once revolved
je m’appelle Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, one has reactivated a formerly inactive and semi retired lens back into service. I won’t bore you with the technical details revolving around the camera, instead I’ll just say that this particular lens never performed terribly well on my old camera and it fell out of active rotation in favor of other devices. Saying that, it’s complimentary to the newer camera I’m now using so there you are.
These shots were gathered while hanging around Astoria, carousing and watching the other Queensicans go about their business. This is a telephoto lens, which allows me to get “up close and personal” from about a block away. Its biggest flaw on the RF system is that it’s a fairly “dark” lens, with a variable aperture.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The “variable aperture” bit means that as you zoom in or out, its internal settings change. It’s f4-6.3 over the range, if you’re curious. One vastly prefers lenses which don’t do this, and the rest of my current kit doesn’t do variable, but that’s where they get you on price. At the moment, I don’t have any financial impetus to upgrade to a better lens for this particular function. Also, maybe it’s just me, but if you’re zoomed out to 300mm you really want to be working the image at narrow apertures to ensure sharpness.
For those of you who aren’t camera nerds – lenses with wide apertures like f1.8-f4 produce images with narrow focal planes but allow a lot of light into the camera. Think about portrait shots with blurry backgrounds for what that looks like. Narrower apertures produce more edge to edge sharpness, but restrict the amount of light entering the camera, necessitating longer exposure times and or higher ISO settings. Photographers, myself included, drool over bright lenses. Lens manufacturers price their wares accordingly, and – generally speaking – the brighter a lens is, the more expensive it is.
Telephoto lenses with wide apertures are ludicrously expensive, which is why you generally see them employed by Paparazzi, Sports, or Wedding photographers. I take pictures of junk yards and tugboats, so…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Where that narrow aperture really bites you in the tuchas is at night, or in any situation which isn’t “outside during the day.” The rest of my lens kit is very capable in low light conditions, and even at f1.8 I’ve been hitting tack sharp infinity focus with them. The 70-300 I’ve brought out of retirement isn’t really in the same league as these more modern lenses, and its color rendering requires a bit of adjustment and attention that the newer ones don’t need. Saying that, it’s already paid for, so win.
Speaking of winning… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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.
hyperbola according
Se llamo Monday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned last week, a social engagement found a humble narrator wandering the streets of lower Manhattan, specifically the “East of Bowery” section of Chinatown. My luncheon companions all decided to jump on the subway to get home, but it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I had nothing in particular to rush back to Astoria to do, so…
A short walk found me at Corlears Hook, which is one of the locations you can catch the NYC Ferry’s South Brooklyn service. My intention was originally formed around going one stop south to transfer onto the Astoria boat, but the ferry people were running late and I missed my connection. Given the 45 minutes I’d have to wait for the next boat, one opted to instead take a different path to Queens and I transferred onto the East River line which would deposit my stinking carcass in Long Island City’s Hunters Point section nearby my beloved Newtown Creek. Since that was going to be a while as well, I opted to stay on the South Brooklyn boat instead of waiting on the pier for the East River service, which I’d be back in time for anyway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
What seems to have caused the Ferry schedule to unravel was the presence of a large number of recreational jet skiers on the East River. There were also abundant riders on the ferries, which caused the boats to expand their “dwell time” at the docks as the ridership loaded and unloaded. “Dwell time” is an important factor which transit planners need to incorporate into their schedules, but it’s unfortunately something that’s difficult to plan for. Somebody at MTA once told me that having somebody at a busy Manhattan hub station like Herald Square randomly hold a Subway door open for even a minute can ripple out into the entire system and cause delays for hours.
This is sort of what happened on the NYC Ferry system a couple of Saturdays ago. Missing that connection with the Astoria boat ended up costing me close to two hours and ended with having to find a way home from LIC once I hit the landward side. I’m going to suggest to the Ferry people at Hornblower (the private company which NYC uses to run the service), next time I have the chance, that they incorporate a “local” into the their lines system – one which makes all stops between Astoria and DUMBO on the Long Island coast and East 90th to Pier 11 Wall Street on the City Side. If the “local” is timed to visit these stops at the half way point between “express” service scheduling, it would ameliorate quite a few issues.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally speaking, I actually don’t care how long it takes to get from “a” to “b” if there’s anything interesting to point the camera at. To wit, the Crystal Cutler tugboat was steaming by Governor’s Island as the South Brooklyn Line Ferry I was on was heading northwards.
As a note, since this particular excursion played out, I’ve solved my “long lens” problem. The shot above was captured with a 24-105 lens, and regular readers of this Newtown Pentacle will tell you that I’ve been gnashing my teeth and decrying the fact that 105mm is the longest lens I own that’s native for the Canon mirrorless system which was invested in at the end of last year. Luckily, a 70-300mm lens which was purchased about 15 years ago and that I had sort of forgotten about is designed for full frame cameras and I’ve been successful at adapting it to the new system. It’s not ideal, but it’s already been paid for!
Speaking of historical lensing… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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.
understand dimly
Shabbos… a haaa… shabbos
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last Saturday, one had a lunch date with a few friends on Manhattan’s Lower East Side… well, actually the extremely Lower East Side. The only part of residential Manhattan that’s still remotely interesting is found between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, East of Bowery. That’s where you find architectural variation in the building stock, weird counterpoints, and an actual working class neighborhood. Don’t worry, the City and the EDC will likely declare the entire area a slum soon and knock it down in favor of glassine towers. They’re in the early stages of doing to Manhattan what they did to Brooklyn and Queens over the last few decades. Ugh.
What’s so interesting, you ask?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Going back to the Civil War, when this section of Lower Manhattan was the center of NYC and Manhattan was still quite industrial, groups of do-gooders and reformers have shown up in every generation who had the answer to “how you help the poor.” You had Jakob Riis and his reformers – and there’s still “Old Law” and “New Law” tenement buildings extant from their solution. A generation later, the Settlement House people showed up, then came the (actual) Progressives like FDR with an enhanced education system, then Robert Moses with his urban renewal money brought highways and Section 8 housing, and then Moses and the NYCHA people built the Rutgers and Al Smith Houses and the rest. These days the do-gooder’s hustle involves “affordable housing” for the well off and screw the poor. The fossil skeletons of these behemoth movements and trends litter the streets here. A history book in brick and mortar and steel.
All of these brilliant and connected people who have tried to solve the intractable problem of urban poverty over the centuries, here in Lower Manhattan, and never did it occur any of them to just give some of the cash they were spending to the actual poor people. The core issue of poverty is that you don’t have any money, which means your babies are hungry. When you have hungry babies, you do desperate and often violent things as that makes sense in the circumstance. America’s overlords have always felt threatened by poor people, and worry that actual cash in their pockets will be drank, smoked, or gambled away. There’s a puritanical side to charitable impulses in our country. God forbid somebody on Welfare might use the money to buy their kids an ice cream cone.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wish that you could see through time like I can. A fire escape bolted to the front of a New Law Tenement on East Broadway? Well, that’s symptomatic of Jakob Riis and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the formation of the FDNY after NYC consolidation in 1898 and the creation of a uniform fire code. The East Side of Manhattan’s “Chinatown” occupies a space that has long housed ethnic populations who regularly spoke languages other than English at home. German, Gaelic, Yiddish, Italian, Spanish. I wonder who made that fire escape, where was the foundry, and who got handed the license by the Tammany appointed Fire Inspectors to design and install it. Love it down here, I do, as it’s thought provoking in a way that a glass walled condo tower ain’t.
Speaking of seeing through time… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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.
inconceivable tensions
Thursday, Brü, Thursday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Priorities are a big deal for a humble narrator. First thing’s first, and there’s other less time sensitive stuff you leave on the back burner while dealing with exigent reality. If something suddenly bursts into flame, you drop everything and deal with that. The people in charge of our common enterprise – the Government, as it were – don’t seem to think like this. This isn’t about political party or philosophy, it should be mentioned. At the moment, there’s a fairly large bundle of “have to’s” which seem to have been overlooked, while the stuff that really isn’t urgent – for whatever reason – is being treated as number one with a bullet.
If you’re fighting to rezone a Manhattan neighborhood in this part of 2021, and acting like it’s a 4 alarm fire to get it done “right now,” you’ve mixed up your priorities. NYC’s existential crisis isn’t “big business” related, rather it’s small business. We need to marshal the forces of our society right now in the name of entrepreneurs and shop owners, and for small landlords who own residential buildings with less than eight units. The latter entities are the most commonly held form of small business citywide, and the ones who are really in trouble at the moment, but the Governmental types and their masters in the Real Estate Industrial Complex seem hell bent on demonizing and destroying them in favor of mega corporations.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Establishing Municipality based Credit Unions and low fee Financial Institutions designed to serve and service the sort of people and businesses written off by commercial banks like Chase or Citigroup would be a great start for the so called “Progressives” and “Socialists.” So would creating a mechanism by which NYC and NYS could resell the same insurance plans offered to their own employees with a small markup margin. That margin assures the Unions that they still enjoy an edge and advantage over the private sector, and would provide the funding required to extend health and pension benefits to the destitute or needy. The business of New York City is business, but the people who run NYC don’t seem to have ever thought about owning or operating their own business. It certainly doesn’t occur to them that few of us started out rich. Policy these days favors Alexander the Great situations. It’s easy to be remembered as “great” when your Dad built the world’s greatest army and died when you were still a teenager. We need more Phillips, and fewer Alexanders, right now.
John Lindsay went out of his way to make the poorest New Yorkers dependent on the City in the 1960’s. Michael Bloomberg went out of his way to insinuate a social Darwinism aspect into that dependency in the early 2000’s. Bill De Blasio and his ilk are a nightmare combination of the two.
Why isn’t encouraging and laying the groundwork for good old fashioned American Entrepreneurship not a part of the equation when the redistributing of common treasure occurs via taxation? Ecosystems work best when they’re varied and broad. You need a top predator – a wolf or tiger like Chase – but you also need mice and shellfish and shoreline vegetation for the baby fishes to hide in. In a properly functioning ecosystem, food falls off of the trees and everybody gets fat.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Next – Imagine if we created a single semester class for High School Seniors that taught the stuff you actually have to know as an adult. The significance of April 15th, how to claim legitimate deductions on your 1040, and how to approach starting a generic business in New York City. Jury duty, how to vote, the basic rules which adults have to follow in pursuance of avoiding fines and or jail time. What to do and who to call if you do get into trouble with the cops. I’d even plan in a remote visit or two with the “Scared Straight” crew at the local Penitentiary. How do I get health insurance, and what’s involved in signing a lease. What’s a household budget, and how much of your income should you save for a rainy day? Basically… Life 101.
When I was in High School, back in the early 1980’s when a young Joe Piscopo taught us all how to laugh again, there were mandatory classes called “Home Economics” and “Shop,” and whereas “Civics” had already been combined with “History” as “Social Studies,” they still talked about all this stuff. Saying that, I’m a grown ass man and that list in the former paragraph intimidates. Imagine being a kid trying to figure out the playing field and its rules?
Speaking of fixing the world… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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.
faiths contrary
There’s always a one in seven chance that it’s Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So – you’ve got the NYC Ferry and the Staten Island Ferry, as well as the Hudson River NY Waterways ferries – what are you waiting for, an invitation? Get out on the water in the fresh air, bring a camera, and catch some sun. NYC Ferry can (and I’ve pulled this one off, but it requires a bit of planning) get you from the South Bronx to Rockaway for $2.75 if you time it correctly. Soundview is the Bronx line, and it carries passengers up the west channel of the East River and through Hells Gate (Triborough Bridge, Astoria Park, Hell Hate Bridge) and then past the Brother Islands and Rikers Island and berths just across the water from College Point.
The Astoria line incorporates Manhattan’s East 90th street, then stops at Roosevelt Island, Hunters Point North in LIC, Manhattan’s 34th street, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and then Manhattan’s Pier 11 at the foot of Wall Street. From there you can transfer to another line or head over to the Staten Island Ferry.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The South Brooklyn line stops at Corlears Hook on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then Pier 11, then heads across the water to the foot of Brooklyn’s Fulton Street. From there it stops on either side of Atlantic Basin, the southern one (inside the basin itself) allows egress to Red Hook nearby the Brooklyn Passenger Ship terminal. Then it goes to Sunset Park’s Brooklyn Army Terminal and then all the way to Bay Ridge. There’s also an East River line which goes to Pier 11, 34th street, and Hunters Point South in LIC. I haven’t ridden the Lower East Side line, so I can’t speak intelligently about it. Supposedly, the next series of expansions will include Coney Island Creek and Staten Island, and the rumor is that Hudson side stops are coming too.
As a note, this isn’t paid content or anything, I’m just a fan. I find that getting on a boat and riding around the archipelago is a curative for bad moods and that being outside is generally good for one’s health. The best way to understand the NYC archipelago is from the water.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Feds. Driftmaster is a United States Army Corps of Engineers harbor maintenance vessel. They scoop flotsam and jetsam out of the water using that prominent crane, and other gizmos they have onboard.
More tomorrow at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
Speaking of navigational channel maintenance… what are you doing on August 7th? I’ll be conducting a WALKING TOUR OF LONG ISLAND CITY with my pal Geoff Cobb. Details and ticketing available here. Come with?
“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 