We Got the Feng Shui Right

At least from the looks of this I think we do. She almost seems to like it here. Of course, the two warming pads under the blanket are certainly a plus, but even the sound of Betsy throwing herself at the closed door haven't begun to faze the little girl. I've been keeping the door closed and the playpen unzipped so Fiona will feel less like an exhibit at a zoo. Last night I turned around to see Clark and Molly circling the pen side by side, like they were on a date or something. Later Legs comes along and tries to eat her food (through the mesh: he's cute but not bright).

So I decided visiting hours were over and left the playpen open for her to stretch her legs. Twenty minutes later I'd figured that the only way to get her out from under the sink was to leave the room and let her come out on her own. Once I barricaded the sink, though, she was content to just sit in the playpen and take the world's longest nap.

Marie's Cheesecake

July 2007

Marie Ong Allegro has been doing this body-building and fitness thing for a while now, and as you can see from these pictures, she knows her way around it all. Above are three shots from a fitness show in New York City she competed in during the summer of 2007.

April 2007

The above and next two are from an earlier show that year. I'm pleased to be able to present her as this year's Bikini Girl, which, I've just decided, shall be an annual event here.

April 2007

April 2007

Of course, with the temperatures in the fifties this weekend we hardly need winter cheesecake, but you can refer back to these pictures after the thaw is through.

Another Stranger Among Them

I've introduced you all to Fiona before; she's the cantankerous resident of my sister's garage. Usually when her humans are out of town I'll look after her, but with the severe cold weather we've had lately, Sharon was worried, so I suggested we set the old girl up in my basement. I've got this big netted tent, about fourteen square feet, that fit her bedding, with a litter box on one end and food dishes on the other.

Of course it's impossible to keep secrets in this house, so it wasn't long after settling her in that the others began to investigate. Betsy is the only one who spends any time in my office, so naturally she took the most interest.

But the others weren't as curious as we thought they'd be, hence the lack of any more interaction photos. Legs sniffed around, got hissed at and probably figured he didn't need any more of that, and Molly made an obligatory stop on her way to the litterbox. Clark stalked around a bit, not sure quite what to make of it all. I love the way they walk, real slow, with stretched out motions, in an arc about three feet from the tent. Fiona, for her part, just crouches on her blanket, front paws curled under her, watching the parade.

And I really did give her a manicure, although I wasn't able to get the dewclaw on her left leg. I'll try for that, and her back legs, tomorrow.

The Business End of Cows

Spend any time in the Green Mountain state and you're going to see cows. Driving along the road? Cows on both sides. Under a tree in the middle of a windswept field? A cow. Providing much-needed methane for electrical power generation? Cows. Staring at you with big wet eyes from their pens in a dairy barn?

They're good at staring, these cows, and they should be, After all, they're Jersey cows, and if any animal is going to give you a what-for look, it will be a Jersey cow.

We were at the Billings Farm Museum outside of Woodstock, Vermont in early January. "We" being Michele and Dana, and their two daughters, Katrina and Marissa. Sherry stayed back on the mountain, dealing with her crisis du jour in New York.

Marissa learns where pie comes from.

Billings is a working dairy farm, as well as a museum and educational center. The returns from the milk they sell helps subsidize the day-to-day running of the property. We toured the dairy barn right around the afternoon milking time, the preparation for which is shown in the above photo.

The man in the center is rolling a cart with all the suction apparatus and hoses that attach to the udders. The hoses will lead up to a stainless steel pipe running above the stalls, then the raw milk is gravity fed through the pipe to a collection room at the far end of the barn. Milking is done twice a day, every twelve hours.

Visitors are advised to stay in the center of the corridor, as the trough running along the length of the barn in front of the stalls is a gravity-fed collector for cow products that are not milk.

Enigmataphs

Vermont, 2006

Two pictures today, two headstones, from two states and two different centuries. But similar in their epitaphs, for even though they're 76 years and over two hundred fifty miles apart, both bear lamentations and warnings for their readers. Above, Mr. Elkana Cobb, in Dorset, Vermont bemoans:

Oh let me not forgotten lie
left you forget that you m-
uft die
For Death's a debt to nature due
Which I have paid and so m-
uft you.

(Note: In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was common to substitute the letter 'f' for the letter 's' in certain words; so in the above verse you should read 'left' as 'lest', and 'muft' as 'must'.)

You'd think whoever chiseled that would have realized after he tried squeezing in the 'mu(s)t' the first time that it wasn't going to fit, but that's just an example, I suppose, of Yankee stubbornness.

Long Island, NY, 2006

Meanwhile, down on Long Island in the mid- to-late nineteenth century, we have Maria Louise Doxsey, age twenty-one and a half, tragically bidding farewell to her family and reminding them that the debt she's paid is owed by everyone.

Either that or by saying: 'The debt is paid, the grave you see', she's really extolling the virtues of pre-planning your funeral. A little Yankee pragmatism.

Betsy @ 50mm 1.4

A couple of pictures of Betsy from last month, last year. These were taken the same day as Legs in Slatted Shadows, below. I like the one above because of the way Betsy looks almost contrite, as if she's sorry about something she's done: someone she swatted, worried that she may have caused some pain, or bloodshed, even. Which, actually, she never is.

She's usually shooting some variant of this look, a cross between alarm and accusation, with a few daggers and some piss for good measure. I don't know how she got this way. She was so cute!

Saran-Wrapped Coney Skies

It has been too long, both since I updated myself here and since I last looked in on the deterioration of Coney Island. Monday was a brilliantly clear and crisp day with high, thin clouds rippling across the sky, looking for all the world like the saran wrap stretched over a bowl that had had someone's fingers pressed to it.

I parked near the aquarium, on the side of Surf Avenue without the meters, and walked over to the Cyclone. No matter what becomes of the neighborhood, the Cyclone, Wonder Wheel and Parachute Jump will always be here. Only two of them will ever operate under today's liability standards, still the Jump is nice to just look at.

But the Astroland rocket has taken off, or been taken off. Removed, to be precise, this past January 6th (video link). Currently it's reposing on a flatbed trailer behind the food stand it sat atop for the previous forty-six years. Nobody ever thought to landmark Gregory and Paul's boardwalk snack bar, so the rocket is gone and the premises up for lease, along with the rest of the commercial strip along the boardwalk.

Now the boardwalk is bisected with a fence along this stretch while great holes appear in front of the storefronts that may or may not have tenants to cater to whatever throngs in thongs show up next summer to wear away the woodwork.

What's to become of the classic seaside shooting galley?

Ruby's bar is closed, along with the arcades and snack bars, and even the seaside Nathan's will be gone soon, too. Grabbing a dog next summer will mean a walk down to the original building on Surf Avenue, which is thankfully not part of the stalled redevelopment. And in a cruel twist to the former shopkeepers, after they were closed down the city decided to replace the shredded planks in the boardwalk, finally remedying the hazardous conditions that visitors and owners alike had complained about for years.

The old Child's restaurant building is still a pleasure to gaze upon, if only they'd quit splattering the base of it with paint. It's a NYC landmark, with absolutely beautiful terracotta ornamentation high enough up that the local vandals can't get to it (easily). Last summer the interior was taken up by Lola Staar's Dreamland Roller Rink, as you can see by the signs in the arches. I should also point out that it was about 28 degrees on the beach that afternoon when the shirtless man in shorts jogged by. A shirtless man in shorts who appeared much older than me.

My mermaid still watches from her corrugated perch. But her building is small, for rent, and sitting on a prime boardwalk location.

She's doomed.

Slatted Shadows

The final Monday of 2008 was one of those few days per year when the light in the living room was of any quality, and there were models at hand. Not exactly willing subjects, mind you, but I put the 50mm lens on the 5D to see what I could get.

The harsh light falling on his white fur caused a hotspot around Legs' snout in the top picture. The focus and metering point was on his left eye for the mid- to three-quarter tones. Had I metered for the highlight then everything from the quarter tones on down would have been mud, and the ears would have blended into the background. By sacrificing a small part of the image, I save the whole composition.

For this one I closed one row of the slatted blinds over the windows to add more shadow to the background, and adjusted another to let in more light. In the first picture I like the way the light was limning the ears; by increasing the contrast this way I hoped to be able to capture more detail in the highlights and a stronger outlining of the ears.

I also used a faster shutter speed on this one than the first: 1/200 at f2.5 instead of 1/100. ISO was 320 for both. I did a little work opening up the color in the iris of the second picture.

Reflecting on the Year Gone

The 28th Annual Monkey Island Holiday Card - 2008

As December draws to a close it's time to reflect back on the year gone by and look forward towards the year to come.

I originally started this blog and the others as a way to migrate all my stuff off the horrible service I was using before and into the cleaner design and easier navigation of Blogger. That was back in the spring of 2007, just after we got back from our Route 66 trip, which we wrote about in more or less real time.

Talking Pictures was originally called The Portfolio Collection, since that's about all it was; a collection of pictures, arranged somewhat by category. I wasn't ready to start writing any new Postcards from Monkey Island, but I did wind up culling them down to my favorite thirty-six, and put them into their own blog during the summer of 2007.

It was while Sherry and I were driving across the country and doing the Route 66 blog that I realized how much I like to write about my photography. But as I just said: I didn't want to do new Postcards; as much fun as they were, I thought I should try something a little more creative and challenging.

I'd been going through my black and white archive, which dates back to 1985, scanning negatives I had previously printed in the darkroom, and many that I'd never bothered with, when I came up with what I thought was an interesting concept.

Some background: In the 1960's and 70's, when all the New York Sunday newspapers had rotogravure magazines, the Daily News' magazine had a column that I loved, called "New York's Changing Scene". Every week they'd dig up an old photograph of a building or intersection from the vast Daily News morgue, then send a photographer to the same location to shoot the scene as it looked in the present time. Seeing how much (or how little) the city had changed was something I found fascinating. But it was dropped some time before the paper stopped producing a weekly magazine sometime in the late seventies, and to my disappointment never ran in any other section of the Sunday paper again.

This long-dead feature was the inspiration for The Time Machine: Images of the Lost City. I started going over my negatives from the eighties more closely, looking for interesting compositions and noting their locations. I scanned, cleaned up and printed a number of images, and, armed with a pocketful of those 4x6 prints, spent a few early Sunday mornings prowling the streets of Soho, Greenwich Village and midtown. East side, west side, all around the town. Some places were easy to locate, others, damned near impossible. With the original as a reference, I'd frame the scene as close to the same cropping and field of view as possible. My Canon DSLR's have a black and white mode, but setting the file type to RAW+JPEG will display a black and white image on the camera monitor (the JPEG) yet store all the color data in the RAW file. I would reshoot the scenes in this mode, which it made it easier for me to determine if I had the framing I wanted, without the distraction of color.

Then I began prowling the internet. Between Google and the NYC Buildings Department website I gathered as much information about the area or buildings in the picture as I could, and pieced together a story about the pictures. With both pictures lined up, I'd point out what had changed and what was the same. Through the NYC.gov site, I was able to find out when things were built, items from the internet told me when and why they were torn down, or, in one extreme case, moved. I wrote about what I was doing then, how I felt about the places, why I was there.

I kept it going for twenty-six chapters, one a week through the spring, summer and early fall of 2007. Of course, not doing school pictures in the summer gave me the time for this, and to wander around Brooklyn's favorite (and only) amusement park. The photographs I made there, as well as the fact that it may soon never look as it does, resulted in Last Year at Coney Island.

Wandering around that boardwalk and its environs was and is great fun, but I'm afraid I never spent enough time there to really develop a true feel for the area, and, while I hoped to document the changes predicted with the proposed redevelopment, I never did. Nothing ever got redeveloped, the project stagnated. Astroland got a one-year extension and opened again for the summer of 2008, but the owners of the park weren't able to get a lease from the new owners of the land, for 2009, so maybe this past season was the last. Politics and zoning changes, the economy and neighborhood emotions are more than I want to chronicle, I want to take pictures and write about what I see.

So, while I'll go back from time to time, I've merged the Coney Island blog into this one, and shut down the original site. All those posts are now in chronological order here in Talking Pictures, and are tagged as 'Last Year at Coney Island' in the 'Gathered Together' section of the right-hand column under the archive listing.

I'll probably merge the VanGoghlaroid blog into this one as well. I rather like them on their black background, but the medium gray will offset them nicely, I think. I'm not sure if I want to integrate them in chronological order like Coney Island, though. I may reintroduce them over the course of a few weeks, along with fresh comments. Since I never wrote anything more about them other than the sidebar copy on that blog, it may be nice to go into more detail about each picture, especially since they all had extensive cleaning and manipulations done to them in Photoshop, in addition to the normal physical manipulation. So you can look for those in the future.

And of course, there's the new masthead. I hope you like it; it's one of my favorite shots.

So there we have it. I'm having fun writing this blog, I hope you're having fun with my musings, ramblings and other oddities. I've averaged two new posts a week for the last year; I'll try for the same pace again. And if there are any literary agents out there reading this, some of this stuff would make a neat book, ya think? And if any of you out there know any literary agents, pass the site on for me.

Thanks for reading so far, have a great and safe New Year, and come back for more in January 2009.

--Neil J Murphy
December, 2008

2008 Monkey Island Logo
(Peggy's Point, Nova Scotia)

Species Specific

I'm not quite sure what to say about this, other than it's my favorite label since the one for Meowie Wowie catnip. I suppose it differentiates these as toys that cats play with from the larger, cat-shaped toys that, say, doberman pincers or bull mastiffs would toss about the yard.

Or it could be an ironic misspelling, given the number of toys in the bag and the homophonic phrasing.