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.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m lurking through life with my shirt-pocket-sized camera. Here’s an ATM that includes another self-portrait. The distortion foreshadows some of the composites that I’ll be posting later this week from my 1999 24 hour series of self-portraits.
Interestingly (perhaps predictably) I’m falling into a familiar pattern of daily photo projects. If you Google “one photo a day” or a similar combination of words you’ll find sites with titles like “Ben takes a picture of himself every day” or “Noah takes a picture of himself every day for six years”. Who gives a damn? Why would you bother to click through one of these links, edging yourself one click closer to carpal tunnel syndrome? “Ben takes a picture of himself . . ” is like a 20-year old’s memoir. Not enough milage to be interesting.
The picture-a-day space has become a rundown neighborhood. It seems to be populated with losers who don’t have anything else to do with their time than take pictures of themselves. There are now sites that make it easy to post a picture a day. Try flickaday for example. (Sponsoring my own website for this purpose is distinctly not easy.) There are more of them, a lot more of them, than when I started this project two years ago. There’s a photo-a-day bubble in this country. Notify the Federal Reserve – picture of myself every day sites may be Systemically Important. If photography were housing these sites would be double-wide trailer parks.
Anyway, here’s the ATM taken with my Ricoh GRD IV.
ATM
Free at last – this is the last picture in the series of 24 self-portraits taken hourly over 24 hours on February 13 and 14, 1999. It’s taken, well 24 days, to get this off of my chest. The camera was an Arca-Swiss 8×10. In this and a few other images in the series I look slightly cross-eyed. It may be the camera angle which was a bit to close for portraiture.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A friend came ver for dinner in the kitchen. Image taken with my Leica M9.
A couple of new thoughts. I really liked the way that the self-portrait that i posted yesterday came out on the web. I’ve decided the give the “on this day one year ago” idea a rest for a month. Instead I’m going to post the full series of 24 hourly shots of myself, one a day starting today. The first image was taken at 2;06 PM local time on February 13, 1999. All were taken in my studio in Warren Connecticut with an 8×10 Arca Swiss view camera. I processed and scanned all of the negatives. The background derived from a Chuck Close self-portrait.
Here’s the image of the day followed by the first self portrait.
Francesca Barra has a friendFebruary 13, 1999 2:06 PM
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Have you filed your estimated taxes? So a new lens just arrived for my Panasonic GH2 – a 7mm to 14mm zoom (14-28 35mm equivalent). This thing is very wide and very good. The pictures are interesting. I’m a wide shooter and this lens is really wide. Even the picture of my feet that I took to make sure that the camera was working has some interest.
New lensFrancesca and meCourtyard
On this day one year ago: Hmmm . . we’re on to an appropriation them here. I appropriated Mike Bidlo.
WESTHAMPTON, NEW YORK – More with the Leica and the 50mm Summilux. I’ve been shooting a lot in the past month with Alpa and a 35mm Schneider which for a number of reasons facilitates images with a lot of depth of field and corner to corner sharpness. The Leica lets me rebel from that a bit. today (and yesterday) I generally shot with this lens wide open at f 1.4, producing large far out of focus regions. Steve’s house seemed to call out for this treatment.
Like most modern Leica lenses the 50 mm Summilux has optimum sharpness at its widest aperture, f 1.4 (lenses from other manufactures often need to be stopped down two stops for maximum clarity), this is one of the reasons why these lenses are so expensive. The out of focus portions of the of 50mm Summilux images have a lovely, creamy character, a quality that is referred to as “good bokeh”. I also like the way it renders colors. I don’t often write effusive praise for lenses. I guess I just got carried away by this one.
By the way, sorry about the dog. You know how I feel about pictures of dogs and cute kids.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I picked up a painting from a restorer/framer – it’s an 18th century Italian arcadian landscape from Maria’s mother. Here’s a link to my blog entry when I dropped it off a the framer. July 19 blog entry. Anyway, I caught myself in one of the many, many mirrors in the shop. My teacher and friend Lois Connor has told me to stop doing this (I’ve got hundreds of similar images) but sometimes I can’t resist. Leica M9 and 50mm Summilux.
