NEW YORK NEW YORK – Weird. You take a month’s break from visiting a place, you come back, and it’s entirely changed.  Tom Sachs’s sculpture, Hello Kitty, has been in the courtyard of Lever House for longer than I’ve been photographing for this blog. Now it’s gone, so it’s “bye bye Hollo Kitty”. Here are some links to some earlier Hello Kitty photographs: July 6, 2010, May 11, 2010, April 20, 2010, and March 19, 2010
I guess I really like Hello Kitty. The little gold doodad that replaced Hello Kitty appears to be a part of a much larger installation by Rachel Feinstein entitled “The Snow Queen”. Photographed with my Leica M9 and a 28mm Summicron lens.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I went to lunch at Nougatine, the more casual room in Jean-Goerges Vongerichten’s restaurant at Columbus Circle. I met a friend there in our ongoing quest to try every burger in New York. The burger was fabulous, except we felt that the pickles should have been served on the side. Here’s the view East on Central Park South as I’m walking to lunch, shot in infra red with my Leica M8.2 and a 35mm Summicron pre-Asp. lens – two frames stitched. The M8 sensor is sensitive to infrared light which results in “IR-polution” of images (a magenta cast) unless you use an IR-blockig filter in front of the lens. Here I’m using a filter that blocks everything except IR light.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I spent the morning visiting galleries in Chelsea. There was a terrific Hiroshi Sugimoto installation at the Pace. Pictures of “lighting” manufactured by a telsa coil and a few of his much earlier “beyond infinity” seascapes, shown below. My largest regret in life is that I didn’t buy one of these images years ago when they were first offered at $3,500 each (well it seemed like a lot of money at the time). Here’s a link to Sugimoto’s seascapes.
I also spent some time with Elizabeth Kabler, a friend of my daughter’s and now a friend of mine, at her gallery Skylight Projects.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – So today’s post is a tale of a lens. I’m a gear head, perhaps even a gear whore, but I don’t often talk about cameras and lenses here because it’s politically correct to downplay the gear one uses – after all a great photographer can take great pictures with anything. The later statement isn’t actually true – many luminaries in the photo world have selected their gear with great care – often finding the best technical solution for the types of images they take: Ansel Adams and his 8×10 Deardorff, Cartier-Bresson and his Leica and Lee Friedlander (in his later years) and the Hasselblad Superwide. I’ve proven on these pages that I can’t take a decent picture with an iPhone.
Leica has issued a new version of it’s 35mm f1.4 Summilux. It replaces a lens that I owned but sold when the rumor of a replacement circulated – essentially to raise cash to pay for the new lens, which is bizarrely expensive. The lens it replaces is famous for being bitingly sharp and having remarkable contrast corner to corner at all apertures. The former Summicron had “bokeh”, the character of it’s out of focus image, that made it unique. Unfortunately it also had a tendency for the focus point to shift as it was stopped down, resulting in very slightly out of focus images in the range f4.0 to f5.6 or so. This trait, which was not visible with film but is visible in the more demanding digital realm, drove me nuts. The new lens retains the character of the original but has solved to focus shift issue. Here are some links to reviews: Irwin Puts reviews the 35mm Summicron.Steve Huff on focus shift. The new 35mm Summilux has been back ordered for about a year. My copy finally arrived today.
Today I’m posting a picture of a pair of Venini vases (I collect Venini) drying in our kitchen, together with a close up crop to illustrate the character of the out of focus image. This was shot at f1.4. I’m also including a picture of the building that houses the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and a crop, to demonstrate the biting sharpness and contrast. This building was originally built as a residence for George F. Baker Jr. by Delano & Aldrich, the firm that became the ‘society architects” in New York after Stanford White’s murder in 1906. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is a splinter of the Russian Orthodox Church formed after the Bolshevik Revolution – it is now reconciled with the main body of the Russian Church.
The vases:
A crop from the vases illustrating the characteristic “bokeh” of this lens (note the circular highlights):
Here’s the Synod:
A crop of the Synod – again illustrating this lens’s special character, but also the Leica’s tendency to blow saturated yellow highlights:
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I had lunch at Columbia today. This is an Henry Moore sculpture on the bridge that crosses Amsterdam Avenue from the Law School, an otherwise bare and uninviting space. The Moore is actually too small for the site and is located on a spot where there is no reason to walk past it.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We’re planning a dinner party later in the week for which I’ll be cooking so I went to Agata and Valentina to sort out what’s fresh and seasonal. Maria had asked for scaloppine al limone so . . . we’re having scaloppine al limone. The rest of the menu is risotto with mushrooms (I found king oyster, mousseron, black trumpets, chanterelle and of course portobellos), baby zucchini, kale from out garden in Connecticut, and braised pumpkin, and an apricot tart with creme fraise. Here are some vegetables (mostly Treviso) in the market, taken with my Leica M9 and a 28mm Summicron lens.
Interestingly, maybe ironically, on this date one year ago we gave a dinner party featuring . . . mushrooms. Last year it was the mushrooms that I brought back from a trip to the Willamette Valley in Oregon: Mushroom dinner.
Dinner party
I’m going to try a similar picture Thursday night hoping that it can be more interesting.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – New York was sideswiped by a tropical storm today – I spent the day dodging rain. I caught this image of the Guggenheim Museum with my 16mm Hologon. I’ve been stalking the Guggenheim for some time, and have shot from this angle in the past, but not with this lens and in this light.
