Archive for the ‘Long Island City’ Category
cut classes
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happy Thanksgiving week, which I’m taking off. Single image posts will greet you between now and Monday the 30th of November. I’ll be out taking pictures, in between dodging microbiotal clouds of expirant and looking over my shoulders for other sources of existential danger.
Today’s photo displays what’s happened to some of the yellow cabs during this pandemic season of ours. Notice that the cars are stripped of both medallions and placed advertising materials. That water is the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, in the Long Island City section of Queens.
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 23rd. 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.
stagger back
Friday odds and ends.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One finds himself constantly exhausted by and annoyed by all of these online Zoom meetings, as opposed to the sort of in person meeting fatigue that was experienced in the “before times.” On the plus side, I don’t find myself traveling around to some dusty school cafeteria or office building annex to be told by Governmental employees that something is impossible due to some arcane regulatory prohibition. Conversely, I don’t like being told no when I’m sitting in my own kitchen back at HQ. There’s also a whole lot of non verbal communication which gets lost – I’ve taken to describing my various postures, laser like stares, and other physical “tells” to whomsoever it is I’m talking to, as there’s a whole lot of communicative indication which don’t translate on video conferencing.
Y’know, it didn’t have to be like this, and if everybody had taken this plague seriously back in spring and summer we’d likely be half way back to normal by now instead of negotiating “new normal.” Idolators, that’s what you anti maskers are.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots in today’s post didn’t fit into the other offerings this week, so they’re lumped together in an odd fashion today. The sheer scale of Long Island City’s Degnon Terminal Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) is staggering, and you never quite get past that when wandering the seemingly narrow sidewalks lining the massive factory buildings in this area. These are old school double wide factory sidewalks, btw, notice how that garbage truck in the lower right corner of the shot above only takes up half of the pavement?
Luckily, these old dinosaur factories have found new utility and life in recent years. Light industrial usages – commercial printing, garment assembly, etc. have recently found their way here. You want to talk about blue collar employment, you have to talk Newtown Creek or you’re just virtue signaling.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of my beloved Creek, here’s a shot of the Dutch Kills tributary in LIC, part of the series I’ve been presenting all week here at Newtown Pentacle.
If you haven’t added your email to the subscription function here at WordPress, or followed me on Twitter ( @newtownpentacle ), you’re missing out on free daily updates full of photos from places most seldom see. I go to these places so you don’t have to.
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.
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.
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.
rat tracks
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s fall foliage time in Long Island City, so capturing the bucolic splendor of the Industrial Business Zone is on my menu this week. Admittedly, there’s a definite deficit in these parts – vegetation wise. You take what you can get, I always say.
This shot is from Skillman Avenue, nearby a company called “Propper” which seems to manufacture and distribute military and utility oriented clothing (army pants and service uniforms) that have more than the usual number of pockets sewn into them. I wear army pants most of the time for both comfort and utility, but order a different brand than propper, one that includes a lot of velcro closures on those many pockets. My particular brand also has several internal pockets sewn into the velcro closure outer ones, which comes in handy when I want to leave the camera bag at home. Between the pants and my trusty Scott E Vest sweatshirts, I’m packing (literally) 39 distinct and secure pockets at all times. Literally – I’m Mr. Big Pants.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One lost track of time on this particular lonely walk around a nocturnal Long Island City, what with the unseasonably warm November weather last week. Additionally, the route I chose successfully avoided the presence of any other humans somehow, so possibly my missing time involved an abduction by aliens. Solitude is no mean trick, given how this section of Western Queens which I call home counts amongst the most densely populated sections of North America.
Under normal circumstance, solitude is reached for and desired, during a pandemic season – it’s nepenthe.
This particular route isn’t exactly unfamiliar to longtime readers of Newtown Pentacle, of course, and I’ve been marching along it throughout the pandemic. I’ve actually been making it a point of visiting certain spots at different seasonal intervals, which has been kind of a “thing” for me to do. We’ve all had to find something to do during this weird interval, I would imagine. Adapt or die, right?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Given that it looks like the long dreaded second wave of Covid is upon us here in the big City, I’d like to join the chorus and remind all to be preventative and careful as you move around the world in the next few months. I know a LOT of people who experienced the virus during the first wave and even the folks who didn’t end up in the hospital due to it described a pretty undesirable experience. Who wants to get sick, anyway?
It’s going to be a very cold winter, after a very hot summer and a definitively annoying autumn. I imagine somewhere around the middle of December we are going to start hearing about a baby boom, as December 13th will make it 9 months since this all started and “Netflix and chill” became a lifestyle. Damn.
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.
The Newtown Pentacle 