NEW YORK NEW YORK – Tax day. This is ordinarily a pretty grim day. “The ides of April?” But today was actually visually interesting. A trip to our daughter’s office provided a new angle on the local cityscape; a new lens provided a fairly energetic rainy cityscape out my window, and I got some decent images of our granddaughter.
Day 1,643 of one photo every day for the rest of my life.
Baby VFrancesca’s conference roomOut my window
On this day one year ago (day 1,278): Building. Obscured by a tree.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A clear day at last but I’m not fully in the moment so blah images. I sometimes shoot infrared in the winter – rarely in the summer because I don’t like the white leaves effect. Here’s an “out my window” with a digital camera that I had modified a few years ago so that it sees infrared only.
Day 1,586 of at least one photograph a day for the rest of my life.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I shot this afternoon with a long lens. This usually doesn’t work for me – I see best with a wide angle in my hands. The lens is a 280mm Leica R with a Leica 2s tele-extender. These are out my window in the early evening. The last image required hand stacking two images to get shadow detail in the brick.
I’ve done a careful recount of total days on this project without a missed day. I’m going to start posting the running total daily. Here you go
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day with my cameras. We drove back to New York (from Warren) to get Maria to a doctor – she’s had a hacking cough for two weeks now. When I arrived I found that FedEx had delivered two packages, one with my 2x tele-extender for my Leica R 280mm lens (which I can use on my Leica M camera), one of the great long lenses of all time. I also received a 75mm Leica Summicron Asph., which it turns out is a marvelous lens. The first two frames below are Baby V (our granddaughter) taken with my Monochrom and the new 75mm. In the next image I’m experimenting with the quality of the out-of-focus portions of the image (so-called “bokeh”), which is creamy and lovely, a real accomplishment for such a highly corrected lens. Finally a couple of out my windows with the 280mm and 2x tele-extender set up on a tripod. Looks fine but this combination is really fussy in use.
Apologies for the gear talk. What’s more important here is that Baby is making the transition, at just short of two months old, to having a personality. You begin to get a bit of that in the series of pictures below, taken over about a five minutes period.
Baby VMother and childBueno Bokeh560mm lens!560mm lens!
On this day last year: Lipstick building. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 5cm. Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar from 1945 – this lens rocks.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More experimenting with odd lenses. Today I attached a Leica 280mm lens designed for the dearly departed Leica reflex camera to my Leica M via an adapter and used the M’s electronic viewfinder to focus an frame. This lens has a sensational reputation, which based on this brick wall torture test, it deserves. But it’s a handful and the Leica M’s EVF isn’t very good so it is quite hard to work with.
Out my window
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Back home. Photo fatigue has set in. Not a luxury I can afford. A single not so good image on my Leica’s memory card at the end of the day.
Not so good image
