WARREN CONNECTICUT – A weekend with friends and family. Maria is in Europe but our children and Kimball and Patrizia Chen joined us for the weekend. We just had a Big Green Egg delivered – known as the “Harley of outdoor cooking” so I’m experimenting with ribs, steaks, pork shoulder, pizza, you name it. This is deep water – I’ve got a fair amount of work to do on it.
Here’s John Novogrod listening to Alexander at dinner with us. Taken with my Leica M9 and Noctilux lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Hmmmm . . . Friday the 13th. I took a walk on 11th Avenue in the morning light. 11th Avenue is great for urban landscape. There are Hopperesque blocks. There’s a tenderloin vibe. This sort of thing has mostly disappeared in Manhattan. Hell’s Kitchen might as well be renamed “Dante’s Catering”. I captured a couple of images with my Alpa TC, 32mm Rodenstock and Phase One back, a setup that I use hand-held — it works like a digital Hasselblad Superwide C.
We stayed in the City – rare for a Friday night – because I and a friend hosted an “Edwardian Dinner” at the Knickerbocker Club. The image is from my iPhone – I’m in the picture (but I set it up) so there’s obviously a guest photographer.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A busy day of shopping, cooking and otherwise preparing for an onslaught of relatives for Alexander and Laura’s wedding this coming weekend. It’s good to have some food hanging around just in case people are hungry at odd hours. So I roasted a coupe of chickens, made two kinds of swiss chard, did some beets and feta cheese and eggplant parmesan, and made a variety of pasta sauces. Here’s a sample, captured with my Panasonic GH2
Chicken Eggplant Swiss Chard
NEW YORK NEW YORK – As noted yesterday we stayed in New York this weekend to attend an engagement party at the River Club. Shot with my Panasonic GH2 and a 20mm pancake lens..
Engagement party at the River Club
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I carried my Leica around as I went about Holiday preparations. I stopped at a costume rental place on West 38th Street to pick out costumes for a New Year’s Eve party. Here is a portion of a wall of photographs, sent to the shop by clients, showing their costumes. Of course I had the Walker Evans image Walker Evans Studio in mind.
Costumes
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – We had a casual dinner at home in the kitchen with two friends of long standing, Bill and Bunny Beekman. Here’s Bunny Captured with my Leica M9 and the 35mm Summilux II lens, my new favorite lens on this camera.
Bunny Beekman
The out of focus portions of the image are particularly interesting. I shot Bunny at f/2.8, where the lens has the creamy out of focus character typical of the pre-aspheric Leica lenses; wide open at f/1.4 it has a more edgy character typical of the current generation of highly corrected fast lenses. The following is an example. In effect this is two lenses in one – how it draws the out of focus portions depends on f stop.
