cemetery, on the quiet side of the hill, insulated from the from the sound of traffic on Route 110. The hills on this part of the island form the Harbor Hill Moraine; detritus left behind by the retreating glaciers from the last ice age. Appropriately, a glacial boulder serves as his headstone, embraced by box evergreen bushes and flanked by two young pines.

The stone is covered by other stones, dozens of rocks and pebbles, left by visitors, some with painted messages, and keys, and coins. Lots of coins, and I'm sure many of the visitors to this windswept hill pull a few hits off a joint as well, before dropping off some quarters and dimes, beckoning Harry to keep the change.

December 2, 2009

Harry Chapin would have turned 67 years old today.

Hilltop Markers

2009-12-05T15:33:00.008-05:00

December 1, 2009

Huntington Rural Cemetery spreads across several hillsides along the west side of Route 110, New York Avenue, in this village on Long Island's North Shore. Names familiar to the town's commercial signs and its very streets dot the landscape, giving the grounds an air of coincidental oddness.

I think this may be the only zinc marker in this place, although I haven't covered all of the grounds. It's over seven feet tall, and was raised to the memory of Hester King, the young wife of J.M. King, who died in 1886 at the age of 33.

To those of you visiting via Taphophile Tragics, a short explanation about zinc markers is in order, as they are, to the best of my knowledge, unique to the United States.

These are hollow, metal grave markers that were manufactured by a company called Monumental Bronze, located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the east coast of the U.S. They were only made for 37 years, between 1875 and 1912, and all of them came from the single foundry. They were marketed up and down the east coast and midwest United States by sales representatives, in many designs that could be chosen from catalogs. (This was long before the Truth-in-Advertising era; though cast in zinc, they were called 'white bronze' for enhanced sales cachet. Color-wise, they're actually closer to a light gray, or gunmetal blue.)

There were numerous advantages to using these markers: they were durable (though sometimes prone to metal fatigue in the taller examples), the bas-relief lettering is perfectly legible to this day, and convenient (the monuments had removable panels for the names of the deceased; unused panels had symbolic embossing until the space was needed). And being made of 99% pure zinc, they wouldn't rust, and naturally repelled organic growths, so no vines or moss would ever cling to their surface.

More information about these unusual markers can be found here.

This was shot with the InfraRebel, using the 17-40L @ f4 -17mm - 1/4000 sec - ISO 400
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Seven and a Half Weeks

2009-12-03T03:26:00.001-05:00

Clark

I only now realized that it has been just shy of two months since we've featured the cats on the blog. Conveniently I was stalking two of the little darlings just the other night. Clark was skulking around the living room and giving me the stink eye, so I followed him around for a while with the 70-200 lens opened to 2.8 with the flash pointed at the ceiling.

Molly - December 1, 2009

I captured Molly with the same set-up, except she was draped over a dining room chair under the table, so the light washed through the half-inch thick glass, giving an ever-so-slight diffusion. Because of the mixed light from the bounced flash, I decided to convert these both to black and white, which I did during the RAW processing.

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Fire Island Lighthouse

2009-12-01T23:02:00.003-05:00

Fire Island looking west from the lighthouse

For the first days of December, when I should at least be wearing an unbuttoned winter coat, if not battling driving snow, I bring you a vista from the last weekend of November: Warm breezes, bright sun, and a clear view towards Democrat Point at the very western end of Fire Island, seen from the top of the lighthouse, which, for all my visits here over the years, I've never ventured to before.

Looking east towards Kismet and Saltaire

The spiral staircase with its 180 or so steps (I admit, I lost count at 120, just above the halfway point) was a test, but worth it for the vista. We were able to walk on the outside platform just below the rotating light. Above is the scene east, with the National Seashore in the foreground and Burma Road to the right.

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Fifteen and a Half Months

2009-11-23T00:19:00.003-05:00

August 6, 2008

While I make semi-regular visits to many of the locations featured here, I don't always set out to deliberately record their deterioration. In the case of Freeport's Brooklyn Water Works ruins, I've been there several times in the last few years, but I haven't always had the same goals each time. The last two or three visits I made were all infrared shoots, most of which have been posted here before. The last time I shot color there was on this muggy August afternoon in 2008.

Pictured above is the west turret. Watching the walls fall reveals the several layers of brick that make up the mostly masonry structure. The second story of the turret, in fact, has entirely lost its surface bricks, only the lower-quality and less-skillfully laid bricks remain.

November 20, 2009

In the current picture, we find the local vandals have laid a fresh coat of gibberish, but in such bright, cheerful colors that it's hard to be too annoyed about it. Historic as this site may be, no one holds any hope or dream of it being restored. I'm not even sure who owns it anymore. It's also a fairly dangerous place; the brick walls rise to heights of almost forty feet, with no real support other than elementary physics.

I like seeing what's fallen down, and what, unexpectedly hasn't. Above the ground-floor window on the left in the top picture, for instance, a temporary lintel has been placed with vertical lengths of wood shoring up the brick. On the top level, towards the middle, you can see the wood frames of two windows.

In the second picture, the lintel and other supports have disappeared, and with them more of the veneer bricks have collapsed, yet the two window frames have survived.

The eeriest part about these pictures is that when I went to the site on this afternoon I had no intention of creating a duplicate of the previous year's shot, and was more than a little shocked when I saw how exact the two pictures were.

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Winter Bench

2009-11-19T23:33:00.004-05:00

November 17, 2009

Not a lot here today. I ordered a new set of apertures for my Lensbaby, since I've managed to lose everything but the f8. I should note here that a Lensbaby aperture is a thin magnetic disc that you drop into the barrel of the lens where it is held in place above the glass with three other magnets. Without a disc in place the lens is f2.0. The seven discs in the aperture kit have holes in the center to equate 2.8. 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16 and 22. (Beyond the standard EOS mount, there is nothing normal about this lens. The metal lens cap, for example, screws on like a bottle cap.)

This was taken at f5.6, on a rather warm day for November in the northeast, at Point Lookout town park, the beach that would not die. I like the contrast split in this picture, with the dark area on top highlighting the bench and the darker bench itself leading into the lighter section. I think it draws the eye in, then moves it up and down.

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Picture Day

2009-11-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite parts of being a school photographer was the time I'd have before doing the senior class picture, that hour or so that I'd spend unpacking my equipment, setting up the light stands and positioning the strobes, trying for the smoothest coverage of light from side to side, without horrible reflections. The worst part is trying to meter the light in a room whose every surface is, by necessity, highly varnished.

October, 2007

The reflections in the picture above actually aren't a big concern for me, since those bleachers will be filled with warm bodies by the time my shoot begins. In fact, at this school I wound up having to remove the umbrellas and shoot with bare lights, since the gym was a windowless cavern. These bleachers are also twenty rows high, enough so that someone standing on the top row could hoist themselves into the box girders that make up the roof. Most school gyms only have twelve rows of seating at most, sometimes fifteen.

September, 2007

Since I stood on the ladder to shoot my pictures, getting a light reading from the proper angle and elevation was more important than screwing around for my own amusement. When other people's reality intrudes upon my own like this, I include them. Thus two hapless freshmen, wandering through the gym, are pressed into being stand-ins for an entire senior class.

If you're wondering about those two lines on the sides, each one is a strip of masking tape I've laid out to mark the edges of the crowd, once they get there. It's angled in, from the top row to the bottom, so the group will appear squared-off in the final picture.

Like this:

September 2007

This particular school had the largest senior class I'd ever photographed, consistently, year after year. The group above has close to 800 people in it. No big reflection problems, either, since the bleachers are made of plastic. But in each of these pictures you can see the almost mirror images in the floor.

September 2007

Outdoor shoots, however, require much less prep time, although the logistics are more critical. My worst outdoor group was at 8 AM with bleachers that faced west. I had to shoot with an ultra-wide lens from a fifteen-foot ladder almost straight down to avoid the morning sun.

By contrast, the school above has bleachers facing east, and we took the picture around eleven o'clock in the morning, optimal time. And as you can see, the customers were so pleased, they gave me a standing ovation.

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Two More Towers

2009-11-16T21:11:00.005-05:00

Time again for a 'then and now' entry, and in a first for this blog, the 'then' picture isn't a photograph, but instead is an illustrated postcard.

My sister gave me this last month, it's a C.T. Art Colortone of Chicago, published by Frank E. Cooper in New York. There's no date or copyright information on it, but the stamp square calls for a one-cent stamp, which puts it prior to 1952, which is when the post card rates went from one cent to two.

It looks like a hand-drawn illustration, but close examination of the original shows it to be more like it's a colored photograph. It may date from the early 1930's, when Jones Beach State Park first opened.

There have been some serious structural problems with the 231-foot tall water tower in the last few years; cracks appeared in the brickwork in 2007, and inspections revealed deficiencies that required the removal of the copper roof and rebuilding of the walls. The project has been going on for two years now.

I think I did pretty good with the re-creation, except for the elevation; if I were standing on the roof of the one-story snack bar building directly behind me, I'd have the perspective correct.

Oh, yeah, and maybe there could be a few people walking along the promenade.

Details.

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Afternoon Invitational

2009-11-10T21:00:00.010-05:00

November, 2009

Not much to really say about this, except that I'll never back down from a challenge: if it's outdoors, and encompasses at least an acre of asphalt parking lot, then it can't physically be 'closed'. There's no wall, there's no fence, there's not even any yellow tape delineating any off-limits area. There's just the sign nailed to a picnic table, one of hundreds of picnic tables dragged from the woods and arranged within the painted spaces in the far end of a parking lot, getting ready to ride out another winter.

So I'm going in...

11-10-09

These were taken in the main parking lot at Hempstead Lake State Park, a location I've been drawn to ever since a chance encounter on a winter's day many years ago. The pictures today (and they were taken today, too) were made with the trusty InfraRebel. For the shallow depth of field in the first one, I used a 50mm lens at f1.4, since I only wanted the sign and the very edges of the benches in sharp focus. I really like the performance of this lens wide open; the creaminess of the bokeh, even on this 6 MP sensor, is quite special. I may need to do a self-assignment with this lens and the 5D in the near future...

The vertical shot of the tables, and this one above, are just a couple more examples of leading lines: elements of the image drawing your gaze from one point to another. This shot of the bench may be considered an extra heavy-handed example of the genre, with the painted arrow on the pavement directing the viewers eye in the desired direction.

These last two were shot with the 17-40mm f4L @ f5.6, with 1/40th of a second for the picnic tables, and 1/60th for the bench. The 17-40 has pretty much become my walk-around lens for the InfraRebel, among its other attributes, the glass is very kind to the six megapixel sensor. It gives far sharper image resolution throughout its focal range than the EF-S 17-85 does, and with a constant aperture. By the time the 17-85 has zoomed to 40mm, it's stopped down to f5, and I'd rather have a faster than a longer lens, especially for infrared work. In fact, after considering what I've written here, I've just gone into my bag and removed the 17-85 EF-S to make room for something more important, like my Lensbaby, as well as the 50mm f1.4...

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Further Left Coast

2009-11-08T23:40:00.004-05:00

October 20, 2009

As promised, more spooky pictures from San Francisco. This is another angle on Fort Point in the fog, giving a fuller view of the bridge footing and the grounds in front of the fort itself, which resembles more a warehouse than a defensive point dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.

The next day Wayne and I were driving around Treasure Island, site of a partially abandoned naval base. The navy is long gone, and film studios and community centers have moved in, but there is plenty of military detritus clustered about. An abandoned bowling alley, rows and rows of single-story wooden barracks, their paint peeling and signs warning of asbestos. These tanks are right along the eastern shore of the island, on Avenue N near 13th Street.

To get to Treasure Island one crosses the western span of the Oakland-Bay Bridge, the double suspension bridge that leads from the city of San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island. This natural island is the half-way point in the bay on the way to Oakland. (Treasure Island is man-made, composed entirely of dredged material and fill.) The second leg is the cantilevered section of the Bay bridge, part of which suffered a collapse of the roadway in the quake of 1989. This length of the bridge is being completely replaced with a concrete causeway and cable-stayed bridge, and Wayne wanted me to see the complexity of what was actually going on.

In the picture above, the section on the left is the original bridge. You'll notice as it leads into the center of the picture, it just sort of stops, and then there's nothing. This section was cut out and slid away during the Labor Day weekend in 2009. The connection to the new viaduct (on the right) was then slid into its place.

The rest of the new causeway can be seen in the background, below the distinctive span.

We wandered around under the bridges here for about fifteen or twenty minutes, just around noontime. We were a bit surprised at the lack of security, despite the Coast Guard station checkpoint a few hundred feet behind me in this picture, we were never challenged by anyone for loitering under a major Interstate highway bridge, taking pictures, and pointing out landmarks, discussing seismic requirements, and what it might really take to knock this thing out.

Twice-Reflected Wayne - 10-21-09

Of course, we weren't driving everywhere; despite the hills, San Francisco is a very pedestrian-friendly city, especially for those with good quads. It's also a city that you want to see at a walking pace, as well, since it's easy to miss a lot of the architecture and most of the twisted characters if you spend all your time driving by.

The empty barber shop above is on Columbus Avenue, across the street from a brilliant white, triangular building, that one reflected in the glass. It has the words 'Transamerica Corporation' just above the topmost visible windows in the picture, but it's not the Transamerica Building. It points to the Transamerica Building, though. Make of that what you will. If you click on the picture for the larger version, you'll understand why I titled it what I did, as well as find out the name of the barber shop.

This one I couldn't pass up, it just looked so silly. Watching the group thread through the crowds on Fisherman's Wharf was fun, but hard to shoot with the harsh shadows. I got a better angle with this shot when they regrouped alongside one of the pier buildings.

I think Segways are cool, there's just something, I don't know, odd, about riding on something while standing upright.

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Too Late for Hallowe'en

2009-11-06T00:11:00.000-05:00

October 8, 1995

Probably the last time I carved pumpkins was when I did these two, the first Hallowe'en we spent in the new house in Long Beach. The gourds were a gift from our friends Paul and Deb; Paul taking special attention, I recall, to having them be proportionate to Sherry's and my dimensions. One tall, and one small.

A few days later I dutifully lobotomized the pair, going so far as to give even the smaller one a full set of eyebrows, and sat them out on the wall of the front porch, alongside the steps. My distant Irish cousins, these relatives from the O'Lantern branch (or vine, as the case may be) of the family, lasted there a few days, then disappeared.

October 15, 1995

Three nights of being cooked from the inside-out by candlelight must have been enough for the neighborhood raccoons, as I found the partly-eaten, semi-decomposing shells on the ground behind the shrubs several mornings later. Knowing a good before-and-after opportunity when I saw it, I arranged my future compost for one final photo session.

I printed some 5x7's of these back then; I have the diptych framed. These images are new scans from November of 2009.

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Left Coast

2009-11-03T19:23:00.004-05:00

I got to spend time in San Francisco last month, a city I have long wanted to visit, but never got to until now. We flew out on a Monday morning, Sherry had meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday. That gave us Monday afternoon to sightsee together, along with our friend Wayne, a local resident.

After dithering for far too long, I've decided that the easiest way to start was to get the classic, touristy picture out there first, then I could proceed with the usual strange stuff that I try to find in a new city.

This was taken during our last photo stop of the week. The lookout point has a wire fence to keep visitors from pitching themselves headfirst down the cliff, and the posts holding the wire are nice, thick, logs, about four inches in diameter, with theirs tops thoughtfully cut flat. Perfect for resting a camera on for a long-term exposure, in this case for six seconds at f14, ISO 400. I should have used mirror lock-up to eliminate any vibrations, though. Next time.

Wayne and I had tried for this scene during our travels the day before, only to have the fog roll in. Which was not a bad thing, in and of itself, since it gave me a couple of alternate opportunities, as we see below:

Fort Point - October 2009

The Golden Gate is an interesting bridge, and for reasons other than that it's six lanes of two-way traffic with no center divider. The arch is part of the south anchorage and allows Fort Point to continue guarding the Golden Gate, which it's done since 1853. The two structures form an eerie appearance in the late afternoon fog.

That fog also does nothing to deter the surfers that flock to these waters, either. In full wetsuits and paddles, they're able to ride some impressive swells and breakers directly under the towers. As thick as the fog seems, the day was sunny and clear just twenty minutes earlier in downtown, and probably still was.

We decided not to waste the trip to the northern point, opting to head for a bar in Sausalito instead. In all, a good decision, since we got the spooky pictures one day, and good weather the next day, when Sherry was with us.

Coming next: More of the spooky pictures! Stay tuned...

Walkway Over the Hudson

2009-10-23T12:08:00.004-04:00

October 14, 2009

Back in the late 1970's I spent many a hazy weekend in the clear mountain air of the college town of New Paltz. For someone with no car (or drivers license even) there were three ways to get there; knowing someone with a car was the best, and most enjoyably direct. The Trailways bus was a less than enjoyably direct route, given the necessity of a trip to Manhattan and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Also, a round-trip ticket was something on the order of twenty bucks as well, making a serious dent in one's beer budget.

The third way was far less direct, but much, much cheaper. ConRail from Grand Central Station was around 12 bucks for a round trip ride, maybe less, I really don't remember. Trouble was, it only got you as far as Poughkeepsie, on the opposite shore of the Hudson. But the entrance to the Mid-Hudson bridge being only three blocks or so from the station, made hitchhiking the last twelve miles a fairly easy thing to do, often in a single ride.

More often than not I'd have to walk over the bridge before getting a ride, not a terrible thing though, since more cars were likely to stop on the far side, which has wider shoulders, and it gave me time to gaze at a wonderful abandoned relic, the Poughkeepsie Railroad bridge, a spindly-legged cantilever crossing that had only gone unused for five years when I first saw it.

Looking north from the east tower of the Mid-Hudson Bridge

There had been many a proposal for its re-use over the years, and possession changed hands more than once. In 1992 a non profit organization took over, and, with the New York State parks department, conceived and constructed a concrete surface across the span and created the Walkway Over the Hudson, a New York State Historic Park.

Looking north from the Walkway

It opened on October third as New York's newest park, as well as the longest pedestrian bridge in the world. I'm also willing to bet it's also the narrowest park in the New York state system, at least on an unofficial basis.

Original bridge girder

The walkway is twenty-five feet wide for most of the length, with two 35-foot wide sections at either end. The narrower sections allow you to see the original steel girders of the bridge, but that's all that's visible of the actual structure from the walkway itself. A square yard of glass in the flooring that would let you see down one of the towers would be a neat touch, I think, but may freak out too many people.

Sherry and I took the bikes up there about a week and a half after the opening. We started on the west side, which has a smaller parking lot that the Poughkeepsie side, but plenty of street spots. We crossed the bridge and took in the spectacular views. Absolutely gorgeous, and even higher above the river that the suspension bridge for traffic a mile downstream. We then followed a fairly well-marked route through the city streets to the entrance of that bridge, crossing it and completing a three and a half mile loop a few hundred meters on.

I'll be back in the spring, because I need to get down to the water level so I can shoot the bridge itself, from the human perspective.

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EAT: The Sign

2009-10-16T08:30:00.005-04:00

Mastic, New York - February, 1991

This bleak scene caught my eye one cold winter day in 1991, while tooling around the east end in my little black Nissan Sentra. They were the only pictures I took that day, too. Four frames, three angles of view. I probably drove over 125 miles for two horizontal, and two almost identical verticals, and I never did anything with them till now.

And of course, I only came across them while looking for something else, naturally. But what intrigued me was that I swear I've seen this sign more recently than eighteen years ago. I think it was used sometime in the last few years in the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip.

(For those of you unfamiliar, Zippy is a surrealistic daily comic strip, nothing at all like your father's Blondie. Bill Griffith, the creator, has his title character visiting diners and bowling alleys, interacting with various roadside icons: holding hallucinogenic conversations with Bob's Big Boy, for example. He also draws detailed scenes like the photo above, with lots of signs and power lines, for Zippy to wander through.)

This place is still open, too. I did a little Googling on the name (Jimmy's Diner, the sign is visible in one of the other frames) and tracked down the place in Mastic. Odd, since I thought for sure it was somewhere on the north shore, along route 25A. Google Maps and street view show a remodeled building on the corner, but alas, no sign. The gas station, like a lot of Getty stations here on the Island, is now a Lukoil, but the utility poles don't seem to have been replaced or moved, and they still tilt at almost the same angles.

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Cat Break

2009-10-11T11:10:00.003-04:00

May 20, 2009

After three straight entries about cemeteries and an equally depressing image of urban renewal, I figured the time was right for a new cat picture. So from earlier this spring, we have Betsy.

I like the general composition of this picture, but there are a few things I would do differently, were I living in a perfect world. (You must realize that in this case, 'a perfect world' would have cats that sit still, follow direction and actually hold a pose.)

It could be sharper. Even though the lens (70-200 @ 200mm) was stopped down to f13, the focus is a bit off, because I made the focal point on the nose, rather than the eye. I also wish I hadn't cut the top of her ear off, but she moves around so much it was hard enough keeping her in the frame. I should have zoomed out a bit to keep her entire head in the frame.

The lighting is what saves the picture for me; the way the shadows and light outline the ears and head, shaping the individual hairs and illuminating each individual whisker.

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The Past is a Curious Place...

2009-10-08T15:35:00.005-04:00

Patchogue - October 5, 2009

Shipwrecks were fairly common off the south shore of Long Island during the nineteenth century, so it's not unusual to come across several headstones of victims of the same event.

The three-masted schooner Louis V. Place was wrecked off the Great South Bay during a horrific nor'easter in February of 1895. It took two days for the Life Saving Service (the forerunner to the Coast Guard) to reach the men clinging to the rigging, by that time all but two were dead. One of them, Soren Nelson, the man in the middle above, died of tetanus less than a month later.

Go back for a minute, enlarge the picture and reread the words carved in the stone. "Taken from the rigging" "Died in the rigging". Eight crewmen crawled up the ropes of the sails, in the face of a howling storm. For those of you unaware, a nor'easter is basically a hurricane that comes from the northeast in the middle of winter. They spent two days with the wind, the surf, the rain and the ice, with their woolen garments saturating and freezing, waiting for rescue.

There's an old joke that's told to see how well your audience is paying attention to you. The joke goes like this: If an airplane crashed on the exact border of New York and Pennsylvania, where would they bury the survivors?

The account of the shipwreck that I read on longislandgenealogy.com says the lone survivor of this disaster, Claus Stuvens, eventually went back to sea. Which would explain, I suppose, why the stone bearing his name (on the left, above) has no date of passing. It doesn't explain why there's a stone bearing his name here at all, however. He survived, right?. There's a gravestone for the ship's captain here as well, though that same account says Capt. Squires is buried in a family plot in Southhold. The past is a curious place, indeed...

July 15, 1991

Family Reserve

2009-10-06T07:59:00.003-04:00

Infrared and cemeteries were made for each other as far as I'm concerned. There is just no better way to convey the other-worldliness of some graveyards than with heat-influenced exposure.

July 19, 2009

Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue, New York is one of those places I've watched evolve over the last twenty years, from completely overgrown and forsaken during the town's mid-1980's blight to the well-kept yet sparsely visited expanse it is today. There are a number of fascinating graves as well. Victims of two local shipwrecks line the main drive, and some of the largest zinc monuments that I've ever seen are here as well. I'll be detailing them in a later entry, but today I wanted to feature the shot above of a typical family reserve, with the plot marked off by a low railing held up by concrete posts.

June 5, 2009

St. John's Episcopal church is a small, wood-framed building, easily overlooked save for a white picket fence along Montauk Highway in Oakdale. This tiny building was the first church on the south shore of the Island, built in 1765 and still standing to this day on the north side of the highway. A brick footpath leads from the door through the graveyard, past the late 19th century headstones.

Again, the infrared imaging adds to the eeriness of the picture; in straight black and white the shingles of the building would blend into the darkness of the surrounding trees and grass, while here the grass and leaves make up the highlights and midtone of the picture, instead of midtone and shadow, bringing the building and path forward as the main element of the picture.

InfraRebel LensBabies

2009-10-04T09:17:00.001-04:00

I like to give myself special assignments sometimes, particular subjects or physical limitations. Sometimes I'll only shoot in black and white, or I'll only use the infrared camera, or more commonly, I'll limit myself to shooting with a single lens. Last week I decided to double the restrictions, and found myself wandering the boardwalk at Jones Beach with the LensBaby stuck on the InfraRebel.

Jones Beach in early fall is similar to the way it is during the other three seasons, a flat, vast expanse of windswept sand, only with fewer half-naked people than just a few weeks earlier. The sky was a slate-gray overcast, with just a tiny bit of filtered sunshine peeking through now and again. Never enough to matter, just enough to put a gleam in the shiny trim.

I've visited this snack shop before, during a more restless time in its existence. And, although it's still constrained within a snow fence, it seems whatever kind of architectural thorazine therapy it's undergone in the last two years seems to be working.

Once again we have one of my favorite subjects, those stalwart silent sentries of scenics, the cast-iron quarter-eating spyglass. Since the company that manufactures them now puts their web address on the units, I visited their site and was able to learn a bit more than I need to know about these things. For example, I always referred to them as a 'spyglass'. Well, no, according to the Tower Optical Company's FAQ's, the proper name is 'binocular viewer'. The FAQ's then go on to list another thirty-nine terms for the item, none of which, I should note, were 'spyglass'. Of course, I also think of them as mouthless aliens, which is what they look like.

October 2, 2009

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The Broadway Hotel

2009-10-01T16:31:00.003-04:00

December 25, 1988

The building looming in the background looks like it could be part of the King's Park complex, given its abandoned appearance and the fenced-off lot filled with rubble. But this was taken several years before I ever set foot on the grounds of the north shore asylum, although, since it was the location of my first apartment, I can attest that the building was something of an asylum on its own.

This was taken in the dead-end of Edwards Boulevard, south of Broadway, with the Boardwalk to my back, in Long Beach, New York. The apartment building is 25 West Broadway, where I lived in apartment 502 from 1983-84. No ocean views, though. Of the four windows, each of my two rooms had one facing north, and one facing an airshaft.

The rubble is the remains of the Jackson Hotel, a nursing home/residence hotel razed during the initial phase of the Long Beach renaissance. A luxury high-rise rental building would rise on the site in the coming year.

This picture was a finalist in the 8th annual spring conest sponsored by Photography Forum magazine in 1989.

Inventory (Feline)

2009-09-30T11:24:00.011-04:00

We did the annual cat inventory last night; as expected given the economy, we were unable to move any of our current stock, much to the chagrin of our CFO. (Although we did get several offers on the chair.) Nevertheless, we are still able to utilize them for our own purposes, e.g., as space heaters within the paradigm of winter sleeping arrangements, and general amusement.

From left to right: Molly, Betsy, Clark (received as new stock - spring 1999) and Legs (refurbished - winter 2000). Click on image for larger picture.

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Balloon Bottom

2009-09-26T16:57:00.000-04:00

One more picture from the Quechee Balloon festival to carry us through the weekend. This balloon made several touches on the water before finally ascending to the cloudy skies. I was shooting with the 70-200mm lens, so I wasn't able to include more of the reflection in the water. I'd tried that type of composition earlier, with the water reflecting the full balloon, but the light was all wrong; too much glare, too many ripples in the water, and the water was too dark because of all the trees along the riverbank.

But the tighter framing here lets me capture more detail in the foliage, makes the vertical red and blue stripes become the main focus, and the rippled water with its truncated reflection is now an anchoring feature at the base of the picture.

And even though you can barely see it, the woman in the peach blouse is giving us a big smile.

Theodore Roosevelt Cage Match

2009-09-25T13:57:00.004-04:00

At the time of his death more than ninety years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was apparently thought of as a dangerous man. I mean, why else would you surround his grave with a seven-foot high wrought-iron fence topped with spikes and a deadbolt lock on the gate? What kind of effect did he have on the villagers of Oyster Bay that they would feel the need to keep his mortal remains isolated from the rest of the cemetery?

They built the cage on the top of a hill at the back of the cemetery, far away from the sight of the road. In fact, if it weren't for all the signs pointing to Sagamore Hill, and the Theodore Roosevelt Bird Sanctuary nearby, and the big parking lot with the directions to the gravesite, you'd never know the 26th president of the United States was here at all.

May 12, 2009

Or is he? Perhaps the cage wasn't meant to symbolize the public's final and everlasting restraint of tyranny, nor was it meant to contain TR's vengeful soul or to keep his zombified remains from terrorizing the local citizenry with a big stick, as was originally reported back in 1919. Perhaps instead, it was built to keep the curious and the deranged from digging up the casket to affirm the identity of the contents; to hold the pince-nez and finger his watch chain. Maybe they'd take some dental impressions, too. If there's even a body in there, and not just a pile of rocks, which, according to a new internet theory that Theodore Roosevelt faked his own death, is what you'll find.

I like the idea of a zombie TR wandering the forests in a pair of khaki jodhpurs better, though.

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Sagamore Hill

2009-09-24T15:15:00.008-04:00

An old colleague from my final days in the printing trade posted a link to Sagamore Hill on Facebook the other day. It was inevitable, I guess; his status updates were a growing compendium of TR quotes. I don't know what brought it on, either, since he's geographically much closer to Puget Sound than he is to the Long Island Sound.

But still it seemed like a good idea to me, I haven't been up that way since the spring, which I reported on in the entry Then and Now. This time around I decided to do some panoramas of the house and grounds.

September 23, 2009

As much as I love the images I get from the InfraRebel, its by-now ancient technology is frustratingly slow. The camera's buffer can only process four RAW images at a time. Shooting the eighteen frames that make up the image above took about two and a half minutes, most of that time spent with the camera to my eye, waiting for the CPU to scurry the pixels and bytes to the CF card.

The pano below, made with the 5D, took less than forty seconds to expose and process eighteen images to the card. With twice the megapixels, shooting RAW and jpeg's. It is amazing what happens in a mere two years with technology.

September 23, 2009

This is the view of the house and the hill as you see it on the drive up Cove Neck Road. The path on the left meanders into the woods, then peters out just below the pet cemetery. If you click on the picture, the larger image will show the striped awnings on the porch and upstairs windows that have been lowered against the afternoon sun.

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US 4 Arch Bridge

2009-09-22T11:17:00.004-04:00

June 18, 2009

Another problem with the way I abandoned this blog to my writer's block and general malaise this past summer was overlooking some of the really neat pictures that I did manage to capture.

This is the arch bridge that carries US Route 4 over the Quechee Gorge, about 150 leafy green feet above the Ottaquechee River. I took this picture from the same spot as the VanGoghlaroid version from three years ago. It's actually the only spot along the trail where you can get a clear view through the trees. The way the girders of the bridge stand out amid the foliage in this infrared image really make the picture for me.

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Summerfall 2009

2009-09-21T04:13:00.010-04:00

With today officially being the last day of summer, I'll offer a few recent shots from Coney Island. Friday was a bright, clear day in New York, with a slight haze off to the horizon. The sun was noticeably into the low angle of winter, giving lots of glare off the water and long, stark shadows even at one o'clock in the afternoon.

Steeplechase Pier

There was a stiff and steady wind off the ocean, strong enough for a burly kite-flier on the pier to tell me he didn't want to let out too much line for fear he wouldn't be able to reel it back in. "Sounds like you're fishing in reverse," I told him.

The Cyclone

I need to come back a bit later in the afternoon so I can make a better pano than this in color. Even though I had the 5D with me, I'd still be dealing with the lens flare on the right because of the position of the sun. Like all of these current InfraRebel pictures, this ten-image montage was shot with the 17-40mm.

The Wonder Wheel

There's an eerie drone in the neighborhood, a low, rumbling hum that I first noticed getting out of the car, and I had parked near 20th Street, across from the ballpark. As I walked east on the boardwalk it seemed to deepen, and I finally realized what it was: the wind blowing through the Wonder Wheel was turning it into a giant, circular tuning fork, radiating a vibrato of despair throughout the deserted remains of the surrounding amusement park.

September 18, 2009

Notice the compositional theme of these four pictures? All of them were shot directly into the sun, with the last three exhibiting typical lens flare across the groupings of the lens elements.

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Moonlight in Vermont

2009-09-17T18:21:00.001-04:00

September 5, 2009

Well what else am I going to call this entry? On my second attempt of the summer, I was able to get a good base exposure for a clear night one day past the full moon.

This image was made with the Canon 5D, ISO 100, standard picture style, cloudy white balance, on a tripod, of course. I used the wide end of my 24-105 at f8, and had a wired remote (cable release) locked for an exposure time of 390 seconds. The in-camera noise reduction software uses an equal amount of time to process, so the pictures I made that night took a total of thirteen minutes each.

So even after an hour I had very little to show for my efforts, but I like this image. I wasn't expecting star trails in a six and a half minute exposure, so they were a pleasant surprise. Next time I'll lower the ISO to 50 and stop down the lens some more and try for a longer exposure, and longer trails.

Mountain Panoramas

2009-09-16T16:12:00.003-04:00

July 8, 2009

Early in July I headed for the mountains, hoping for a clear night during the full moon. Ha ha. We all know how well that worked out, not only for me but for most of the eastern seaboard. I'd been wanting to try some extended time exposures using the ambient moonlight, and there were a couple of places I had in mind. The cloud cover proved to be too much, and neither of my set-ups were worthwhile, however.

But while the clouds (and subsequent rain) pretty much killed that trip I did get the shots of the abandoned car in the previous post, and put together the above pano in the upper parking lot at Snowshed. This was put together from twelve vertical exposures. Take a look at the cloud on the far right and tell me it doesn't look like a human profile. Sort of.

July 25, 2009

This next one was a few weeks later, during a much more cooperative weekend on the weather front. We took our bikes into Woodstock, about 35 miles round trip, then later in the afternoon took the K1 gondola up Killington Peak. Getting off the gondola at the top I noticed something a little odd. There was a small whiteboard near the operator's station, and someone had written on it:

'Welcome to Mt. Killington. Elev. 4235 feet'

Okay, you're wondering, what's so unusual? Well, it was the elevation. Of a mountain. Written in erasable marker on a whiteboard. Like they might have to change it regularly.

This panorama was also made from twelve vertical shots. Both sets of images were shot handheld using the wide end of a 17-40mm lens. Like all the pictures on this website, you can click on the picture to view a larger version.

VT 103

2009-09-15T18:04:00.005-04:00

I've driven along Vermont Route 103 probably a hundred times now in the last four years, yet somehow managed to never see this abandoned car just outside of Chester.

It is sort of hidden when you come upon it from the south/east. There's a dense line of trees along the road just before the open space where this Dodge sits, just a few yards from the thicket. So it's possible to miss it, but this time something brought my eye to it at just the right moment. That moment, however, didn't include any kind of decent light, so these pictures were made the next morning.

July 8, 2009

As best as I can tell, this is a 1953 Dodge Coronet with a GyroMatic transmission. Unfortunately it's lost its hood ornament.

Quechee, Quechee, Queue...

2009-09-14T20:25:00.001-04:00

Another thing we did this summer was to visit the nearby Quechee (pronounced 'kwee-chee') Hot Air Balloon festival. Every year this has been going on, a mere twenty miles from where we are in Killington, but this was the first we were able to stop by.

Hot air balloons take off best when the surrounding air is cool and still, so early morning and early evening are optimal launch times. We were on hand for an and an early morning and later an evening lift-off. The evening event was a bit murky with clouds, but the morning inflation and rising was as crisp and beautiful as one could hope for.

There were about twenty-four balloons in total, all starting off as flat bits of nylon on the ground...

...and eventually, with copious amounts of both fire and air...

And a bit of leverage...

They all get off the ground and literally head off for parts unknown.

June 20, 2009

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Reflections

2009-09-13T21:33:00.007-04:00

Vietnam Veterans Memorial - July 2009

Since I spent the late spring and the entire summer slacking off here at the blog, I figure the best way to redeem myself is to start off with a really strong picture, and certainly the best of the three presented here today.

Washington D. C. in the late summer features an atmosphere eerily reminiscent of the planet Venus, but without all the ammonia. Except in some parts of the Metro. I was prepared for that, and planned an early start the first day after dropping Sherry off. Naturally I hadn't planned on spending the entire morning on the side of I-66 after being the first part of a five-car sandwich. No one was hurt, most of the cars were drivable, including mine, so I wound up getting a late start in the hottest part of the day, while pissed off. Mostly at having to cut short my list: I never got to the Jefferson Memorial, Arlington or the east front of the Capitol.

Ah well. These were a couple of nice shots. Getting the three sets of hands in the first one was pure serendipity; I was concentrating on the girl in pink and the boy in black. The man in white walking in the opposite direction was something I never saw until the last instant. I'll call it the definitive shot of the trip.

This one is pretty nice, too.

And though I didn't get around to the other side, I did manage one shot of the west front of the Capitol, making it almost perfectly symmetrical. It looks so tranquil, doesn't it? You just don't see the two men with automatic weapons on the steps above the curved balcony.

Washington DC - July 2009

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Then and Now

2009-05-20T01:53:00.006-04:00

About fifteen years ago my sister gave me a box of photographs and negatives she'd found in the basement of the house we grew up in, and where she and her husband have lived since the mid 1980's. The pictures all seemed to have come from the same camera, or at least a camera that used the then-standard 120 format film. This made a negative that was about two and a quarter by three and a quarter inches. The prints were only a little bigger, since they were contact-printed, rather than enlarged.

This particular one caught my eye.

Sagamore Hill was almost instantly recognizable to me. I've spent many hours wandering the grounds there, and the house itself is quite distinctive. I don't know who took this picture of my dad, or even when, though some quick research reveals that the Sagamore Hill house was first opened to the public in 1953. It's possible my parents came up here one summer day, although this is the only picture they took. Maybe it was the last one on the roll.

I didn't have a problem with running out of film, however. In fact, I brought about half my kit; along with a tripod and flash bracket. The landscape has changed over the last half-century, the tree shading me was most likely a sapling in my father's day, if it was there at all. The tree in front of the house, at the left edge of each picture, is a different one today than in the 50's. In fact, I was talking to the chief of maintenance on my way out, and he told me that that tree is going to be taken down this summer; it's too close to the house.

I may try this one again soon. I was there in the early afternoon, from the looks of the original I need to be there early in the morning, nine or ten o'clock I think. Of course, I'll also need a light gray three-button suit.

Bokeh Betsy

2009-05-17T16:45:00.007-04:00

May 2009

I don't know if I've ever mentioned bokeh before. Bokeh is the westernized spelling of the Japanese word boke, meaning fuzzy. It's used to describe the quality of the off-focus background in photographs. When you shoot with a lens wide open, i.e., at its biggest f stop, the depth of field, or the front-to-back range of sharpness, is very short. The out of focus areas are the bokeh. The faster a lens is, the large its maximum f stop, results in a shorter depth of field. High-end lenses like this also have more blades on the iris as well which add to the smoothness of the bokeh.

The picture of Betsy, above, was shot with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens. I was zoomed in at 200, and wide open at f 2.8. Focusing on her right eye, the depth of field is about an inch, from the eye to just short of the end of her nose being sharp focus. Everything else falls off into creamy smoothness.

(When shooting animals or people with a short DOF the best focal point in on the eye closest to the camera. Even if the rest of the picture is out of focus, with the eye sharp it'll look okay.)

Chaising Rebecca

2009-05-12T07:31:00.006-04:00

May 10, 2009

This picture is all about unconventional composition, since the sun was too harsh for me to make anything resembling a decent portrait. I had the 17-40mm lens and decided to take advantage of the extra-wide angle by focusing on Rebecca as she lay on the lounge and tried to turn back generations of northern European heritage. I was drawn to the bisecting lines in the concrete, and the way the lines of the lounge work with the near-vertical line on the right to almost meet and form a triangle.

Post-processing included cropping the top quarter of the entire picture, neutralizing the background tones and boosting the saturation a bit. I seem to be emulating the style of a 1960's southern Californian photographer, I just can't remember who.

Skylines

2009-05-10T16:05:00.004-04:00

Looking east along Spring Street, lower Manhattan. Early morning, with the sun just breaching the horizon, barely scraping the rooftops of Brooklyn and radiating its orange glow upwards through the humid air, silhouetting the East Village water towers.

I'd looked at this scene for weeks, mainly because it was my route to and from the subway, and waited for the right time of day to get this image. I think I used the 70-200 Toyo lens on one of the Pentax ME's.

I can't for the life of me remember where this next picture was taken. I know it was at dusk, and it was on the west side of Manhattan. It's a Mobil station, and it has to near West Street, since the building poking up in the middle is the south tower of the Trade Center. It might be on Canal Street; as a quick look at Google Maps has a vacant lot in front of two buildings with a water tower that fits the bill.

Longtime readers may also recognize these two pictures from another website of mine, where they appeared crudely Photoshopped together under the title Fireworks Factories.

Look Out, Children

2009-05-09T15:47:00.005-04:00

That's what I used to think whenever I passed this house. This was on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Rosedale, in the overgrown yard of a run-down house sometime during 1987 or '88. I liked shooting Kodachrome in the early morning light, and the neighborhood I lived in had plenty of creepy scenes like this. The pupils and lashes on the letter O's are very special, and the open vent on the roof makes me think someone may have recently escaped.

I came upon this and a few other interesting shots while looking for something else. What I was originally looking for I've totally forgotten, but since I have these, I decided not to waste them. More tomorrow.

Cry, Baby, Cry.

2009-05-06T11:00:00.006-04:00

I have to admit that I was part and parcel in causing the event pictured here, responsible through my inaction based on my observation of the situation as it unfolded. I watched the child and practically mouthed a narration of the action as it happened. I could have done something, but I didn't. I don't even know the kid.

I saw the woman put the party hat on the baby, and I knew it wouldn't end well. I remembered my own childhood experiences with birthday hats with thin elastic bands, and I knew it would only end in only one way. Pain and tears.

I watched the child's stubby little fingers reach for the elastic where it was cutting into his ear. Baby fingers are about the least dexterous thing a child has, and I don't think this kid even had bones in his yet. He was only able to hold the elastic for a millisecond, but it was an eventful one.

Grab. Pull. SNAP! (pause). Create ear-splitting yell through the use of the pictured mouth/tongue combination.

The child may never look at Elmo the same way again.

Castle on the Hill

2009-05-04T05:18:00.006-04:00

April 2009

As I was walking through the drizzle and mist in Majors Park, just above the Ottawa Locks, I saw this and realized the parallels it had with various Hollywood representations of Baron von Frankenstein's castle.

I only had the infrared camera with me, since this was the morning of my earlier report, Ottawa: Ouest à l'est, and I was on my way to the National Gallery. Given the state of the weather that morning, it was the ideal medium to create the mood. All it needs are a few well-placed lightning bolts.

Weight Room

2009-05-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

May 2009

Even though I've been coming to Kings Park for twenty years, there's always something on the property that surprises me. In the past year I've explored sections I've never been to before, as well as revisiting familiar scenes with the infrared camera. Still life ghost town landscapes have been a major influence in my portfolio since I first began carrying a pocket 110 camera back in the late 1970's, and this place has a limitless supply of all of that and more.

I had a hour or so to kill before a meeting, so I decided with an overcast day and a slight mist in the air, that it would be perfect for shooting infrared. I hadn't been to the powerhouse area for a while, so I parked near St. Johnland Road and walked behind the towering hulk of building 93. The power plant sits behind it on a lower elevation, with the concrete piers of the abandoned rail spur crossing the yard.

I've shot these uprights before, they make for some interesting compositions, depending on the light. But it was a building off to the side of the plant, through a broken window on a loading dock, that I found the image that opens this column.

I'll be coming back for this again. I already wish I'd gone to the car for my tripod; this was the steadiest of the seven shots I made. And even though it was made with the InfraRebel, because of the lack of direct sunlight or organic material, it's more or less a straight black and white.

Ottawa: Ouest à l'est

2009-05-01T05:51:00.004-04:00

Sherry and I completed the four hundred and ninety mile drive from Long Island to Ottawa in exactly eight hours, pulling in to the driveway of the Marriott on Queen Street at six PM Sunday night. We had a room on the 21st floor, the northeast corner of the building. Being on the corner, it was one of the only four rooms on that floor with a balcony, affording us this panoramic view:

(Click to enlarge)

The Ottawa River stretches and curves in the midground, from the du Portage Bridge on the left, behind the gray granite of the Supreme Court building, with the spire of St. Andrew's Church on Wellington Street in the foreground. The copper-roofed edifice on the right of the spire is the Justice Building, currently housing offices of MP's.

All of the square roofs in the foreground from the center of the picture to the right are buildings lining the Sparks Street Mall. Though not apparent here, they're all glass-faced, and, depending on the quality of light, are interesting subjects on their own. But that's for another post.

Moving along west to east, the nearer of the two bridges in the center-right, closest to the viewer is the Interprovincial Bridge, with the MacDonald-Cartier Bridge behind it. The next tall copper tower is the Confederation Building, with more government offices. Moving along to the right, that small tower is the top of the dome of the Library of Parliament.

Next we have a bit of an optical illusion, due to our angle of view. While these might look like twin towers, the West Block, on the left, and the Peace Tower, on the right, with the flag, are several hundred meters apart, and different heights.

Center Block and Peace Tower

There had been a series of demonstrations the previous week, Sri Lankan-Canadians were pressing the Canadian government to intervene in their home country's political struggle. The marches came to a climax Tuesday afternoon on the lawn of Parliament Hill. It was a wet, gray, day, and I planned on carrying only my Infrared camera with me. I only wanted one camera, partly as a self-assignment and partly because I was walking to the National Gallery, and I didn't want a lot of extraneous stuff.

There wasn't a lot going on early in the morning, when I first went by. The police were keeping the marchers in the street, although they weren't actively keeping people off the hill. I was able to walk along in front of the West Block and almost up the drive to the Center Block, but there were barricades set up keeping people out from the roadway behind the buildings to the Library. Which also meant I couldn't get to the cat condos, either, which was disappointing.

When I finished with the museum a few hours later, the rally was in full swing. There were what looked to me to be a few thousand people gathered on the lawn, an area about the size of a polo field. I didn't stop then for any pictures, since I still only had the infrared camera with me. That and two and a half hours pounding the hardwood and granite floors of the gallery had left my feet and legs weary.

But at the hotel the TV told me this was an historic occasion, with fifteen thousand people assembled on the Hill. A live report came on, and I opened the door to the balcony, which faced directly at Parliament Hill.

The chants and cheers coming from behind the onscreen reporter were just a split second behind the cheers I heard live from four blocks away. This was beginning to look interesting, and my inner photo journalist started pecking away. I had several hours before I had to get Sherry, so...

After a quick shower and cup of coffee, I loaded a fresh battery and card into the 5D. I agonized for a few moments between the 17-40mm and the 24-105mm lenses before choosing the latter. I wanted the reach of the 105mm, and the 24 was wide enough. I put an extra card in my pocket and headed out.

I still don't think there were 15,000 people there; I've been part of huge crowds before, I've marched on Washington, I've been to the Thanksgiving Day Parade, I was at most of the major concerts in Central Park. This was a big crowd, and surely the largest group of Sri Lankans I've ever seen in one place. Mostly naturalized citizens, from what I read in the papers, mainly settling here over the last thirty years, but not so far removed from their homeland that the pain of the current affairs there haven't moved them to act.

And still, they're Canadians. Which means that for all the people that were there, there wasn't a bit of litter on the grounds, and everyone leaving dropped their signs in a single pile at the gate, where the pickets were already being removed for future use.

The Second Sign of the Apocalypse

2009-04-29T05:07:00.004-04:00

April 28, 2009

"Come see, they're sharing the fleece."

So went the instant message from two floors above. While it was highly unlikely that all four of the beasts would be parked in one of the many cat beds around the house, I knew just from the fact that she'd sent the message that Sherry meant it was Legs and one of the triplets. It certainly wasn't Betsy, since she outright hates Legs, and she'd been skulking around my office a few moments earlier. Besides, I don't think I've ever seen her in one of the beds.

I grabbed the camera and a flash and headed upstairs to find what I'm calling the second sign of the apocalypse: Legs and Molly in bed together. Granted at opposite ends, and with their faces as far apart as possible, but together. And in the particular bed, in the hallway, that was, for the most part, Legs' personal domain, and which Molly had, in recent days, been sprawled in when he wasn't around. This means Molly had to have let Legs join her, since he's the type to cede easily from reclaiming anything.

This was my favorite of the dozen pictures I took. I'm not that crazy about the color cast and the light, though. The ceiling here, in the upstairs hall by the stairs, is about fifteen feet, and the walls a light mustard. I toned it down as much as I could without losing the white of the cat to the bed. I love the expression on his face and the opposing head tilts. I think it's the tilts that really make the picture.

Oh, and the first sign of the apocalypse would be Legs and Betsy in bed together. I think my lens would crack.

Z is for Zipper

2009-04-27T05:37:00.005-04:00

Valley Stream - 1987

Have I ever published this picture on this site? I know I've posted it on earlier versions of these websites, but a quick look (and with almost 500 pictures on this site alone, I should be forgiven for losing track of a few) doesn't seem to yield this particular image.

So it comes that I finish the alphabet with one of the best time exposures I ever did, of a traveling carnival ride called The Zipper, an amazing vomit comet whose actions and processes I won't begin to describe, other than to mention that the clockwise spin giving us the beautiful Spirograph® pattern above is perhaps its gentlest motion.

Shot with the Pentax ME Super with a short zoom lens, on Kodachrome 64. Probably at about f8 or 11, with a shutter speed of at least ten seconds.

Y is for Yellow Flower

2009-04-26T06:19:00.003-04:00

Vermont - August 2007

I don't do many flower pictures, mainly because every time I start getting close to dahlias or black-eyed susans or mums I start feeling nostalgic for the days I spent working with Polaroids. It's hard thinking that I'll never be able to create them again.

But a close second to that is working with the Lensbaby, the flexible 50mm lens that allows me to move the focal point and distort the backgrounds to a degree never possible with a conventional lens.

X is for X Beams

2009-04-25T05:37:00.003-04:00

Scott Covered Bridge - March 2009

A lattice truss of X beams hold up the King Post truss of the Scott Covered Bridge in Townshend Vermont, the longest wooden bridge in Vermont at 277 feet over the West River. This bridge is only open to pedestrians and bicycles these days, the 139-year-old timbers can't support cars anymore, despite an additional concrete pier added in 1981 and an earlier laminated bow, visible in both pictures above.

W is for Whales

2009-04-24T08:22:00.000-04:00

Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia - August 2008

Sherry will always say I don't put enough pictures up, and she's never happy with the ones I choose. Now, when I first posted the whale pictures, I thought I chose well, and selected three that represented what we experienced. I don't want to overwhelm the visitor to this site with too many pictures or too many paragraphs. I want to get my point across concisely and succinctly, be it visually or verbally.

But I need something for W, and I thought that publishing new whale pictures would bring peace to the house. So here are three new ones. This is really something we need to do again.

V is for Volvo

2009-04-23T05:05:00.001-04:00

October 2004

Even without the distinctive grille, and the trademark sash and badge, the overall squareness of everything but the tires should tell you that this is, or was, a Volvo, a special Volvo: one that has performed the ultimate sacrifice.

This was my 1998 Volvo S70, the last of the square ones, with 116,000 miles on it. This was taken in the junkyard a day or so after it was kissed by a minivan doing about 50 mph.

I kept the grille. It had been left in the front seat, along with an interesting assortment of other junk. You see, when they clean up the street after accidents, all the garbage gets dumped into the vehicles involved, regardless of whether they belong to that particular car. When I realized that, I was able to figure out why there was a huge headlamp here in the driver's seat, for example. It was from the other car, and the broken glass must have been swept up from the street, since none of my windows were broken. Although, if you enlarge the picture on the right, you'll see the windshield is cracked, probably from the force of the airbag going off from just below.

Volvo makes an excellent car. I highly recommend them.

U is for Umbrellas

2009-04-22T05:09:00.005-04:00

August 2007

Umbrellas to protect you from the sun at Coney Island, taken from the fishing pier near the parachute jump, with a 400mm lens. A hundred meters of beachfront crammed with what looks like half of New York City in one single colorful lump.

When you don't want to use the long lens for isolating your subject, using it to compress the image can lead to some interesting compositions. The picture above was taken on a weekday, with a fairly sparse crowd...

...as you can see in this shot taken with a wider focal length and from further out on the pier. But getting in alignment with the people on the beach, and being slightly elevated, adding the compression of a super telephoto lens, makes it look like there's thousands of people crowding the beach.

But cameras don't lie. Your eyes lie to you. Your brain lies. Cameras just show you what's there. And one of the things there is a guy buried in the sand.

T is for Toilet

2009-04-21T05:30:00.002-04:00

Batman 1987

Today's post is for every cat (or dog) who misunderstands or just happily ignores the primary function of the porcelain throne. Mine almost always have. I think I'm five for the last seven cats that I've been had by who've sat there staring at me while I did the Times puzzle, waiting for me to get off the water dish.

Batman was an odd cat too, in that even though he had a litter box, and seemed to know how to use it, he never, ever did. But he never peed or crapped in the house, either, the cat preferred to do his business outdoors, no matter the time of year, even. He was very strange that way.

S is for Stonehenge

2009-04-20T05:07:00.004-04:00

October 1986

My sister Janet and I ventured to London in October of 1986 with six days on our hands and no fixed itinerary other than suggestions from friends, images from James Bond and Monty Python, and lyrics from Beatles songs.

We managed most of the good spots, the touristy stuff, and the required historical things you do to justify the whole affair to your intellectual side. Stonehenge is a little of both, I think, and fit neatly on a day-long bus trip to Bath (touristy) and Salisbury Cathedral (historical guilt).

It was the perfect day: overcast, windy, with a slight mist. There weren't a lot of people around, and we were kept on the perimeter of the stones, about a hundred feet or so away, on a circular path. So while there were always two or three people directly across from me, walking past the stones, it was a simple matter to wait for them to pass behind a stone, out of sight, to take my picture.

These were shot on Kodachrome 64 with a Pentax ME Super. The lens was my Toyo 70-200, probably at somewhere between 70 and 100mm. The transparency was scanned sometime in 2000 on a Crosfield 645-type drum scanner, not a terrific resolution but pretty high tech for the time.

R is for Rockefeller Center

2009-04-19T05:24:00.004-04:00

No matter what, when you think of Rockefeller Center, whether you think of it in the middle of July with your sweat-stained feet are embedded in the melted tar of the city streets, or in the late springtime in the eastern Rockies, fly-fishing in a stream swollen with snowmelt, you're going to think Rockefeller Center at Christmastime, because face it: How else can you imagine it? What other season is so distinct in midtown Manhattan?

This is an old scan of an even older picture. The image is from December of 1986, and was shot on Agfa slide film, 1000 ISO. This was a fairly grainy slide film that I used on my first trip to London. The scan was done in late 2000 on a Crosfield drum scanner, the same machines I made color separations with back in the 1980's.

Q is for Quaker

2009-04-18T07:33:00.003-04:00

August 2008

The Quaker Meeting House is in Bethpage, New York, nestled between two cemeteries and right across the road from the Bethpage State Park, home of the famous Bethpage Black golf course, and site of the 2002 and 2009 U. S. Open golf tournament.

There's been a Quaker meeting house here since 1698; the building shown here dates back to 1890. Meetings are held the second and fourth Sundays of each month at 11:00 AM, if you're interested. This is an infrared image.

P is for Paradise

2009-04-17T05:06:00.001-04:00

June 2005

At one time, and apparently it was quite some time before this picture was taken, Paradise was a nightclub in the Bronx, where Courtlandt Avenue dead-ended at East 163rd Street. The building with the tattered awning on the left was the club, I think.

This is an interesting area to look at from above. There's a railroad siding running in a large curve behind all the buildings on either side of this alley, so they all have curved walls in the rear. The siding arcs north for two blocks, then heads southeast for another block before petering out at East 163rd Street and Brook Avenue.

View Larger Map

Of course, as we see here in the current Google Street View, they've paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot. But not to worry, for the Bronx holds more than one Paradise:

Loew's Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse at 187th Street looks a little decrepit in this image from around 2003-04, but I understand the place has been rehabbed and currently operates as a performing arts center.

O is for Organ Pipes

2009-04-16T05:10:00.009-04:00

March, 2009

Well, okay it's just ice on the face of a cliff, one of the numerous granite bluffs along Route 30 near West Townshend in Vermont. The ice was melting fast on this warm March afternoon, and pieces were dropping off with mushy regularity under the brilliant sunlight. This time of year you want to pay close attention to the 'Falling Rock' signs, especially the ones decorated with pretty red flags.

What I like about this picture is the reedy thinness of the melting icicles, and the way they lead into the lines of the trees. Everywhere you look in the picture, your eye is drawn up to the very top.

N is for Nelson

2009-04-15T05:08:00.007-04:00

October 19, 2006

Nelson's Monument, atop Calton Hill in Edinburgh, Scotland. Not to be confused with Nelson's Column, in Trafalgar Square, London, or with Nelson's Pillar, in Dublin, Ireland, nor The Nelson Monument on Portsdown Hill on the south coast of England. There's also a Nelson's Tower in Forres, Scotland, but that's not this one. And this certainly isn't the Nelson Tower on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District.

But they all have one thing in common, and that is that they commemorate the memory and achievements of Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson. Well, at least the first five do. The office building in Manhattan makes no references to British naval heroes anywhere on the edifice or in the rental agreements.

But the Brits really liked the guy, and he did defeat the French and Spanish navies at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, with his fleet destroying twenty-two of the enemy's 33 ships, without losing a single one of their own. And he was killed there, too.

Long before Elvis, death was a great career move.

M is for Mailbox

2009-04-14T05:15:00.004-04:00

Mailbox! Mailbox! Mailbox! I don't know where this is, or when it was taken, but I remember being struck by how quaint the juxtaposition seemed: the carvings on the doorway celebrating the newest form of 20th century mechanized communication, some kind of personal wireless telegraph (all the kids had them, they ran around sending each other useless messages, like .-. --- ..-. .-.. and -. --- -! .-.. --- .-..!), and a mailbox, the waystation for written communication well before the electronic age. I also liked the little concrete slab it sits on, almost as if they weren't allowed to bolt it to the sidewalk but still needed to secure it somehow.

Taken somewhere in Manhattan is all I can remember, I'm wondering if it could have been the Telephone Building down near Canal Street? I think what caught my eye about this scene is all the rectangles: The carved panels, all of the window panes and the doors, the mailbox and the panels within it, dozens of vertical rectangles.

L is for Lighthouse

2009-04-13T05:02:00.002-04:00

May 2008

Not a view of the Fire Island Lighthouse that I've ever published before, I don't think, but I'm rather fond of this angle. I may have done something in this fashion as a Polaroid, I'll have to check. But I really like the composition, thanks to the almost perfect symmetry of the building.

K is for Kilowatts

2009-04-12T05:02:00.000-04:00

August 2008

18,000 kilowatts that is, give or take a few hundred, enough electricity to power over 4,000 homes in Nova Scotia, is generated twice a day for about six hours at a time by the tidal waters of the Bay of Fundy at the Annapolis Royal Generating Station.

Here we see the waters being released from the holding pond after having gone through the turbines. The water is churned with such force that thick foam forms along the shore, and if there's enough of a breeze, it'll be flying across the roadway and depositing itself on your windshield.

I wonder about those statistics, sometimes. Specifically I wonder what those 4,000 homeowners do for electricity during the other six hours, twice a day.

J is for Jacob Javits

2009-04-11T05:04:00.000-04:00

May 1990

The center, not the Senator, this black and white is of the green-glassed sprawl along the west side across from the railyards. I always liked using the way the panels of the I. M. Pei facade reflected the sky and skyline around it. Here the scene is the south-facing 34th street side with the setting sun glaring out from behind a cloud. Somehow those trees have weathered almost twenty years of diesel fumes from the fleets of motor coaches idling curbside.

I is for Inside Pitch

2009-04-10T05:13:00.000-04:00

April 2006

There's not a lot of vengeance pitching in high-school baseball, so when something like what you see above happens it's because the kid got a little wild and the ball just got away from him. Not uncommon early in the season, and fun to catch. At least with the camera. The guy with all the padding and the funny round glove behind the plate isn't always so amused.

Today's assignment: Compare and contrast the contorted expression on the batter's face with the blasé expressions of the spectators. Is their smugness because of the chain-link fence separating them from the danger on the field?

H is for Head

2009-04-09T08:16:00.003-04:00

And for headstones and for heads on a stone. St. Mary Star of the Sea, a cemetery alongside the railroad tracks in Lawrence, NY. Somewhere there a statue lost its head, which has taken temporary refuge in the carved flowers of a granite marker on this foggy day.

A lot of lesser-quality statuary seems to have been sold back in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth centuries, from the look of those graveyards today, with their one-armed cherubs and faceless, wing-clipped angels.

G is for Geese

2009-04-08T06:53:00.004-04:00

April 4, 2009

Geese in graveyards. A goose walking over your grave. That feeling when a dark chill runs down your spine in an otherwise warm place. I learned as a child that when that happens, or when some other eerie event had occurred, it meant that 'a goose had walked over my grave'. A great visual to impress on the adolescent mind: that my grave exists somewhere, and every time I get a chill there's some filthy waterfowl squawking and dropping green turds all over it.

F is for Flatiron

2009-04-07T07:15:00.000-04:00

November 1989

Thanksgiving 1989, the second year I went to the parade, was overcast but not too cold. There was snow on the ground from a day or two before, making the streets and sidewalks dark and slick. I was shooting the balloons from Herald Square that year; I was using two cameras-one with color film, and one with black and white. Since I was able to look up Broadway, from behind all the television trucks, I could see the line-up long before they got near 34th street, where they'd emerge from the shadows of the midtown canyon and turn right towards Seventh Avenue and their eventual deflation. I wanted to shoot them just before the turn.

There were only a couple of balloons that year I was interested in, and they were spaced almost a half an hour apart, so I spent a bit of time wandering the mostly deserted blocks below Herald Square. It was nice having so much of Manhattan to myself, so I came all the way down here to 23rd street and worked my way through most of a roll on each camera.

This is probably my favorite of all my images of the Flatiron Building. It's got a timeless feel to it, and if the cab weren't there it would be difficult to place the decade.

E is for Elevation

2009-04-06T08:06:00.001-04:00

June 11, 2008

One thousand, one hundred and twenty-two feet above the Rogers Centre in Toronto, waiting for the Blue Jays game to start. This would eventually grow to a crowd of 35,000 people, but at at quarter to twelve most folks were just milling about and lolling in their seats.

The Jays would lose that game, to the Mariners, 2-1, after a close ninth inning. I wasn't planning on watching it from the open-air observation deck of the CN Tower, anyway. It's pretty windy up there, and you don't have any real view of the field as you can see, either. I shot this leaning over the railing with my lens right up against the wire mesh of the observation deck. The mesh is visible as a shadow running through the left third of the image, and to a lesser extent the right side, too. It was smaller than a standard chain-link, which is easier to shoot through. There wasn't any way for me to work around it with the lens I was carrying, a 24-105, which I was shooting at the long end. There's a glass floor on the lower deck where you can see the playing field, but there's part of the tower leg visible, and the floor is usually covered with kids and spilled soda. Still, with this I like the lines and curves of the streets and building.

D is for Duck

2009-04-05T11:30:00.003-04:00

We see here one of the occupational hazards of being a sports photographer, namely, becoming part of the action.

I was on the baseline, under the net, waiting for the team I was shooting to complete a drive to the basket. They got there, made their shot, missed, and all I saw through the viewfinder was a whole bunch of teenage girls charging at me. While this could be disturbing on many levels, I realized they were just after the ball, which I sensed, rather than saw. I heard the ball bounce, and in a single movement managed to snap the shutter as I rolled backward into the wall.

The ball was out of bounds, the whistle blew, and a referee asked if I was okay. At this point I was sitting with my back against the wall, reviewing my shots. I nodded an assent, then showed him this picture, mentioning that "...this is why I can't get any decent insurance."

C is for Child's

2009-04-04T10:34:00.003-04:00

January, 2009

The former Child's Restaurant on the boardwalk in Coney Island is an official New York City landmark with gorgeous terra-cotta ornamentation. Last summer the interior was being used as a skating rink; I don't know if that will be the case this summer, but then, who knows what the situation at Coney will be this summer. Astroland won't be reopening, though the Wonder Wheel in Deno's Amusement Park and the Cyclone will operate as usual.

This was taken this past January; I can only assume the shirtless man in shorts jogging by is an off-duty Polar Bear, since they swim in the ocean every week in the wintertime, not just on New Year's Day.

B is for Betsy...

2009-04-03T07:18:00.002-04:00

October, 2005

...in a box, with brown paper. Our enigmatic little gray girl goes through phases that make her impossible to figure out sometimes. For some reason she took a liking to this box back in October of 2005, a box that Canon used to ship my camera back after a minor repair. Every time I went downstairs she'd follow me, then spend about ten minutes settling herself, or rather, letting herself settle, since the box was about one size smaller than she.

For about two weeks after it appeared I'd hear the crinkling and fussing as she climbed in whenever she was down in my office, then just as quickly one day she decided she'd rather keep an eye on me from her more usual, and closer perspective: sitting in my lap.

A is for Abandonment

2009-04-02T08:17:00.002-04:00

December 28, 2008

Not unlike the way I abandoned this blog for a month, here is the first of twenty-six pictures for the following month.

Nissoquogue River State Park in Kings Park, Long Island, is made up of some of the acreage of the Kings Park hospital that I'm an all-too frequent visitor to. These were some of the staff housing, located on the eastern section of the property. According to Google Maps, these houses are located on Sea View Court, although views of the sea (or the Sound) are nonexistent.

If you click on that link, these two buildings are the ones below and to the right of the marker. Though decrepit and boarded-up, being a part of the state park means the trees and bushes are trimmed back, unlike the other sections of the hospital that are destined for (eventual) commercial and residential development, where nature has overtaken.