NEW YORK NEW YORK – I walked around the Village this afternoon with my Alpa TC. There was wonderful Edward Hopper light – just enough haze to open up the shadows – the IQ 180 back’s color rendering actually got the light right. Here are a couple of examples:
On this day last year: Travel day. Yuck.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I took my Alpa Max and a light tripod to Central Park to shoot with my Schneider 120mm lens. The Max and the !20 were a delight to use. On reviewing the results the light tripod was a disappointment – in the future I’m going to need to use a serious tripod with this lens. I’m fighting a battle with myself to avoid an overly composed look when working on a tripod, and generally loosing. Here’s an example:
On this day one year ago: Sunset on the Maasai Mara. I actually just posted this – I had taken the picture but hadn’t posted it in the confusion of pulling the Africa materials together.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I walked to the office today with my Alpa and the 72mm Schneider Digitar. I’m experimenting to see if it’s possible to hand hold the camera with this lens. (Longer lenses are more demanding in terms of camera movement than shorter lenses.) The light was just ok. There’s a no name spec building at the Northwest corner of 57th street and Lexington Avenue. I played around with the plaza in front of it, and finally realized that the shot for the day was looking straight up. You’ll see that the framing would have been better if I had included the full circle on the sides of the frame. The Alpa finder is kind of approximate – based in this fairly disappointing experience I’ll be trying some of my Leica finders on the Alpa to see if I can get more accurate results.
Anyway . . .
On this day one year ago: Maasai village.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – So what’s so technical about a “technical camera”. Here’s a link to last week’s post on my Alpa TC but it just looks unwieldy and it lacks a lot of things (autos focus and automatic exposure) that we take for granted on a pocket point and shoot.
First, what’s so technical about these things? Well last week’s Alpa TC is actually the little brother of the Alpa Max, a camera that permits the back and lens to be shifted relative to each other, and permits the lens to be titled relative to the plane of the sensor with longer focal length lenses. The ability to shift the lens upward to look up while keeping the camera level permits great flexibility in composition while keeping vertical lines properly parallel (if you tilt the camera up they appear to converge). Of course once you move into shifts you are committed to working on a tripod. In my setup composition is done through live view on the IQ 180’s lcd panel (live view is common in consumer cameras but for technical reasons is hard to implement in medium format digital backs). Working with the Alpa Max is fully the digital equivalent of working with a view camera and 4 x 5 film (the debate on the “quality” of film vs. digital ended a long time ago – on a resolution basis the IQ 180 is fully comparable to r=legacy 8 x 10 film, but the look is different).
Here’s the Max with the lens shifted upward relative to the back:
This setup (the tripod and the need to fiddle with a complex camera) forces one to work slowly. It leads to consciously “composed” work. Some of my best work is actually shot off-hand and intuitively. The challenge for me in working with a large camera is to keep the images interesting (getting them to be perfect is not that hard). The following capture with the Max has the character of thousands of other images captured with similar equipment. This bothers me a bit, but I suppose it shouldn’t – it’s really no different that the millions of “mom and pop at the beach” snapshots that all look the same except for who mom and pop are.
I’ve included a grayscale conversion of this image that further emphasizes how this method of capturing images nudges you in the direction of traditional landscape.
On this day last year: A travel day. A travel day last year, on our way to Nairobi and a date with some wildlife.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – It poured rain all day. Given the weather we had decided to stay in New York for the weekend. I didn’t get out except to walk the dog. There was no one on the streets of Cargegie Hill, our neighborhood. What do you do on a rainy Sunday? Well I spent the better part of the day updating my website with a slightly new look and much better and more flexible software.
I took my Leica out while walking the dog. The camera is a 1954 design and weather sealed cameras weren’t in the picture then (modern high end designs from Nikon and Canon are completely weather proof – I’ve taken them into the shower to clean them off after they were splashed with ocean spray). But the machining tolerances on the Leica are very tight so it’s sort of weather resistant, but you have to use common sense.
A shot a bunch of rainswept streets and a few pedestrians with umbrellas. The best of a fairly poor lot was of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Here’w what I said about it on November 24, 2010:
This building was originally built as a residence for George F. Baker Jr. by Delano & Aldrich, the firm that became the ‘society architects” in New York after Stanford White’s murder in 1906. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is a splinter of the Russian Orthodox Church formed after the Bolshevik Revolution – it is now reconciled with the main body of the Russian Church.
Taken with my Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens. Two frames stitched in Photoshop.
On this day one year ago: Water skiing on Lake Waramaug.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Alexander’s fiance had her wedding shower today, so he and his future father in law and I went to lunch together. We went to The Red Rooster, Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant in Harlem. Here’s what The Red Rooster’s website says about itself:
We named our restaurant after the legendary Harlem speakeasy that was located at 138th Street and 7th Avenue, where neighborhood folk, jazz greats, authors, politicians and some of the most noteworthy figures of the 20th Century – such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Nat King Cole and James Baldwin – would converge . . .
After lunch we walked down Lenox Avenue to Central Park, me carrying my Alpa TC, Phase One IQ 180 back and a 47mm Schneider XL lens.
This is not 1975:
The self-same Lenox Lounge referred to on the Red Rooster’s site. Note the patched bullet holes in the facade.
And finally, a Mostly Mozart concert in Avery Fisher Hall. Take with my Blackberry.
On this day one year ago: A boring out my window. The photo-a-day guy was under real pressure here.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A busy day at the office. A carried my Leica around with the 24mm Summilux strapped on it. Here’s some light and shadow on Park Avenue near my office:
On this day one year ago: Another not very good image
