Archive for the ‘Degnon Terminal’ Category
wail hastily
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just because I was walking home from LIC’s Dutch Kills didn’t mean I was done taking photos, nor was I done experimenting with the focus stacking technique. Got this one on Thomson Avenue, corner of Skillman, across the street from LaGuardia Community College. I had become so focused on shooting that I had lost track of time, and this is about the moment I discovered that it was well after midnight and that my camera battery only had two bars of power left on it. Thing about this particular technique is that every single image represents 9 or 10 individual shots, so it’s pretty easy to chew through your camera memory cards and battery charge in short order.
Oops. I carry extra batteries with me, of course, so no big deal. Saying that, wow, I was something like 300 plus shots and six hours into the walk and I hadn’t even realized it. Additionally, this is also when I realized that despite the fact that the audiobook I was listening to at the start of the walk had long ago concluded, I still had my headphones in for some reason. Missing time, huh?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My toes were promptly turned towards HQ, and the slogging home section of my night. I had covered a lot of the same ground at the start of the evening, so photo opportunity on the way home was fairly limited. Saying that, there were a couple of shots that jumped out at me – like this little tree sapling that had somehow rooted itself alongside the fenceline of the Sunnyside Yards. I love this sort of sight – indomitability of nature and all that.
I was still playing around with the focus stacking technique mentioned in earlier posts this week, which allowed for a terrific amount of captured light and tint.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This image depicts the western looking pov from Skillman Avenue, where you can see the Queens Plaza South and North truss bridge over the rail tracks, and the elevated 7 line above the roadway. While gathering the focus stacking shots for this one, four distinct passages of rail train sets rolled through the frame, leaving behind light streaks to mark their passage.
Man, I just love Long Island City.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, November 16th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
livid marks
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, one spent some time playing around with the camera at a very familiar and often visited spot – the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek in Long Island City. Also mentioned, one was goofing around with a technique called Focus Stacking, which the images in yesterday and today’s posts are a product of.
I really like the way these shots rendered out, and plan on experimenting with this sort of thing a bit more in the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s some of the legendary black mayonnaise sediment bed pictured above, where it shoals out of the water at low tide. This shot is a bit beyond normal human visual range, as a note. When I was shooting it, those three ducks looked like rocks and were entirely immersed in shadow.
I won’t bore you with the technique again, but if you wave a camera around regularly, hit YouTube and type focus stacking in – there’s a million tutorials on how to do it.
Funnily enough, this technique is something I’ve always associated and applied it to product photography and macro work than I have with landscape.
Ya can learn something new everyday, I tell’s ya.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That little tree growing out from under that factory building is something I’ve been obsessed with all year. As above, so below, huh?
A friend told me that it’s likely a “Tree of Heaven,” which is the eponymous cultivar of the book “A tree grows in Brooklyn.” To me, it’s symbolic of the fact that no matter how badly we’ve screwed up the environment, nature will find a way.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, November 16th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
chanting mournfully
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Dutch Kills is a tributary of the fabulous Newtown Creek whose course runs entirely through Long Island City. The canalized waterway is hideously polluted, and you should thank your lucky stars that photographs do not transmit odoriferous information. These photos were gathered while standing on the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge, and were created by a fairly complicated bit of “Camera Fu.” A regular one shot image is normally captured using some combination of aperture/sensitivity/speed. The images in today’s post are actually several images that are married together using a technique called “focus stacking.” This technique allowed me to use a wide open aperture of f1.8 – which would normally be quite blurry in all but a few inches of focal area. Instead, by moving the point of focus around the composition and capturing up to 9 images in one compositional set up, I’m able to combine them all during the developing phase in photoshop.
Focus stacking in low light allows for dramatically shorter exposure times, and also allows changing lighting conditions to mix and merge. The technique also helps with getting control over a particular pickle encountered in urban low light photos – harsh street and passing vehicle lights.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The wider aperture and quicker exposure time also combats a flaw which long exposure shots suffer from, which is the erasure of any texture for the water in favor of rendering a smooth mirror like surface. The waters of Dutch Kills are typically quite still and mirror like to start with, and they really don’t need any assistance on this front. It’s about getting the photo to look the way you want it to, right?
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, one was ironically seeking out fall foliage here in the concrete devastations of LIC, but then I found some.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I’m looking forward to experimenting with this technique over the winter months, actually. A few interesting results have been arrived at by mixing exposures during photo stacks, as well as the focal points. A seriously underexposed photo mixed in with a series that had blow out whites due to street lighting saw a lot of that underexposed detail get mixed into the final product that was lost in the “proper” exposures. Interesting. Very interesting.
Never, ever, stop learning and experimenting with your tools.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, November 16th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
balustraded terrace
It’s always Monday somewhere
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These images have nothing to do with the route, but I conducted a short walking tour on Saturday. First one of the year. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney attended. That’s me, Mr. Big Pants.
One of the Newtown Creek Alliance “revitalize” projects – we have a “reveal, restore, revitalize” mission statement – is playing out in the Hunters Point section of Long Island City. The plan involves the replanting of a median strip nearby Gantry Plaza State Park so that cultivars chosen to attract the attentions of insectivorous pollinator species can be installed. A fairly large group of volunteers showed up to pull weeds and turn over the soil, and on Wednesday of this week another crew will show up to plant said cultivars. Next Saturday, I’ll be leading another short walk if you’re interested in coming along. Masks and distancing required, obviously.
It was nice to feel useful again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Tonight, one of the Queens Community Board 1 committees I’m a member of – Environmental – will be hosting a zoom meeting discussing various issues here in Astoria. Contact the CB office if you’d like to virtually attend. It should be a fairly uneventful conversation, as we have to procedurally focus in on budgetary recommendations for most of it. If you’ve got anything environmental in nature you’d like to bring to the groups attention, please do so.
Again, it’s nice to feel like I’m actually earning my dinner again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Next Sunday, the 27th, marks the ten years in point since the declaration of Newtown Creek as a Superfund site by the Federal EPA. This has put me into a reflective mood, which never works out well for a humble narrator.
Before any of you ask “how the hell did you narrate a walking tour while wearing a mask,” I used a small amplification gizmo which has a microphone headset and a belt worn speaker to compensate for the muffling effect.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, September 21st. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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.
sharp toothed
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My weekly visit to the Dutch Kills tributary of the fabulous Newtown Creek, found in the Degnon Terminal section of the Long Island City industrial zone here in Queens, was perpetrated recently. My pandemic long investigations into the presence of “it” continue, here in the former “Workshop of America.”
What is “it”? It is likely people having some cruel fun with my credulous nature, and taking advantage of the boredom and anxiety which the pandemic has induced in a humble narrator. Regardless, most of the stories I’ve received about “it” revolve around the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge section of the waterway so I keep on finding myself here. I’m also kind of obsessed with the indomitable nature of that tree in the shot above, and have been making it the focal point of various photos all year.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has been forced into using certain esoteric practices behind the camera to properly record the darkness down on the water. Next up in my bag of tricks will be the use of polarizing filters to reduce the reflectivity of the water and allow the device to peer down into the gelatinous fathoms. It’s actually only about a single fathom, maybe a fathom and a half, here at Dutch Kills. It is fairly gelatinous, however.
One way or another, what I can say is that I didn’t see “it” but had the definite impression that there was something odd going on in the water. There were all sorts of splashes and ripples being caused by one critter or another down there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The streaks in the water are the reflections of fish scales moving around during what ended up being a thirty second exposure. I’ve actually become quite fascinated by the artifacts of movement which turn up in these shots. Can’t tell you what sort of fishies were swimming around down there, but it’s likely these were Mummichogs.
Mummichogs (Fundulus heteroclitus) are essentially the bottom of the vertebrate food chain at Newtown Creek, but in a larger sense that’s the niche they occupy in the brackish and environmentally compromised waterways of the northeastern United States. They are omnivorous, and can thrive in fairly awful conditions. A bit of pescatarian trivia is that a Mummichog was the first fish to go to Space, having been studied on NASA’s Skylab back in 1973. Environmental scientists use these fishies as an indicator specie, meaning that you catch a bunch of Mummichogs and then grind them into a goo. The goo is then analyzed for the presence and concentration of certain chemical compounds like pcb’s or heavy metals.
The search for “it” continues.
Note: I’m writing this and several of the posts you’re going to see for the next week at the beginning of the week of Monday, August 10th. My plan is to continue doing my solo photo walks around LIC and the Newtown Creek in the dead of night as long as that’s feasible. If you continue to see regular updates here, that means everything is kosher as far as health and well being. If the blog stops updating, it means that things have gone badly for a humble narrator.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“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 