WARREN CONNECTICUT – I’ve spent the day here having what feels like a speed bag workout with my day job. Not much time or space for photography. At around 8:00 I decided to see what I could do handheld with my Leica Monochrom around the house in near darkness with my 24mm F1.4 Leica Summilux lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK. I love shooting Manhattan at night. My Leica Monochrom and a fast 24mm Summilux f1.4 lens let me produce very interesting night images working without a tripod. I spend a lot of time shooting straight up.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Finally, some cold weather. Actually really bad weather. We had planned on going out to dinner but the roads were terrible so I pulled together dinner out of what was available. This is what it looked like outside, taken with my Leica Monochrom and a Leica 18mm Super Elmar lens. A 16 second exposure on a tripod. Sixteen seconds was too long to be outside – the wind was howling.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is the best time of year to photograph Manhattan at night. “Night” happens early. It’s dark by 5:30 0r so so the lights are still on in most offices while the exteriors are dark. This opportunity continues through mid-January, but at least now it’s not freezing cold. I’m working without a tripod here with a fast lens, my 24mm f1.4 Summicron, and relatively high iso (5000) on my leica Monochrom. Shooting up in Manhattan is a regular theme here. Here you go:
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I periodically go back to school on photography. It’s a great way keep to technical skills fresh, to get work critiqued and to meet new friends. Today I started a ten week class on landscape at the International Center for Photography taught by Benjamin Dimmitt, a landscape photographer who does a variety of subjects and has a particularly lovely body of work on primitive Florida. The first assignment was to shoot “out your window”, literally or figuratively, in a comfort zone, at various times and in various lights. Of course I shot out my window, something that I’ve done frequently here, at various times over a 24-hour period. You’ll be seeing more of these over the next few weeks.
So . . . I put my Alpa Max on a tripod, selected a 72 Schneider lens (the “normal” formal length for this format) and fired away. The results where ok, but the most interesting thing going on seemed to be the sky so I switched to a wide lens (the 32mm Rodenstock) to get more of it. Because of accidents of meteorology the night images came out as the most interesting.
On this day one year ago: Citcorp. I photograph the Citicorp building and its neighbors a lot: Citicorp Center images. I love their bulk and the surprising angles and reflections. It’s also convenient for me. My advice to urban landscape artists: Look up!
NNEW YORK NEW YORK – A busy day of meetings. II got home and still hadn’t taken my picture (except one iPhone image from a meeting but I decided that it would be unprofessional to post it to the web. So I set up my Sony Nex-7 on a tripod in the dark with a wide lens (the 15mm Voigtlander) and did an image of out living room, draped with drop cloths, illuminated only by the light coming through the windows.