Merge

To the few of you out there still checking here once in a while - this blog has officially been merged with my other blog, Alphabet City. All of the posts here, as well as the comments, are now there and in correct order by date.

I did this because I just didn't really have time to maintain three blogs AND take photos AND play guitar AND do all the other things I do (like work). I found myself spending a lot more time on my other blogs anyway, and I do post plenty of photos there too... just not always very artful ones.

The bad thing is this means no dedicated place for my "good" photos... but on the other hand, now it gives me freedom to do simple photo posts over there, which I never felt like I should do before (because I already had a place to do it, even if I hadn't used it for a while).

I'll leave this up for a while, and eventually either close the blog or just leave it to rot. Not sure which. But you should definitely start reading Alphabet City to keep up with my photos from now on.

Neglect

I realize I haven't been updating here very frequently of late. The truth is I've just been too busy doing other things. Among them is maintaining my other blog, which you may or may not be interested in (it is not a photo blog), but that's in addition to continuing to try to set up and maintain our "new" house, which takes up most of my weekends, and dealing with a long commute to and from work, which eats up most of my weekdays.

I will begin updating again more frequently at some point, either when the weather gets a little warmer (and I'm out taking more photos) or when I just have some more free time. I have not forgotten about this blog, and will always need an outlet for my photos - including many that I still have archived, waiting to post. Until then, though, you can keep up to date with what I'm doing by visiting my homepage, which has links to several of my various online presences. I've only got a certain amount of time to go around, so at any given moment, one of the links there is likely getting more attention than the others.

Tokyo Tower

If you're interested, I'm doing a full trip report (complete with some more random photos) at my other blog. But I'll keep posting my best shots here - a couple right now of Tokyo Tower:

Christmas Lights

Just a random shot I took tonight in Shinagawa.

In Flight (and I mean that literally)

I'm on my way to Japan. As in, right now. Just took this shot, uploading from the plane. JAL's using Boeing Connexion, and wouldn't you know, they're cancelling the service so everybody gets to use it free until it's gone.

I'll have many more photos coming soon - our itinerary has us going to Kyoto, then Ibaraki, then Tokyo. So you know I'm going to be wearing out my camera.

Fire

First photo taken in the new house.

Really been too busy actually working on the house to take many pictures lately. But last night was a night to relax.

Lens test!

It's been a while - a computer crash and the big move have taken their toll. I've had to replace my previous laptop, which developed a power problem that would have been an expensive fix, and otherwise I've just been spending too much time working on the house to take photos.

Finally, today, I grabbed a lounge chair and sat it down in my back yard to take some photos of passing airplanes. This is the first time I've really put my new 135-400mm lens to the test and I don't know that I'll ever be a great aviation photographer, but it's easy to do and it's fun. I can picture lazy summer weekends sitting around on my back deck and just snapping photos all day long (at least until one of my neighbors thinks I'm scouting targets with my scary-looking camera and calls the police on me...).

This photo was the best of today's bunch. It's noisier than I'd like, and not as sharp as it could be, but then I was hand-holding at 400mm, and that's a tough technique to master. After getting results like this on my first day, though, I think I'll be able to do it.

Manhattan Bridge

There is something about this photo - and other photos I have that are similar - that I really love. Part of it is the texture of it. Blogger is going to compress this a bit, but open up the full size version (and make it big if your browser resizes automatically) and you will see that lovely grain, the heavy vignetting and the almost worn-out quality that makes it look like this photo is a lot older than it is. The truth is I probably took it sometime in 1997. The film I used when I shot black and white was always Kodak Tri-X, and it was capable of tighter grain than this. But I shot this with my Pentax K-1000 with a 400mm Tokina lens that always did this to all of my photos - it was a terrible lens, but it gave me this almost newspaper-like look that I loved. It fit the look of New York so well, and it made it seem even more industrial of a city than it is.

I no longer have that camera or lens and it's difficult to duplicate this look digitally. It can be done, but it takes a long time to really make it convincing.

My new toy!

No "real" photo to show you today (check back tomorrow!) but I just had to show off my new toy:



You know I'm on the mend and about to start shooting again (soon) when I go out and blow a chunk of cash on a major piece of machinery like this.

It's the Sigma 135-400 APO DG. Honestly, this is the first "serious" lens I've ever owned. I'm not really a big believer in glass quality making all that much difference in the quality of photos any given photographer turns out. A great photographer with a $50 lens will take a better photo than a bad photographer with a $4,000 lens, given the same subject. Too many people use their lens as an excuse for taking bad pictures, when the fact of the matter is they're just a bad photographer. So I've always just made do with the cheap stuff and tried to focus on finding better subjects, and I've never really wanted anything more.

But we're about to move to the suburbs, and our new house is almost directly under one of JFK airport's takeoff patterns. Luckily they don't use this pattern all that often, and I'm not a huge fan of being right under low-flying airplanes under that kind of stress (especially given JFK's checkered past), but I figured I'd make the most of the situation. I've lived near airports before - San Francisco in the early 1980's, La Guardia just a few years ago - and I've never taken any photos even when all I had to do was step out into my back yard and look up. I've always regretted that.

The upshot is if I wanted to finally use my local airport to its fullest, I needed the longest lens I could afford. And as badass as this lens looks, it was the cheapest 400mm lens available to me. It is definitely a quality piece of glass, but it was not all that expensive (relative to other lenses - it was about half the cost of Canon's 100-400L, although that lens does have image stabilization and that's what you're paying extra for.) It is built like a tank, though, and it is huge - it feels like a wild boar when attached to the camera, and I only hope I can tame it!

I'm not sure when I'll have photos taken with this lens to post, but you can bet I will sometime. But check back tomorrow for yet another new photo from the archives!

I'm still basically laid up, though I'm back at work and at least walking around a bit... not enough to take new photos yet, though. So I'm still picking through the archives... trying not to use them all up too quickly! Thanks for all the emails wishing me well; I do appreciate it.

Anyway, this photo is pretty self-explanatory. It didn't turn out exactly as I wanted (I couldn't get the exact right angle, and cars kept driving me off the street), but it's still not bad and it's a good New York shot.

I'm raiding the archives - still not feeling well enough to go out and take some new photos. I'll try to post a few old ones here and there as I'm healing up.

I took this one at the wrong ISO setting, so it's a bit noisy. But I like the geometric shapes. Purposely underexposed and tinted.

My latest excuse - surgery!

It's been nearly three weeks since I've uploaded a new photo here, but I've got a good reason. Shortly after making my last post (in fact, the following morning), I woke up to discover that my left lung had spontaneously collapsed. This is the second time this has happened to me, and it resulted in a ten-day hospital stay accompanied by major surgery to (hopefully) finally fix the problem.

I'm currently back home on my couch, in pain. Once I'm feeling a little better I'll get back to taking and posting photos. Please bear with me in the meantime and do check back occasionally; I'm anxious to resume a normal life as soon as I can.

There are a lot of lightning photos out there, and some are really beautiful (if you have a recent Mac computer, just look in your pre-installed desktop wallpaper folder!). But this is the only one I've ever managed to take, and there are some things I think are interesting about it.

For one thing, the bolt is right in the middle of the frame, and it's hitting flat water - it seems to defy the laws of physics. For another, if you can believe it I took this with an old Kodak Instamatic 110 format camera. This was a fully automatic camera with no shutter speed or aperture controls, and a very small film frame. Lightning photos are almost always very long exposures - this was a handheld snapshot in the dark!

This is the original color of this photo. These are dried flowers.

Fun with the Photoshop channel mixer

This is an original photo I took as part of my trek across the Queensboro Bridge during the transit strike. As you may have seen earlier, I converted most of my daytime shots to black and white because the lighting was a bit flat that day. If you're a photographer and you're like me, whenever you convert to black and white you probably either just desaturate and adjust curves or you convert to a grayscale image. But Photoshop CS2 has a better way.

Photoshop now has a quick and easy way of simulating the use of colored filters on black and white film - the channel mixer. Check it out - these are b/w versions of the image above, with different settings:


The photo above is with blue set to 100, red and green 0 - looks like a foggy day, doesn't it?


That's red 100, blue and green 0.

You used to be able to simulate this by creating a bunch of layers based on different channels and adjusting them individually, but this took me literally 1 minute total using the channel mixer. The self portrait at the top right was done the same way (that's about 60% blue, 20% green, 20% red). Using the channel mixer, it's incredibly easy to simulate the use of color filters (in any combination you like) and their effects on contrast and depth in b/w photos long after taking the shot.

Transit Strike, Bridge Views and One Dumb Photographer (i.e. me)

Something a little different today - more like a real blog post, but laden with photo goodness. You may have heard about the NYC transit strike that just ended today, and I, like all New Yorkers, was stranded by it. I normally take the N or W train from Queens into Manhattan to go to work, but with no service I was forced to walk across the 59th St. bridge in the bitter cold - around 5 miles each way. This is not the first time I've had to do this - I also did it during the Northeast blackout a couple of years ago, in temperature conditions at the opposite extreme. But that was an emergency situation and there was little time to stop and look around.

I stayed at home the first day of the strike, unprepared to walk and too late to make it to work anyway. My first time across the bridge on day two, I realized that I could make something good out of the situation by bringing my camera with me the next time. The views are some of the best in the city. So the next day, there I was, lugging my heavy camera bag on a ten mile round trip... but it was worth it. My night shots aren't perfect - even if I'd had a tripod, there'd have been no way to get a steady shot on this bridge because of the constant vibration - but I still like them.

Here we go:


Wasn't too crowded that day. The media almost always focuses on the Brooklyn Bridge whenever anything like this happens, I think because there's only one walkway (on the Queensboro/59th St. Bridge there are two) so there's a greater concentration of people, which makes for better TV. But it was a pretty pleasant walk at this time of day on the Queensboro. (The day earlier was a lot more crowded; I think a lot of people did just take the second and third days of the strike off.)

I thought this photo worked better in black and white because of the geometric shapes; I didn't want what little color there was to take away from the line composition.


Another shot across the bridge to show the light traffic that day. It was actually pretty surprising to me; I did hit some pretty bad traffic (both on foot and in vehicles) in Manhattan, but the bridge was empty. Even the Roosevelt Island tram was carrying a pretty light load.

Again, black and white because of the flat color that day. I like silhouettes in black and white anyway.


Part of the view from the bridge, looking south. That's the Williamsburg Bridge down there. You can tell how cold it was that day - look at that steam billowing up!

Ok, now the night commute, which was a little more crowded:


Strike traffic. It was like this all the way up and down as far as the eye could see, on every Avenue. The east-west streets were a little better, but not much.


This was the crowd getting onto the bridge at night. A few more people than I saw that morning.

The view from the bridge. I have a ton of these - I took similar pictures all the way across - but this one was as good as any, so I'm just posting one. Look at the line of lights along the edge of the coast of Manhattan - that's traffic on the FDR Drive that's backed up for miles. If you open this up and see the lights in the sky off in the distance, those are helicopters - most likely watching the Brooklyn Bridge foot traffic. If you're unfamiliar with NYC and wondering why there's no traffic on the street directly below me, that's Roosevelt Island - it's an enclosed island that basically just terminates in a dead-end at the end of that street.

More people walking. Some camera shake here but I still kinda like this photo.

At around this time my gloved hands were fumbling for the LCD backlight button on my camera and instead mistakenly hit the button to turn on the timer. From this point on I was convinced my camera had literally frozen. Unable to hear the beeping, all I knew was nothing was happening when I pressed the shutter button. So I had more photo opportunities after this point, but they were all missed through my own idiocy. I finally realized my mistake just before reaching home (thankfully in time to get the one final shot I wanted below, though I did blow the highlights).

You won't notice it after my processing, but all of my earlier daylight shots were also shot in the wrong shooting mode. I had the camera stuck on Av mode with an f/3.5 aperture - several of my shots were blown out, others lacking depth of field. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on until I was more than halfway across the bridge, when I finally saw it and literally slapped my head and let out a "d'oh!"

Any decent photos I got on this day were despite my skills, not because of them.

This is not something you normally see in New York, where our subways run 24 hours a day. I hope to never see it again.

It was fun walking across the bridge the first time, and it was fun taking these photos - but two days of it was enough to completely wear me out. I've got blisters on my feet, I've got probably a dozen strained muscles in my legs; I can barely walk. It was just another New York experience, though... we seem to have some sort of calamity every few years. At least they usually make good stories.

I've been wrestling with whether or not to post this - I love the color, but the sky was actually too clear that day. The smoke adds a bit to the photo, but not enough. The problem with flat skies is they basically ruin the rule of thirds - I normally would have panned up a bit (and cropped tighter on the left), but it would have just been more empty sky.

Well, I'm posting it so I don't have to think about it anymore. Every time I've thought of posting something over the past few days, I just keep coming back to this photo and trying to figure out how to make it work. At least now I can just move on...

Merry Christmas

A bit of an abstraction today. There's a ton of graffiti in New York, and obviously I'm not responsible for the original "artwork" here, but I liked the particular way all of the different types of graffiti came together on this particular wall. There's an interesting mix of the original color of the wall, some political graffiti, some basic name tagging, and some outright corporate advertising. Sort of a snapshot of what the East Village is all about these days... (that's where this was taken.)

I like the diagonals that happened here pretty much by chance too. It's a combination of the writing style of the graffiti writers and the light reflecting off an air conditioner and its supports just above the photo.

btw, for anyone who's in New York and is into this kind of stuff, head over on the 7 train to the 45th Rd/Courthouse Square station. On the way from Manhattan, look out the window on the left-hand side and you'll see a huge area of just amazing, amazing graffiti art on a little enclave of old buildings. (It's actually easier to see this coming from the other direction.) I'm talking old-school wildstyle stuff from guys who obviously know what they're doing, not these tagging posers you see today. I keep meaning to head over there with my camera one of these days but just haven't gotten around to it yet.