WARREN CONNECTICUT – Further exploitation of a long weekend: a Sunday night dinner party with friends in Connecticut. I cooked pulled pork and ribs all day in my Green Egg. Just OK results but people loved it since they don’t have fixed expectations. Taken by candlelight with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Noctilux lens.
On this day one year ago: Litchfield.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – A big day on the Fedex box front. MyLeica Monochrom arrived today thanks to Jeff Hirsch at Fotocare. Here are a couple of other links:
Jono Slack. Farkas Review. This is a dream come true: a digital camera that only shoots black and white. Farkas refers to it as an iconic camera. I’ll be shooting with it exclusively for the next few weeks. Also packing up some of my other gear to sell.
It will take me a while to sort out image quality on this thing – particularly at high ISO values.
Examples taken with my 35mm Summilux.
From my poker game:
On this day one year ago: Hopper light.
PARK CITY and SALT LAKE CITY UTAH – Still in Utah. I spent last night in Park City for a couple of reasons. In the first place there’s actually not a first rate hotel in Salt Lake – all of the action is up where the ski resorts are. In the second place it Park City presents an opportunity to take in some landscape. So I stayed in Park City last night and woke up to this Disney-like former mining town. I grabbed some store fronts with my M9 and then put together an eight mile hike above the Stein Eriksen resort. Stein Eriksen has grown dramatically since I was last here. Sort of Los Vegas in the very, very high desert. There’s nothing alpine about the scenery here. It’s semi-arid bumps at very high altitude. With some selective framing I managed to get some reasonable scenery.
I ended the day at the Salt Lake Country Club. This was the social institution when I was growing up but I’m not so certain now. Highway construction has ruined the golf course, at least from a scenic standpoint and it feels old. Who know. Anyway, the second evening of my high school reunion happened here.
Images above Dear Valley are with my 25mm Summilux lens; at the reunion I was shooting with my Noctilux. All on my M9.
On this day last year: Hallway.
SALT LAKE CITY UTAH – I can hear the question now: “What are you doing in Salt Lake outside of ski season?” The simple answer is that I grew up here and I’ve returned this weekend for my high school reunion – an opportunity to connect with the girl (now a grandmother) who I had a hopeless crush on and with my friend Jerry Stephens, who I did my first photography with (it turns out that it was less important to him than it was to me), and generally to hang out with a bunch of older people who I haven’t seen for a very long time. See my biography link in the column to the right.
I flew to Salt Lake this morning; killed time for a couple of hours driving around photographing old neighborhoods; and then went to a picnic in Sugarhouse Park. The theme of the reunion is “Highland’s Greatest Year” – my senior year we won the state football championship. I shot the entire weekend with my Leica M9 and Noctilux lens, mostly with a .9 neutral density filter at f.95.
On this day last year: Belvedere Castle. Struggling to produce something interesting working on a tripod.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – A dislocated weekend. For today and tomorrow we’ve ceded our house to our daughter, Francesca, for a bachelorette party that she’s throwing for a friend. Dangerous territory. So we’re camping out for the weekend at Doug and Judy Hamilton’s house because they’re on the way to Salt Lake via the California Zephyr (a train!). I spent today photographing Doug and Judy’s house with my Alpa Max and Phase One IQ 180 back. Then the bachelorettes descended on us for cocktails, which I captured in the waining light with my M9 and a 1954 50 mm Dual-Range Summicron lens. Here you go:
On this day last year: a picture of a camera. Not really that cool.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A slow cloudy day – I didn’t feel much like photography but I captured Basil shaking it off late in the day. Leica M9 and 50mm Noctilux lens.
On this day last year: On foot in Harlem. The Lenox Lounge and the Zebra room in the rear have become major destinations; the bullet holes in the facade are the residue of an earlier, less settled, time.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – We had house guests this weekend. Here are two of them out of focus. Taken with my Leica M9 and Noctilux lens.
On this day last year: Shadow
