NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is the second year in a row for a freak storm for us at the end of October. Last year in Connecticut a major blizzard dumped an unprecedented amount of heavy snow while the leaves were still on the trees causing major damage. We lost power for a week and roads were impassable for the better part of that time. We were trapped. Based on that experience we decided to ride out Superstorm Sandy in Manhattan. I spent a good part of Sunday and Monday on preparation – not in a mood for pictures. Here’s a large lead acid battery that’s designed to power a telescope that I’ve adapted to be a power source for charging mobile phones and the like in a power failure. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux FLE lens.
Sandy prep
On this day last year: Freak storm. As I said before, we had a freak blizzard in Connecticut last year.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m loving my Leica Monochrom. In post processing I’ve been experimenting with some film looks to pretty good effect. Here are some examples from today all taken with the Monochrom and my 55-year old 50mm Dual Range Summicron.
Citicorp
I look for construction sites and vacant lots that create views through blocks that don’t exist otherwise and won’t exist for very long. Here’s the New York Life building – three frames stitched in Photoshop.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well here we are at home with takeout Chinese food and some friend of Francesca’s. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Dual Range Summicron lens from 1954.
Take out
NEW YORK NEW YORK – -Look’s like Francesca’s back home again. She has interrupted her post-bar pre-work travel to come home to have here broken foot repaired at the Hospital for Special Surgery. She’s cheerful under the circumstances. Taken with my Leica Monchrom and 35mm Suumilux lens. The Monochrom continues to wow me.
Francesca
NEW YORK NEW YORK – What a mess. This morning I worked on cameras (which is overdue). I shot a test roll on my new M4 to check shutter speeds and cleaned lenses and the sensor on my M9. I walked around the neighborhood and captured a dozen or so images for this project, and shopped to update my wardrobe a bit. Here’s the mess. On August 21 (that’s tomorrow but remember that I post these about a week late) I took another pass at cleaning the M9’s sensor, but I hit “format card” on the menu on the camera. rather than “clean sensor”. In other words I wiped out the images for August 20. I spent a couple of hours with disk recovery software trying to fix the problem but failed. This is the third time that mess ups involving storage media have jeopardized this project. People talk about storage media failing, but it’s actually much more likely that people fail.
Anyway the test roll of film that I took with the M4 saved the day – it came out fine. Here’s one of the test images taken with my M4, Ilford Delta 100 film and a 50mm Dual-Range Summicron lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I traveled to Boston today but caught some details of our life at home at sunrise. As I’ve noted in the past that we have collected some Venini glass – some of it is in the photos that I took before leaving. I stopped at the Venini store on Via Montenapoleone in Milan on our recent trip – prices have doubled since I last looked at them a year or so ago. This is ruinous. Most of the stuff on eBay now is junk being held out by sellers as Venini or like Venini.
Here are the pictures, taken with my Fuji Xpro-1 (my in-a-hurry camera – I saw the light as I was running out the door to catch a plane) and 18mm Fuji lens.
VeniniSunlight
More scanned film from an earlier date. Have I commented before that a photo-a-day blog would be very difficult shooting film because of the time lags developing film and scanning? Taken with my Leica M3 and a 50mm Summilux lens.
