Archive for September 2016
vague aura
Wood, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To start, apologies for missing yesterday’s post, but frankly – a humble narrator was completely wiped out from the effort leading up to Wednesday evening’s Fireboat trip on Newtown Creek, which seems to have gone pretty well.
We had about 70 “influential” people onboard, served them BBQ and drinks, and discussed the future of things on the Creek. The Fireboat actually ran aground for a short interval nearby the intersection of the main stem of the Creek with English Kills, as it was low tide and a sediment mound was exposed, but what’s a night out on a historic Fireboat without a bit of adventure?
The shots in today’s post have nothing to do with the excursion, instead, they’re macro shots of parts of a decaying wooden fence which my landlord has decided to remove. The wood is so magnificently weathered, and ridden with wood lice, that I couldn’t resist setting up my “ghetto” lighting rig and doing a few macro shots.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Ghetto lighting is one of terms, btw, for an improvisational setup that doesn’t use “proper” equipment like studio lights with diffuser umbrellas or anything like that. In fact, there’s only two light sources and a flash (set to its extreme low power setting) involved. The cool light comes from a flashlight taped to a small tabletop tripod that’s focused on a transluscent plastic place mat used as an ad hoc diffuser, and the warm one is a flashlight of the same model which has an amber colored pill bottle taped to it. The camera is my trusty old Canon G10, affixed to a magnetic tripod, and the flash was in the camera’s hot shoe.
There’s a reason I call it ghetto lighting.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The funny thing is that these shots were captured while I was stuck at home, on the phone, making final arrangements for the Fireboat excursion. I was literally begging the Borough President of Queens’s office to send out a staffer to come along, but they weren’t terribly interested in attending. The Brooklyn Borough President’s office, on the other hand, wanted to send actual elected officials. I had established a rule on the trip that we didn’t want the actual elected officials onboard, as it would have stifled the conversation and diverted it to other issues, and it was difficult saying no to City Council and Assembly members who wanted to come onboard. Saying that, we had a Deputy Commisioner of the DEP, the show runner of Riverkeeper, and lots of other important folks onboard. I’m VERY happy to say that I actually managed to get representatives from Maspeth, East Williamsburg, Bushwick, LIC, and – of course – Greenpoint on the boat.
One of the failings of the political establishment here in Queens is a general disinterest in Newtown Creek, probably because they really don’t want to open up the whole “post industrial environmental issue” can of worms.
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hung about
More experimentation with my new lens, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pal, Jiminy the Parrot, is a ham. He’s also a great and cooperative subject when I’m trying to crack out some shots. Jiminy also hosts a wealth of fine detail in the green suit he always seems to be wearing, which makes him an excellent subject as far as testing out how a lens might perform as as far as rendering detail and color. It seems every piece of glass that you stick on your camera sees the world in its own way, and learning the way that my new Sigma 50-100 thinks and visualizes things is integral to the decision about whether or not it is a permanent addition to my kit.
At the moment, I’m loving the thing although it is damned heavy and there has been a bit of a learning curve as to how to best employ it. The lens itself weighs nearly four pounds, which is the equivalent of at least a couple of parrots. Add in the camera, and I’m waving about 5-6 pounds of gear around for hours at a pop. Doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of an average day – it adds up.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned last week, the Sigma “art” series lenses have a real predilection towards rendering colors in a hyper saturated manner which can be somewhat reminiscent of the four color world of comic books. This fits my visual sensibility, but for those of you out there who prefer muted color and heavy saturated blacks in your shots, this might be a deal breaker. That’s Astoria’s Broadway in the shot above, just east of Steinway Street, if you’re curious. The lens isn’t “all the way” open, instead it’s at f2.8. I could have doubled the ISO and narrowed the lens down to f5.6 to create a bit more of an “infinite” hyper focal range, but wanted to see what a shallower depth of field would do.
Going back to the “heavy” issue, I had been carrying the thing around all day and noticed that a slight fatigue tremor was present in my right arm. The good news, of course, is that I can use the extra exercise. The bad news is that my right arm is going to tone up to accommodate the extra carry while my left hangs there uselessly and will end up looking like a little tyrannosaur limb in comparison. Guess I’ll have to just carry around a gallon of milk or something with the left as I wander about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The virtue of this device, of course, is in the wide open side of it for usage in low light situations. The shot above is handheld and captured at ISO 800 at f1.8. It’s also Broadway in Astoria, and depicts the corner that HQ is found on. Since the night shots are what I’m interesting in pursuing this fall and winter, rather than brightly lit daytime shots of Jiminy the Parrot, the shot above is pretty promising as far as what this piece of glass is capable of.
Weather permitting, I’m planning on making a late night pot of coffee pretty soon and putting on one of my orange safety vests in preparation for an “all nighter” wandering around the industrial zones and concrete devastations surrounding that legendary exemplar of Municpal neglect known as the Newtown Creek.
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so special
A busy week arrives.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator has been somewhat less than fully engaged with my normal round for the last couple of weeks, simply in the name of enjoying the last couple of weeks of August. Uncharacteristic of me, periodic downtime is nevertheless a “necessary.” One believes that all true wisdom can be gleaned from 1970’s “prog rock” lyrics and as the band “Yes” proferred in their anthem “Roundabout” – don’t surround your self with yourself, move on back to square.
Ruts can be depressing, as are the daily demands of the world.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This week, I’ve got a fairly major Newtown Creek event going on (not a public event, unfortunately) which has been increasingly all consuming, that will play out on Wednesday evening. Suffice to say, it takes place on a boat, and that one has been tremulously watching the quite changeable weather reports that have accompanied the path of Hurricane Hermine up the eastern seaboard.
As soon as the event has passed, which will be after Wednesday evening, I’ve got a few new offerings for the general public as far as walking tours and so on that I’ll tell y’all about.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The aquatic excursion will be a Newtown Creek event, onboard and co hosted by the Fireboat John J. Harvey, which I’ve been describing to invitees as a “Community Conversation about Newtown Creek with the Newtown Creek Community.” The event will bring together community representatives, business leaders, environmentalists, and government employees with the goal of discussing the future. I’m proud too say that one of the goals of the trip – to engage neighborhood people and organizations from the eastern section of the Creek (Maspeth, East Williamsburg, Bushwick) seems to have been accomplished. The event has been underwritten – in the name of full disclosure – by Connective Strategies and the Newtown Creek Group, who represent the “potentially responsible parties” named in the Superfund declaration.
Cross your fingers, as this should be a rather productive conversation. We are nearing the interval in which the post superfund future of Newtown Creek will be decided upon, and it’s one of my goals to ensure that everybody’s voice and concerns be addressed. As I’ve told multiple people – there’s a path which I think is the right one, but it’s not up to me to tell Maspeth what it needs. That’s what City Hall does, and unlike the Mayor I happen to believe in Democracy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As an aside, the probable serial killer whom I’ve christened the “Queens Cobbler” seems to have returned to the area, and resumed their nefarious work – as evidenced by a sudden dearth of “single shoe” occurrences.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
inclement forecast
A labor day tradition, postponed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The 24th annual Great North River Tugboat Race and Competition has been postponed from September 4th to Sunday, October 9th, 2016 due to the likely appearance of Hurricane Hermine in NY Harbor on Sunday.
Click here for the Working Harbor Blog which will be your best source of information on the storm and the rescheduled Tug Race.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
rational position
I really need a vacation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Part of the fun involved with buying a new lens is testing it out. Doesn’t matter how good or bad the device is, there’s “sweet spots” and contradictory failings which the itinerant wanderer needs to be familiar with if the thing is part of the daily carry. The B&H folks have a fairly generous return and exchange policy, and in my experience, the window in which you can hand them back the lens is a crucial interval for the investment. Accordingly, one has been shooting everything, and everywhere.
I can tell you this, the sigma 50-100 is one hell of a portrait lens, but I’ve had unequal results in certain circumstances. My effort at the moment is to discover where and when those failings occur, rendering them predictable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the places this lens absolutely sings is in the dark. The shot above is “wide open” and was captured while I was waiting for the train at 59th street recently. I’ve been saying it for a while, but the subway system is an absolutely fantastic photography workshop. Worst case scenario lighting, with a reflective subject moving at speed through darkness.
I don’t often “open the hood” on the process I use to produce shots for Newtown Pentacle, but since a bunch of you asked after yesterday’s post…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots above were captured at f2.2, with the lens dialed out to 94mm at ISO 5000. I’ve got a few other “bright lenses” but the sigma 50-100 really does a beautiful job drinking in the lurid shimmerings of pale light, and it literally outshines the other specimens in my “dark” kit. You can discern the lens’s aperture blades in the hot spots surrounding the R train’s headlights, incidentally.
Shots like these subway images are dependent, in my experience on shooting posture. There are US Army sniper rifle manuals out there which discuss shooting postures, and the body posture process which riflemen use to steady and focus their fire on targets is quite appropriate for the capture of light through a lens, IMHO.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
From a different commute, the shot above was captured at Queens Plaza, and also depicts an R line train entering the station. There’s a bright, almost cartoony quality to the way that sigma’s “art” series lenses renders primary colors which required some adjusting on the saturation slider when I was working on the shot in Photoshop’s “camera raw” window.
For those not in the know, RAW format is essentially an uncompressed digital negative which allows a great deal of fine tuning to the captured shot as the file contains ALL of the information which the sensor saw, whereas JPEG is an image which is compressed and all the decisions have been made for you by the camera. Those decisions include color temperature, depth of shadows/highlights and so on. Every RAW shot can therefore receive a bit of a tweak, and I always shoot in that format.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I engage in when testing a lens is trying to push it to fail. Architectural detail does not work well with a wide open lens, due to the shallow depth of field. Even an infinity focus will produce unacceptable “bokeh” in this context, or at least it’s unacceptable to my eye. I want to see every rivet.
Saying that, the two shots of the Manhattan Bridge in today’s post were shot at f2.2 on a sunny afternoon.
I think I’m going to keep this lens.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 