NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well, here we are in front of the Seagrams Building. A typical hangout for me. I often have meetings in the area and the plaza between the Seagrams Building and the Racquet and Tennis Club is one of the great urban spaces in the country. The plaza is presently featuring sculpture by John Chamberlain – works that look like they are made of crumpled up aluminum foil, but on a really large scale. Here’s one taken with my every-present Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux lens:
John Chamberlain sculpture
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A new lens arrived from Japan today: MS Super Triplet Perar 3.5/35 Mark II. I heard about this forum that I subscribe to and through the miracle of the internet got to the site of the Japanese company that makes them, ordered one and PayPalled some Yen to Japan, and voila the lens appeared a few weeks later via Japan post.
This is a fun lens. It’s tiny – very cool looking – I’ll post a picture tomorrow. The tiny controls and eccentric form facto take some getting used to. Rendering is very, very contrasty. Resolution is ok but pretty soft in the corners wide open. The triplet is a typical 1930s optic (the Cooke triplet is a famous large format lens) – back in the day these lenses were uncoated so the small number of elements and air-glass transitions was important. The Perar is completely free flare – the glass modern coatings.
For some reason it tends to show off spots on the sensor.
Some examples on an M9 from an urban walk about. I’ve done a great deal of lightening shadows and spot adjusting to compensate against the contrast. A little more veiling flare might not be a bad thing. All taken with my M9.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took a walk today in Riverside Park from 116th Street to 59th Street with my medium format kit, a Phase One IQ 180 back, Alpa TC “camera” and a Rodenstock 32mm lens. Here’s a sample:
Riverside Park South
On this day one year ago: Lounge 3. Ugh . . . a travel day. This was hard work.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – So here’s the quilt in Connecticut. We bought it at the annual rummage sale at John’s Episcopal Church in Washington CT for very little and then spent 18 months having it restored. It really is of a piece with the quilt that I shot with my iPhone in the Adelphi Hotel in Saratoga. Probably not the same author but the same time, style and fabrics. Taken my iPhone.
Quilt
Now the picture from the Adelphi. Note the iPhone’s tendency to blow out the whites.
Quilt
On this day last year: Lamu, Kenya. Where my legal homeys hang in Lamu.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A dull day in all respects. I shot the swoosh porte cochere that was added to building in it’s renovation with my Leica M9 and 35mm Summilux lens. During our absence in Saratoga an exhibit of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work was installed on the Park Avenue islands so I’ll be shooting it over the next few weeks.
919 SwooshArt on Park
GLENS FALLS and SARATOGA SPRINGS NEW YORK – In Utah the 24th of July is a state holiday, celebrated sort of as a second Fourth of July. It commemorates the date on which Brigham Young arrived at the mouth of Immigration Canyon and said “This is the place”.
But we’re in upstate New York, not Utah, so no fireworks. We drove up to Glens Falls today to vist a lovely museum, the Hyde Collection. This is an excellent small collection of important European art assembled by two sisters in the early part of the 20th Century, and a terrific collection of Tiffany Glass. Apologies for the long post but this was an interesting day.
Here’s the central space in the collection captured with my Leica M9 and 24mm Summicron lens; two frames stitched in PTGui Pro.
Hyde Collection
The collection (which by itself was worth a drive up here) includes a current show by an artist named Stephen Knapp who does light painting creating colors with precisely shaped and oriented pieces of polarized glass. Taken with the same rig.
Stephen Knapp
Back in Saratoga Springs I had some fun with my iPhone. Here’s a quilt in the Victorian pile of lumber that calls itself the Adelphi Hotel. It’s interesting because it is very similar to a quilt that we have in Connecticut – a quilt that we bought a church rummage sale and then spent a year and a fairly serious amount of money having restored. I’ll shoot it in Connecticut when we’re there next weekend and you’ll see the resemblance.
Quilt
More fun with the iPhone in Saratoga:
Wandering Cowboy
Here’s a sculpture in Broadway (the main street) in Saratoga – I took this with my iPhone to be my screen backdrop in my iPhone – I got bored with gray.
iPhone screen
As I said – this was a long day. Toward the end of the day I spent some time in Saratoga Spa State Park. In the 1930s the space facility was rebuilt on a grand scale (the scale of the complex reminds me of a Mayan temple complex at Monte Alban near Oaxaca). Good Depression era public works, but the scale is far larger than current demand so much of it appears to be in good condition but disused. Maria took a treatment, so I took some pictures with my ever-present Leica M9 and 24mm Summilux lens.
The Baths at Saratoga
Moe of the same:
The Baths at Saratoga
Enough of July 24 2012. On July 24, 2011: Hogmead. No kidding on the name. An inn in Nairobi.
MILAN ITALY – I’m a tourist in Milan this week while Maria attends meetings at Mondadori, the large Italian publishing group. Being a tourist in Milan sounds better than the reality. Milan is actually an ugly city with a few high lights. What is of interest (and there is a lot of it) takes place in courtyards and salons and isn’t particularly visual. I spent the entire day working from my computer – catching up from being more or less off the grid for almost two weeks. This is also a chance for me to catch up on editing pictures and writing posts.
This is another image of the Bauhaus-style building that I referred to in yesterday’s post, taken with my Leica M9 and 35mm Summilux lens.
