NEW YORK NEW YORK – Spring has arrived with a clamor so I took a walk in Central Park. I have a new old lens: a Leica R 16mm fisheye which I can use on my Leica M camera (generally converting its color images to black and white). This is not a true fisheye: it doesn’t produce a circular image with a 180 degree field of view: it’s more like 150 degrees. It does preserve size relationships near the edge of the frame which means that straight lines are curved. This is very noticeable when shooting architectural subjects which have straight lines, but actually looks natural shooting rocks and trees as in the first image below. Anyway, it was a nice day so I had trouble making selections.
Day 1,649 of one picture every day for the rest of my life.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A nice sunny day for a walk in Central Park with a camera and boots with a good grip. This is Valentines Day. I gave Maria the red crystal heart. She noticed that I have used the crystal heart thing in the past and commented that the collection idea is nice but perhaps not as nice as a pair of shoes or an article of jewelry. I guess I need to diversify a bit on my Valentines giving. I’ve edited this post to include the first image below, which is my favorite for today. My travels separated me from the file when I first wrote this post; we’re rejoined now so here it is.
Day 1,583 of one photo every day for the rest of my life.
Central ParkCentral Park ReservoirtreeBrick Church
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I walked today. First on Park Avenue where the light was doing good things with some of the Albert Paley sculpture on the islands. Then into Central Park where I fairly predictably got some mundane images – Central Park is tough. The best image that came out of walking most of the length of it was a detail that looks like a nose.
SculptureCentral Park
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This morning I took a break from professional cares and walked to the office through Central Park in curtain filtered sunlight. Sometimes too filtered and flat; at other times lovely. Today I shot with the Leica Monochrome: the fact that it’s limited to black and white protected me from my worst tendencies and instincts in shooting this time of the year. My lens for the day was the ’60s era Leica 35mm Summicron v.IV, aka the “bokeh king”. The first is three frames stitched.
TapestryCentral ParkPortrait
NEW YORK NEW YORK – It’s St. Valentine’s Day. I walked across Central Park to shop for valentines gifts, carrying my Leica Monochrome and a 24mm Leica Summilux lens. I put a .9 neutral density filter on the lens permitting it to shoot in daylight wide open at f1.4, giving very narrow depth of field, but requiring exacting technique. Three examples.
Bethesda FountainBethesda FountainThe Dakota
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took a walk across Central Park today on a route that took me north of the Reservoir. I stumbled across a lovely cast iron Art Noeveau bridge that I either didn’t know about or had forgotten. Here it is captured with my Leica Monocrom and an 18mm Super Elmar lens.
Art Nouveau
An image from the Reservoir, heavily fixed up with software perspective controls – the high bright sky makes this look like a vintage image on orthochromatic film.
Reservoir
Self portrait. I posted this on an online forum (where I somethimes test-drive images); it was pointed out that my fly was open; I edited the problem out in Photoshop.
