Peach Spa

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We look
For hooks
To which
We Can
Hang an
Order,
A map,
An under
Standing.

NYNY
Canon 7D

Canon 7D, NYNY

Box PIle

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Jay Maissel - "Black and white is an inside joke with no reference to reality. Color approximates reality, gets more of the feeling of what's there."

Arthur Miller - "Create the poem from the evidence."

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New York, New York
Canon G10
PS4 & Topaz & touches of Alien Skin Snap Art 2: Oil Paint

After The Times Square

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I'm re-studying expressionism. It demands complex, well planned images with parts that are worked by the artist to the point of distortion in order to communicate the feelings of the moment.

Here's Broadway, an explosion at night. Blasting color over every part of you... Throbbing with shocking energy. Noisy, fast, a cacophony of sheen. Too much to compute.. Too big to focus. Too massive to step back far enough. Neck hurting high and needling its way into the black curtain up there.... Puncturing it.

Broadway's a vertical thing at Times Square after the Times stupidly left the party.

Geek Stuff: 42nd & Broadway

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Here's 42nd Street & Broadway at 1:06 pm last wednesday. These are almost straight images from my new 40D shot full frame. I purposely aimed almost into the sun to see how the dynamic range would hold together. The camera raw processor in Photoshop CS3 automatically diddles with the histogram a touch... otherwise these are virgin images shot with my Canon 10-22mm at f9, 1/200, at 10mm.

There's lots of detail, nice contrast, hot color and plenty of dynamic range. Oh... I did use a polarizing filter which may have fed the camera flare a bit. I've got mixed emotions about filters on lenses. The engineers who designed these optics did not leave room in their equations for an additional piece of glass to be mounted micrometers in front of their lens array. So any filter will degrade... it has to. I'm always amazed by people who will buy expensive glass then mount a cheap UV filter "for protection" at the tip of the lens. How often have you scratched a lens, particularly when you use a lens shade? In fifty years of image taking I have never scratched a lens. So unless I need to add an effect, I won't use a filter.

Polarizing is an effect that needs adding. So, to get that deep color boost and flare reduction from a PF, I make the compromise. Actually the thing is doubly messed up by the way a polarizing filter works. You've got to twirl it, and that means getting finger prints on the front of the filter.. which further degrades the optics. Sigh....

All of that said, the images here are adequately sharp at 200 ISO. I still haven't mastered the metering of this new camera body, so I set the metering mode to partial for the day last Wednesday, I have to read the manual. I understand that the 40D has a true spot metering capacity which the 20D lacked. This should be a useful feature.

Okay, any comments?

Jersey Boys

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Forget... That's what you do when you haven't been to Broadway for some time. You forget that there's a filtration process and that the people whose product arrives on these stages are the very best that the American theater's got. The writers, directors, producers, musicians, and actors are all at the peak of their crafts and of their careers. So it comes as a startling astonishment to the people like me who get here every few years ... at just how good these people are.
Jersey Boys is about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It won the awards last year. So these are the best of the best who are working just now. The audience went panty-throwing nuts. Women were hooting, men were shouting, the place rocked. See the way this image explodes! Imagine the pounding melody behind it. And then listen for thousands of hands clapping, and their owners standing up and screaming. You don't have to imagine this... I was one of them. It is that good. This time, I'll try not to forget.

New York State Of Mind

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Dye your hair, you become a blonde. Someone knocks off your hat and you wonder, "Why did he hit me?" Collide your bike and you say, "I ran into a pole!" But these are all things... hair coloring, wigs, implanted boobs, bikes, dentures, hats, suits, heels... wuddever. Still, wear them and you extend yourself, right? Okay... okay... heavy stuff.
My point is that the line between who we feel we are and our immediate environment blurs. Get into a tank,or a big SUV... and we feel stronger, bigger, muscular, lethal!
So the question for the day, boys and girls, is... If you live in NYC, if you are a New Yorker (as opposed to a blonde), are these pictures in any sense - WHO you are? And isn't that different from say the folks who live in E. Dennis on Cape Cod Bay? Or in Lancaster? Waco? Or... well you get the point. So, like, what's the answer? Do these streets make these people different? How?Hmmmm....

Crammed

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So how to get a feel for a typical street in Manhattan? Well, maybe there's no one 'typical' street, but at least, how about a grab of a scene that would resonate with a New Yorker? I've tried that a bunch of times. And one of the first things I noticed was overload. Details are everywhere. There's so much, in such sharp focus, in so many colors that the jumble actually becomes... Well, you know how your mind is hard wired to find patterns? New York at first fights that, and then it just imposes a different sense of pattern atop whatever you're used to. Here... look at this image. Do I have it? is that 'typical'? Can you hear the horn section?

Guess Where I Went?

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I told you we were going away for a couple of days. Anyone want to guess where? We were lucky to get there Sunday and return to Lancaster on Monday. Apparently Saturday in the city was an artic adventure with freezing temps and gale force winds off the Atlantic. But, as if switched off for our arrival, the breeze was gentle and the night temps in the high thirties. Over the next couple of days I'll share my impressions with you... But here's the explosion you expect... and this my friends is a Sunday night! A hair brighter on the Great White Way than Lancaster Square. Cool, eh?