Archives #047
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pals at Newtown Creek Alliance and I used to find ourselves reporting oil slicks and other petroleum related situations to the NYS DEC quite often. The head spill investigator for the agency, who was based in LIC, used to bring us in for an informal lecture and describing how to identify the type of conditions we were observing, and how to report it to the agency to get the quickest investigatory response. This relationship bore much fruit over the years, and still does.
Me? I’ve got at least three ‘reported observations’ which ended up becoming formal ‘remediation efforts’ by NYS officialdom. ‘Eyes on the Creek,’ that was one of the operative rules for us.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Often has a humble narrator opined that the NYC Subway system provides circumstances favorable to the practice of a very technical form of photography. Low light, reflective surfaces, fast moving subject matter… add in a prohibition against tripods, lights, and flash… if you’re struggling to master hand held and low illumination photography skills, go ride the subways and get good at it. You’re commuting somewhere anyway, why not make creative use of otherwise lost time?
2015’s ‘copper eyed’ is all about subways, and photographing them as they enter the station. As a note: This is one of the very few times that I included the shot’s exposure triangle information, incidentally, which was me trying to pull back the curtain a bit to show how I do my thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I always figured that since half of my time outside the house in NYC was inevitably going to revolve around transit so I might as well make some usage of my wait times on the subway platform. Eventually this catalog of transit included every single public conveyance I could get a camera next to – taxis, buses, citibike… everything public.
These archive posts are reaching into Newtown Pentacle’s backups, and are pulling posts that went public on this date, in their respective years, going back to 2009. This practice will continue until I’m back on both feet full time, and new photos and stories can be gathered. For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, I broke my left ankle at the end of September.
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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 
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