D is for Duck

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

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...

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

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.

A to Z - No Fooling

I've let the blog go fallow for all of the last month, I know, through a combination of lethargy and busyness, if you can believe such a combination exists. I just haven't been shooting that much stuff for myself, and haven't felt overly inspired by what I find in my archives. And I've been shooting school stuff five to six days a week as well.

But I've decided to take some inspiration from another website, a photography message board actually, that I've been part of for several years now.

One of the occasional threads there is called 'Photographs: A to Z'. Currently in its fourth incarnation, members post images that relate to the alphabet in order. I thought this might be an interesting challenge for me to do here at the blog, one letter, one picture, every day this month.

So, starting tomorrow, be sure to check in every day to see what I come up with. It may be fun, or it may be boring. Who knows? We'll see.

Wall Read

I really don't mind graffiti so much, it's that so much of it is just meaningless scrawl that you have to wonder when the point went from individual expression to simply doing damage. I do find it interesting when you can see actual words and phrases forming among the scribbles, like protoplasm crawling from the sea.

This scene from the meat-packing district in May of 1989 is a good example of recognizable chatter rising above the din, although much of the noisy writing could be construed as stylized lettering. I'm not sure what agenda the author is pushing, but he is obviously challenging the reader with the exhortations of daring to be more, along with calls to be prepared. Then dismissing everyone with a cavalier "Next!"

I came across this doorway in Soho in August of 1994. What caught my eye was the fundamentalist phrase among the semi-legible scrawl, a voice from scripture that seemed to be speaking directly to the vandals as they worked. 'Repent or Burn in Hell'. Doesn't seem to have worked.

This is the corner of Greenwich and Desbrosses Street on the lower west side of Manhattan. It was a late summer afternoon, probably closer to early evening that June day in 1986. The shadows were long, and I was attracted to the way they fell on the sidewalks and filled the door pockets and ornamentation of the building. I liked the stark contrast of the picture, the dominating verticals of the building column, the hydrant and the sidewalk slabs. The buildings on the left lead the eye to the center of the picture, with the soft arching of the cars forming an abbreviated vanishing point. I was also intrigued by the two disparate lines of writing at the base of the column: the left-slanting 'Scribe' and the right-leaning 'Missing 1908'.






Finally, from November of 1989 we have the steps of a building somewhere near the Metropolitan Life building on Madison Square. Although I don't know what building it is, thanks to the internet I can tell you what the simple graffiti means.

Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, at the time of this picture, was a revolutionary guerrilla organization engaged in the civil war in El Salvador. It is currently a legal political party there. Here, their monogram either adds to the majesty of the statue, or signals the beginnings of the neighborhood's downward slide. Take your pick.

Rest in Speech

Jamesburg, New Jersey - February 2009

I had an hour to kill in industrial New Jersey the other day, hard by the turnpike amongst the warehouse parks, railroad crossings and highway overpasses. I had come to Jamesburg to have the 5D evaluated before the warranty expired. The sensor needed cleaning, but what was bothering me was that the dirt pattern was exactly the same as it had been before I last had it serviced at the end of the summer.

I was afraid that there was either some bit of stray adhesive or a scratch on the sensor filter, and that the last cleaning had only removed the accumulated grit of the previous three months. If you click on the image at the right, you'll see what I'm talking about.

All the little dots are bits of dust on the sensor, they accumulate no matter how careful you are about changing lenses, and usually don't matter, unless you wind up with the kind of honkers that you can see I've got in the upper left quadrant. I'd had an identical pattern appear not long after I got the camera. The last cleaning seemed to have eliminated them, or so I thought until a few months afterward. Since then I've been eyeing the calendar, looking for free time before the warranty ran out. This week the stars aligned, so I made a print of the dirty image and headed toward Staten Island and beyond.

Holy Trinity Cemetery, Jamesburg - February 2009

I'm glad I came when I did, given there was a sign on the door announcing that beginning March 6th sensor cleanings would now cost $30, rather than the previous nothing. I'm in CPS, Canon Professional Services, though, which entitles me to a few extras, like rush service and free overnight shipping. I left the camera for them to look at, after detailing the problem (and leaving the print).

I didn't expect they'd examine it and have an answer in an hour, though, and without a map or any clue I drove three miles west, then three miles east. I was ready to stop for coffee when I spotted this cemetery. Fairly recent, the earliest burials are around the early fifties. The majority of the family names are Polish, and for the most part completely unpronounceable.

I thought the Verb family had an interesting stone, that and the cherubic angel caught my infrared eye.

Oh, and the dirty camera? There's a scratch on the filter over the sensor. They'll replace the filter, clean the camera and overnight it to me next week.

West Side Window

I think this was on the west side or it could have been somewhere in Queens, but the more I think about it, the less likely that seems. I don't have the original slide handy either, this was a scan I made back in 2000 during my last foray into the bowels of the printing trade, so I can't readily tell the type of film, either. I came across it, naturally, while looking for something else. It seems pretty grainy to me, but I can't tell if that's from the film or the scan itself. The scanner it was made on, a Crosfield Magnascan, while a high-end machine for its time, unfortunately had as its time the late 1970's. And it was a machine whose inherent design was for halftone reproduction, so the native resolution of 120 dpi was sufficient for its design specs.

But I still have a lot of things to like about this picture. I like the short depth of field, I like the reflection of the buildings in the glass. I like the way those reflections are soft in the face of the sharpness of the glass, as that's the sweet spot of clarity in the image. I like the way the cat is staring at the camera and how it's head is in almost perfect alignment with the head of the carving below the window. I like how everything is neutral gray, except for the shutters, and I like the way the shutter on the left leads up into the line of the reflected buildings.

I'll grab a year out of the air and say this was taken in 1988.

For Four Dead Presidents

(Author's Note: The following article was originally posted three years ago, as you can see by reading the date above. Thus the reference below to Lincoln's 200th birthday is a little outdated.  This is being revived as part of Taphophile Tragics.)



This being President's Week, and with me being a well-known habitué of graveyards, I thought it would be the perfect time to, ahem, dig up a selection of photographs featuring the final resting places of some of our former leaders. Or at least the four I've been to.

With all of the celebrations for Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday last week, I think it'd be interesting to see how he spends his time these days. First, from a May, 2007 drive along Route 66, are two shots from Lincoln's tomb at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

The giant hunk of marble above may look like a sarcophagus, but it's merely a marker to cover a ten-foot deep crypt which holds what must be a very well-preserved body, as Lincoln was reportedly the poster child for the then-new art of embalming. After all, it was a long, hot train ride from Washington D. C. to Springfield, Illinois back in 1865, and millions of mourning Americans wanted a final (or more likely, first) glimpse of their fallen leader. So like a 21st century baseball player, Abe was juiced up at regular intervals along the ride home, and it's not unlikely that he'd be recognizable today.

Up there on the right is the 117-foot tall granite obelisk rising above the tomb.

(Lincoln was buried so deep, and with that huge marker on top, because of various plots to kidnap the body, one of which was attempted before this tomb was completed, when the remains were still in the cemetery's receiving vault.) 

September 1985

Grant's Tomb, on the upper west side of Manhattan, has absolutely no one buried in it. What it does have is Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia entombed within, their caskets in a well below the floor but above the ground, both housed within a domed Greek Revival temple with this simple entableture above the entrance. I used this picture for my holiday card in 1987.

Young's Memorial Cemetery, Oyster Bay, NY

Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith, rest beneath a canopy of trees not far from Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island. A set of stone steps lead up a hill to the ivy-covered private plot, the stone with its columns and bas-relief presidential seal behind a tall, wrought-iron fence.

This image is a VanGoghlaroid from May of 1998.

February 2009

Finally, with this picture we pay a visit to the Coolidge family, on a hillside of their own in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Silent Cal (or, more appropriately today, Ever-Silent Cal) has the presidential seal atop his stone, which is the second from the right. Left of that is his wife, Grace, while their sons flank them: John on the left and Calvin, Jr. on the right. Grace's matching headstone is adorned with a simple wreath, while Cal Jr.'s smaller one (he died at 16, and was the first burial in the family plot in 1924) and brother John's have wreaths with ribbons.  

Coolidge became the 30th president upon the death of Warren G. Harding, and was sworn in by his father at a quarter to three in the morning in the parlor of the nearby family home. In addition to being the only president to be born on the fourth of July, he is also the only president sworn in by a notary public.

Something curious I learned about the names of these Coolidge men. President Coolidge was named after his father, so his full name was John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (although he never used the Junior.)  Yet he gave his first son the simple name John Coolidge, then two years later named his second son Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

The Good White North

School is out for winter break and February marks the transition between winter and spring sports. So with time on my hands and a weekend with friends planned, I decided to head up to Killington a few days early so I could have some alone time to take pictures and do some chores around the condo. Ah, those best laid plans...

I arrived Wednesday afternoon with a migraine, then lost Thursday to the rain, although I did get the shelving stuff I needed at the Home Depot in Rutland. Of course, I had to make a second trip for fasteners and oops! I forgot to bring drill bits. I finally got settled in the closet, but only got to make three holes in the wall before I caught a stud and snapped the bit. A titanium bit. A quarter-inch titanium bit. And you wonder why we lost two shuttles. But it was late by then, the rain was turn ing to snow, so I decided to postpone my third trip to Rutland for the morrow.

Friday finally turned out to be what I came here for. Even though I had to spend twenty minutes channeling William Macy in Fargo while I chipped the ice off my windshield and the other seven windows of the wagon, this frosting made for some nice views, like the above scene of Mendon Brook along Route 4 near the foot of East Mountain. This is my favorite of the shots of this area I made on my way home from the Depot (with two bits this time).

So I successfully got the holes drilled and the hardware placed and the shelves up, made some dinner and awaited the midnight arrival of Sherry and Alan and Cheryl for the Dead Presidents weekend. For them of course, the rain went away, it was clear and sunny and cold: Vermont was its usual, beautiful, Good White North* self.

Here we see Sherry and Alan clambering in snowshoes through the woods on Sunrise.Those are Kaz's shoes that Alan's got on, and seeing this makes me wonder if it would be possible to trick out a pair of these things to look like Bozo shoes.

Somehow I think it's probably been done.
_____________________________
*Naturally, America's Hat, Canada, is the Great White North.