MILAN ITALY – I’m a tourist in Milan this week while Maria attends meetings at Mondadori, the large Italian publishing group. Being a tourist in Milan sounds better than the reality. Milan is actually an ugly city with a few high lights. What is of interest (and there is a lot of it) takes place in courtyards and salons and isn’t particularly visual. I spent the entire day working from my computer – catching up from being more or less off the grid for almost two weeks. This is also a chance for me to catch up on editing pictures and writing posts.
This is another image of the Bauhaus-style building that I referred to in yesterday’s post, taken with my Leica M9 and 35mm Summilux lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK = I’m embarking on a new project: I’m documenting both sides of 11th Avenue from 40th Street or so to 50th Street or so. The idea is to shoot frontally, with medium format, two frames per block. I’ll use the light on either side of mid-day to catch long shadows.
I went scouting for the project today using my iPhone. The Viewfinder Pro app lets me sort out lenses and points of view, and the Theodolite pop helps me with documenting GPS and other similar data. Here’s a shot from Theodolite:
NEW YORK NEW YORK – So there’s a camera app for the iPhone called Percolator which I’ve used occasionally to perk up my daily photo. See for example here. I’m pretty restrained using it. Here’s a more radical example. Walking down Lexington Avenue I passed a store front that had be decorated with circles in more or less exactly the percolator proportion using more or less percolator colors. Is this an iPhone app influencing the real design world, or do they have a common antecedent? Taken with my Sony Nex-7 and Leica 24mm Summilux lens.
Percolated?
SHANGHAI – We traveled yesterday to this remarkably photogenic city. We stayed on the Pudong side of the river at the Park Hyatt Shanghai, located on the upper floors of the Shanghai World Financial Center. From an architectural standpoint the SWFC (as it is known) is one of the better and more appealing super tall skyscrapers. I regretted not having my Alpa kit and the time to use it. Here’s what was possible with my Panasonic GH2.
SWFCSWFC and the moonPudongPudong
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I had a nice opportunity to walk around midtown Manhattan today in crisp early summer light with my Alpa, a 36mm Schneider Digitar and 60 meg Hasselblad back. .
Fathers DayBloomberg buildingBloomberg building II
SHANGHAI AND HANGZHOU – This morning we took a high speed train to the lovely city of Hangzhou. The idea was to spend the day and a night at Hangzhou, a medium-sized city surrounding an extensive system of shallow lakes. It was the capital of the Song Dynasty and has an extensive group of Buddhist temples, and Buddhist statuary carved into living rock. We went via a hypermodern Hongqiao rail station – the Chinese are sensational at designs for moving people. Here is the rail terminal (Leica M9 and 24mm Summicron, two frames stitched) and one of the Hangzhou temples (Leica M9 and 24mm Summicron):
Hongqiao rail station ShanghaiRail terminal ShanghaiTemple Hangzhou
