BOSTON MASSACHUSETTS – My usual monthly business trip to Boston was really bleak. Boston was cold an alternated between snow and freezing rain. This pretty much captures the mood. Leica M9 and 90mm Elmarit lens.
On this day last year: Maria and Luiz Scwarcz at Fatty Crab.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – Here we are after a snow storm. Again. Lovely light and rapidly moving clouds made this image of illuminated trees against a dark background possible. Taken with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and a 300mm lens.
On this day last year: My best barn of the past year. Terry Tanner’s barn in enveloping light.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I spent the morning in a snow-covered Central Park. A few interesting images. Here’s a view of the El Dorado, one of three large building on Central Park West built by Emory Roth (the others are the Beresford and the San Remo). This is a common angle on the building, across the Central Park Reservoir. Two frames taken with my Hasselblad H4D-60, with a 300 mm lens on a monopod. This is another example of how well this camera’s files convert to black and white.
On this day one year ago: From Bryant Park.
WARREN CONNECITCUT – I’ve been experimenting with tilts and shifts on my Hasselblad with an HTS 1.5 tilt/shift adapter. One of the traditional reasons to tilt the lens on a view camera is to extend depth of field by tilting the focus plane; the technique is known as the Scheimpflug principle. I’ve been struggling with getting accurate focus with the HTS 1.5 so I’ve gone back to an alternative digital solution to the problem of extending depth of field, focus stacking. The idea is to take multiple images with the focus point shifted slightly from image and stack the images in specialized software to achieve an image that in focus throughout. See my post for January 4, 2011.
Here’s an image taken with my Hasselblad H4D and an HC 300 mm lens. I used the long lens to obtain compression in the image and to compose it to my taste. The 300 mm lens has shallow depth of field, even when stopped down, and there are image quality issues with stopping down to extreme levels. So I took 9 frames moving the focus plane through the image, and stacked them in Helicon Focus. The process is relatively painless as long as you have a lot of computing power. As I’ve noted previously black and white conversions from the Hasselblad are more like large format film than any other camera that I’ve used since I started with digital.
On this day one year ago: Snow drifts! How about that. Also taken with my Hasselblad. I guess this demonstrates that there are only so many landscape subject to photograph when the landscape is covered by snow. I prefer this year’s effort.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – We had a heavy snowfall Friday night so we stayed in Manhattan and drove up to Warren on Saturday morning. There had been very little wind so the snow stayed where it fell on tree limbs etching them against a darker background. I stopped at a rest stop on I 684 North of Goldens Bridge New York. Ok but not splendid photographs. When we arrived in Warren I captured this with my Hasselblad H4D-60 and a 300 mm lens.
On this day last year: An “out my window” in good light.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I left the apartment early this morning to run some errands, camera in hand. There was a light snowfall that progressed to a full fledged storm. As I left our building’s courtyard I noticed that the view back through the entrance might be of interest. Odd. I’ve lived here for a long time and this hadn’t occurred to me. On the way back I stopped on the Park Avenue island, and took this with my Leica M9 and a 90mm Elmarit lens:
One this day last year: Restaurant construction Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn. This looks more interesting to me with a year’s perspective.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – I took my Leica M9 out today with a wide lens (24mm Summilux) looking for wind-carved snow in fading, oblique light. I was pleased with what I was seeing and enjoyed take the images, but on reviewing the images none jumped out at me. Perhaps this is a worn-out subject (at least through my eyes).
We had dinner with some friends at Winvian, a nearby inn. A woman at the next table turned out to have a food blog. She included a reference to me – an odd experience for someone who avoids the limelight – in her entry on Winvian. Here’s a link: It’s All Fare.
Anyway here’s wind-carved snow:
On this day one year ago: Luke Tanner’s cornfield.
