NEW YORK NEW YORK – I had lunch with Francesca at one of our favorite places near Columbia: Luncheonette. A diner at the next table captured with my Sony Nex-7 and 24mm Leica Summilux lens. Minor pixel level edits – I’ll leave it to you to find them.
On this day last year: Armory Show.
NAPLES FLORIDA – In a break from meetings I ran into a friend having lunch at a casual bar on the beach. He posed as I photographed him with my iPhone. But this presents a dilemma. This guy is pretty prominent in the world that I work in; when he posed he didn’t realize this was destined for the web; I don’t necessarily want to “out” him as having fun in the middle of the day. How to handle it? Well here’s one idea: There’s an app for the iPhone that converts an image into tiles. At tile resolution he’s not recognizable:
Another sunset. This does happen every day so I’m generally against shooting sunsets (same category as pets and cute kids). It was really, really clear and occasionally when the sun sets toward the sea and it’s very clear you see a brief green flash. I’ve actually seen it once from Basil’s Bar in Mustique. So I set up to catch it but alas it didn’t happen. Here’s the sun where there would have been a green flash had it happened.
On this day one year ago: humongous ice-sicle.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Our children are starting to disperse. Here’s an iPhone shot of Thilo, Francesca’s boyfriend, and Jemima Kirke’s portrait of Francesca (which we’re about to take off to the framer).
On this day one year ago: Boxing Day Blizzard.
ACELA BETWEEN WASHINGTON DC AND NEW YORK – We took the Acela back to New York early this PM in time to get ready for the New York premier of “Warhorse” (the movie version) tonight. I caught Maria on the Acela with my iPhone.
On this day one year ago: Washington Congregational Church
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m lurking through life with my shirt-pocket-sized camera. Here’s an ATM that includes another self-portrait. The distortion foreshadows some of the composites that I’ll be posting later this week from my 1999 24 hour series of self-portraits.
Interestingly (perhaps predictably) I’m falling into a familiar pattern of daily photo projects. If you Google “one photo a day” or a similar combination of words you’ll find sites with titles like “Ben takes a picture of himself every day” or “Noah takes a picture of himself every day for six years”. Who gives a damn? Why would you bother to click through one of these links, edging yourself one click closer to carpal tunnel syndrome? “Ben takes a picture of himself . . ” is like a 20-year old’s memoir. Not enough milage to be interesting.
The picture-a-day space has become a rundown neighborhood. It seems to be populated with losers who don’t have anything else to do with their time than take pictures of themselves. There are now sites that make it easy to post a picture a day. Try flickaday for example. (Sponsoring my own website for this purpose is distinctly not easy.) There are more of them, a lot more of them, than when I started this project two years ago. There’s a photo-a-day bubble in this country. Notify the Federal Reserve – picture of myself every day sites may be Systemically Important. If photography were housing these sites would be double-wide trailer parks.
Anyway, here’s the ATM taken with my Ricoh GRD IV.
Free at last – this is the last picture in the series of 24 self-portraits taken hourly over 24 hours on February 13 and 14, 1999. It’s taken, well 24 days, to get this off of my chest. The camera was an Arca-Swiss 8×10. In this and a few other images in the series I look slightly cross-eyed. It may be the camera angle which was a bit to close for portraiture.
BROOKLYN NEW YORK – Today is Maria’s birthday. We had a small dinner at Frankies Spuntino in Brooklyn (that’s not a typo – it’s owned by two guys named Frankie). Shot with my Leica M9 and 50 mm Summilux lens.
On this day one year ago: Citicorp.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Have you filed your estimated taxes? So a new lens just arrived for my Panasonic GH2 – a 7mm to 14mm zoom (14-28 35mm equivalent). This thing is very wide and very good. The pictures are interesting. I’m a wide shooter and this lens is really wide. Even the picture of my feet that I took to make sure that the camera was working has some interest.
On this day one year ago: Hmmm . . we’re on to an appropriation them here. I appropriated Mike Bidlo.
