NNEW YORK NEW YORK – So I’m using my Alpa and a 35mm Schneider as my walk-around camera. This only works on sunny days – I’m a sunny day kind of guy so I prefer these anyway. Here’s in image from Madison Avenue and 55th Street
Here’s the next in my series of 24 self portraits taken in 1999. This is from 12:58 AM on February 14, 1999. I slept on a cot in my studio, setting an alarm to wake my hourly for a picture. I clearly haven’t been to sleep on yet because I still look fairly well put together.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – We had lunch today at the relatively new Shake Shack on 86th Street. Here’s a diner at a neighboring table, taken with my Leica M9 and a 28mm Summicron lens.
The next image in the continuing series of hourly portraits, this one taken at 6:04 PM, local time on February 13, 1999.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A gray day but not quite raining. A poor day for landscape in the city. I walked up Third Avenue with my Leica and Wide Angle Tri Elmar lens (shot at 21mm).
NEW YORK NEW YORK – As you might expect this is an emotionally flat day for me after all of the excitement of the wedding. My mojo is elsewhere. It’s gone into hiding. I hope it’s not gone forever. But I threw my Alpa into a small bag and soldiered on. I caught this at Citicorp Center on my way to the office. Everyone is alone, facing away from everyone else. Everyone is an island. That’s what life is like sans mojo. A lucky shot. Odd how you can do well at something regardless of your state of mind by just doing it daily.
The Alpa (with an 80 meg medium format back) is very demanding of technique when used handheld. At 80 megs of resolution a bit of camera movement was plainly evident in this image. I down-rezed the file to 24 megs – the file size produced by a high end Canon or Nikon – and the jitters disappeared.
SHANGHAI – We have mostly finished our meetings so we spent part of the day as tourists. We went to the Shanghai Museem – Maria and I had been here in April. The collection is good but a little disappointing given Shanghai’s stature. In April we photographed the stairwell – it was the second photograph in my post for April 19. Here’s a link – scroll down to the second photo. stairway in Shanghai Museum. I shot the stairway again, this time a close up of the dragon-motifed banister.
I got bored with the Museum so I took a walk in the neighboring People’s Square. There were young couples with a single child everywhere, a result of China’s one child policy. The Chinese say that single children have six parents (including four grandparents) so they are seriously doted-upon. See the image below.
Finally the Shanghai municipal government’s building is located on the People’s Square. it was finished in the 1990s. It is clearly meant to be imposing but only succeeds at being tedious – typical of civic architecture everywhere in the world.
All images taken with my Panasonic GH2 and 1 14-140mm zoom lens.
HONG KONG – A long day of meetings. I managed a walk in the park in front of the Mandarin with my Panasonic GH2.
My personal workout includes a stretching and flexibility routine that draws on elements of yoga, dance and sports stuff but I could work full time for the next 10 years at it and I wouldn’t achieve the level of discipline that this woman has.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More rain. Really. A lot of rain. I walked around with my Leica and a 90mm lens looking for rain themes. The Leica isn’t billed as being “weatherproof” but it does tolerate the rain, especially if you sheild it with a coat or your body when you’re not shooting. A couple of examples: