Archive for the ‘photography’ tag
Look out…
Lehigh’s back home. And taking her rightful place on the bed. Yesterday I was awoken by three friends and a birthday cake of astonishing artistry, now I have to contemplate the prospect of eating most of a layer cake. Must invite more company over!
As much as Lehigh wants to help, it’s a chocolate cake, so she’ll just have to cheer me on from the side lines. Had a reasonable walk today and learned a bit about my DSLR. There’s good and bad news, but one thing that struck is the way that once you shoot with something enough, you internalize the possibilities of the equipment. These days I know what my regular cameras (including the iPhone) will do with the shooting conditions I find myself in. I haven’t gone through that experience with the Nikon yet, especially with the different lenses. But I’ll get there.
Tags: daily photo, gratitude, lehigh, photographyRelated posts
Everyone’s gone to the movies…
My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.
Low ceilings, patterned carpet.
These twenty sentence things are not repackaged tweets; rather they are all new original content generated out of a crushing sense of inertia.
I’m a content provider?
The above photo was taken while I waited for people to get out of the way of another photo I wanted to take: a heavily bolted steel pillar in the middle of a Queens train station.
I had noticed the pillar’s knobby texture in contrast to the tiled surface of the passageway behind it and like so many other of my pictures I didn’t want something in it that would distract from showing that contrast.
Thus, I was in the position of wishing that the torrent of other people moving through the hallway on their evening commute would vanish, so that the purity of my aesthetic vision might be transmitted uncompromised.
I suppose I was feeling like Ayn Rand.
The moment of absence didn’t happen, at least not during the ten minutes or so I was waiting and snapping off pictures so as to ward off the notion that I was loitering, so I packed up my camera and moved on to my evening appointment.
In my pictures New York is mostly an unpopulated city.
It’s as if I appreciate their traces more than their presences: better a scrawl on a wall than the person sitting next to me on the subway.
There’s some exception if the person is cute, and my friends and family show up in front of my camera as well.
It’s a bad habit, to be wishing people away.
Pictures and recognition have been much on my mind lately.
Think of the world before 1800, and ask what percentage of the population had ever had a likeness made of their individual physiognomy.
Following on from that, how many ever had the slightest expectation of that happening to them?
And what is those percentages today?
In much of the world, I suspect that it has become hard to make it all the way through your life without having your picture taken, either by family or by someone else.
Is turning the camera away a recognition of the everyone’s compromised privacy?
Tags: daily photo, new york in black and white, photography, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Not a twenty, I don’t think…
Mom just swung by the office, and while I know she’ll want to kill me for posting this view of her, I have to post this, my favorite of the pictures I just shot. But here’s the thing: I’m shocked at the difference in quality between the camera I just lost, and this the backup one. The ability to handle interior light conditions is vastly different. Now given, this current camera is about four or five years old. It’s just that I can really see the difference in lens quality between it and the Lumix.
I might have to start toting around my DSLR. I’m turning into one of those photographers I always used to crack wise about.
Over on The Onion’s AV Club, I see that Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson is giving a rare interview. I may have said this before here, but I don’t really care for that strip, which provokes passionate devotion among many of my friends. Some of it is beautifully drawn, but I just never thought that the writing was much more than a few stock situations reshuffled, and I was pretty much repulsed by Calvin, who struck me as a thug in training, unredeemed by his flights of fantasy. It’s Krazy Kat, where you’re mostly being asked to root for Ignatz. But then I always hated Dennis the Menace, too. Maybe I see Calvin as exemplary of the boys that used to frighten and make me nervous as a kid: boys who delighted in smashing stuff and running around. I suppose we are meant to see him as creative, and rebellious, but I just don’t get it.
Tags: Calvin and Hobbes, camera, comics, criticism, daily photo, mom, photographyRelated posts
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, reading
