itemized exceptions
I just can’t stop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More of the macro shots with which I’ve been passing the cold weather down time, in today’s post. First up is a bit of Swiss Chard. Chard (Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris) is actually part of the beetroot subspecies of the Amaranthaceae family. I’m planning on cooking the non photographed portions of it up with garlic, red onion, olive oil, and a bit of a poblano pepper thrown in to make it interesting. That’s likely the first time I’ve ever shared a recipe at this, your Newtown Pentacle, btw.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a bit challenging to pose this leafy thing, given the manner in which its leaves buckle up and curl. The now standard under flash arrangement was used to reveal some of the internal structures of the thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All sorts of Lovecraftian stuff was flying through my head while I was shooting these, it should be mentioned, but then again – I was standing in a darkened and quite chilly room in which bright lights were flashing every eight to fifteen seconds. The thing about strobes is that even if you close your eyes, the light will penetrate the lids.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I mentioned pareidola in my last post of macro shots, and a humble narrator is experiencing it heavily in the shot above. It’s the nature of the human mind to try and find recognizable faces and other familiar shapes in entirely random patterns, or at least it’s the nature of the slowly rotting ball of snot found between my ears and behind my eyes.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is a bit of that plum I was showing you in the last macro shot, with a blast of light traveling up and through the flesh of the fruit. The slice was probably about a quarter inch thick, and I set my flash gun to half power.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The snow pea pod pictured above required full power on the flash gun. The waxy skin of the legume provided a bit of refraction as well, which was unexpected. A legume, the snow pea (Pisum sativum var. saccharatum) is also known to the french talkers as a “mangetout.” That means “eat all.” I know it’s supposed to be “two peas in a pod” but three just worked better.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fuzzy Kiwi fruit, (Actinidia deliciosa aka mangüeyo), is seen in the shot above and is the national fruit of China. Once known as the Chinese Gooseberry, the vine escaped China in 1847 via the actions of British horticulturalists. A girls school principal began planting the vine in New Zealand in the early 20th century, and the fruit soon became synonymous with the country, although it wasn’t called Kiwifruit until 1959.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oddly enough, the world’s largest producer of Kiwifruit is actually Italy, and the specifics of the most common commercially available variant of this cultivar – called the Hayward – are that the world produces some 1,412,351 tonnes of it annually with Italy and New Zealand leading the pack. It seems that since the two nations are in different hemispheres, they don’t actually compete with each other due to seasonal variability.
Who knew?
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obstinate retort
random things I’ve seen.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My pals at the North Brooklyn Boat Club collect bricks and other things they find along the shorelines of the lugubrious Newtown Creek. Historic bricks are a whole topic in themselves, but the ones you find along the creek can be somewhat revelatory, as many of them were used in the furnaces of the industrial revolution. The company which manufactured these so called “refractory” ceramics was founded in 1854, and located on Richards street, between Van Dyke and Beard streets, in Red Hook.
Odds are that it was used for the retort of a manufactured gas plant, based on the sort of discoloring and wear pattern it exhibits. It’s also likely infiltrated with all sorts of heavy metals and arsenic compounds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over in Blissville, along Greenpoint Avenue at the corner of Starr, this (reportedly) 1930 model building hosts a deli at the street level and two apartments above. There’s a basement as well, and I’ve found conflicting accounts regarding the date of construction, with NYC’s Buildings Department displaying a “CofO” listing the place as having been first occupied in 1917. The records regarding Queens at DOB are pretty spotty, if you ask me, and I chalk up their inaccuracies to the chaos of LIC & New York City Consolidation.
According to the DOB, the building Newtown Pentacle HQ occupies in Astoria is actually the parking lot of an Italian restaurant in Rego Park, as an example.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This one is shot from the last car of an N train leaving Queens Plaza, through that trippy lenticular plastic that MTA believes will defeat the armies of chaos. I dream of getting on an N, or Q, with clean windows. It’s part of the reason why I like taking the C, as those older model cars still allow an unimpeded view of the tunnels.
Regardless of optical distortion, I like the shot above for some reason.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Simply put, the shot above describes the proper Brooklyn pronunciation of the word “fifth.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in Queens, which is the only place in NYC where a private property owner can get away with hanging his own sign on the pedestrian sidewalk admonishing passerby to make way for his workers and their heavy equipment. Look out for forklifts indeed.
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tropical marks
A quick look inside the Circus Warehouse in LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the Newtown Creek side of LIC’s Vernon Blvd., you’ll find the Circus Warehouse. I’ve been desirous of doing a long post on them for a while, but this ain’t that. The organization instructs and trains for the athletic side of the circus world, teaching acrobatics and rope training. Occasion found me sheltering from the cold in there recently, for reasons which I’ll describe in a post next week.
Suffice to say that for the 15 minutes or so that I was in the space, I cracked out a few shots of interesting people doing cool things – what more could the wandering photographer ask for?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a level of physical strength on display in the shot above which astounds. We’re I to attempt something like this, I’d experience a body wide cramp which would collapse into a singularity and a black hole would form.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Circus Warehouse offers all sorts of programs and classes, which the athletic and physically sound types amongst you might consider. They are based in a 1960’s era warehouse that sits on the former Pigeon Street Yard of the LIRR in LIC, at the Vernon Blvd. street end where the Vernon Avenue Bridge once stood.
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occasional indifference
It’s all so depressing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not too much to report to you today, Lords and Ladies. The hermitage season has certainly seen me shooting a whole lot of macro shots of foodstuffs, but otherwise a humble narrator has been stuck in the house nursing a wounded shoulder and disabled right arm. Wish I could describe some outré tale about the infirmity, but just chalk it up to age, and the “pain squirrel.” One has hit that section of life wherein something hurts every day, and whichever branch of the bodily tree that the pain squirrel has decided to inhabit that morning is where you’ll find the offending sensation.
Aches and pains are just a part of life, like taxes and a lonely death, after all.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shoulder thing has been a “mofo” however. I’m right hand dominant, and unfortunately the limb that hand dangles off of is the affected one. My left arm is used as little more than a paper weight, and the right one has been nigh useless for about a week. If this sort of thing was occurring in my left arm, of course, I’d be in a hospital and under the care of a cardiologist. Saying that, this has little to do with the heart and circulatory system, instead it’s a pinched nerve which is slowly unpinching. Opiate pain medications were required just to accomplish a few hours of sleep when the condition first manifested, and one was forced to fashion himself a sling. Shoulder and tricep were dancing around unbidden within the skinvelope, my bicep muscle felt as if it was being eaten by a horde of beetles, and my elbow was reporting back to the brain that it had become hollow. Additionally, my wrist was of the belief that it had become packed in ice.
The dog was quite concerned, but she made a play to assume the alpha/dominar position in our household pack. What can I say, she’s a dog, that’s what they do when they sense weakness. In the case of my dog, of course, rebellion took the form of her staring at me while she “woofed.” Her play ended when Our Lady of the Pentacle got home, since we all know who’s really in charge around here.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Accordingly, I’ve got zilch as far as new stuff to show you this week. Today, and for the next couple of days, it’s going to be shots from the archives – such as the twilight shot of the Sunnyside Yards above. Pain Squirrel and canid rebellion notwithstanding, the show must go on.
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cubits wide
More macro comestibles, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in a couple of posts from last week (this, and that), a humble narrator is making productive use of the hermitage forced upon him by the cold weather by experimentation with macro lens photography. The subject matter for this pursuit has almost exclusively been food based, and in the case of what you see in today’s post – it’s a true fruit and a drupe, not berries which are commonly referred to as fruit like banana or citrus.
The circumstance of the shots utilizes a jury rigged lighting set up which includes the usage of a powerful flash placed behind the subject, which allows for some of the internal structure of the food stuffs to be revealed. It’s all somewhat complicated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First up on the stage are apples, specifically two of them, and I’ll be damned if I can tell you exactly which one of the 7,500 breeds of the thing they are – they’re red apples which I bought at the bodega across the street from my house is all I can tell you. The nice thing about this sort of project is that in addition to providing for an interesting technical challenge which produces somewhat intriguing results, it also results in a series of tasty and healthy snacks for a narrator to enjoy when the work is done.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Apples and humans have been together a long time. Literal interpreters of certain holy texts will tell you that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil consumed by Adam and Eve was an apple, but that’s largely because of a translation era. There’s also the Nordic tradition of the Golden Apples of Idunn, which supplied Odin, Loki, and the rest of that crew with immortality. Heracles had twelve labors, and acquiring the golden apples found at the Garden of the Hesperides was one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Malus domestica is the botanical classification for all 7,500 kinds of domesticated apple, which have been bred out from a wild ancestor native to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang that is called Malus sieversii. It’s believed that the original cultivation of apples as a crop began in China’s Tian Shan mountains in prehistoric times. Apples are produced by a deciduous tree which is part of the same botanical family that produces Roses and Plums, amongst other useful things.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that China is the world’s apple superpower, producing roughly half of the worldwide annual 80 million ton harvest of the fruit. Apples are nearly twice as genetically complex as human beings, and unlike humans, if you store them under the right conditions you can count on them staying fresh for months. The Granny Smith and Fuji variants can be kept viable in storage for nearly a year under tightly controlled circumstance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Apples were brought to the Americas by European colonists in the 17th century, and the first orchard on the continent was in Boston. The schoolboy mythology version of American history claims that Johnny Appleseed distributed cultivars of Apples to far flung homesteads. The reality was that John Chapman was a Swedenborgian missionary, who maintained a far flung apple tree nurseries business, who would just show up on your property and try to convert you to the “New Church.” He would distribute individual sections of the bible to people he visited, operating a one chapter at a time library service for pioneers. Chapman would also try to talk the farmers he met into partnering with him on an apple nursery planted on their property.
The esoteric side of Swedenborgian thought opined that if if you could create a society that operated in the manner of an orchard, it would be producing better citizen and parishioner fruit than you could by letting them grow wild. Later adherents of the philosophy would popularize and institutionalize into education a tenet of their faith, and if you attended Kindergarten then you’ve experienced it.
Swedenborgian Kindergarden – American Child Orchard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above looks right down where the stem of the fruit connected to the branch. My “under” flash was set to maximum power and “throw” to illuminate the otherwise lightfast skin and flesh of the fruit. I’ve received a couple of comments about the prior posts that there’s a “Georgia O’Keefe” sort of sexual vibe going on with some of these shots, btw.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Technically speaking, these are the sex organs of a life form, so… probably not far off. I’ve always been interested in the visual similarity of various animal body parts to analogous organs found in the plant world. My opinion on the subject has always been that evolution is a somewhat lazy beast, and that certain anatomical configurations were figured out very early in the game and have been widely transmitted as the various clades diverged from each other. Someday, science will describe certain shapes and structures as being distinctly terrestrial – presuming we have something else to compare earthly life to in a clinical setting.
Either that, or it’s the same mechanism of the human brain which renders a passing cloud as either a winged dragon or a unicorn and sees recognizable shapes in otherwise random patterns, which is called pareidolia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned above, Plums also belong to the Rosales or Rose family, just like apples. A taxonomist will argue about the number of plum species there are, but the presumption is that there are something like 20-40 individual variants. Commercially available plums are a different story, with most of the Plums we eat originate from either the European plum (Prunus domestica) or the Japanese plum (Prunus salicina).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Plums aren’t fruits, unlike apples, instead they’re drupes. They’ve been domesticated by humans since Neolithic times. If you spot a stand of Prunus domestica in the woods of the Caucasian Montains of Eastern Europe, you’ve got a good candidate spot for archaeologists and paleontologists to poke at.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I’m trying to do with these macro experiments is to find a way to do an “x-ray view.” This requires a bit of “studio-fu.” The shot above is the same basic setup as the one below, with the difference between them being that in the one above, I left a lamp on that flooded the lens facing section of the plum with light. This reveals surface details and true color.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the “x-ray view” above, the lamp was turned off after about a second. When the big flash underneath the Plum went off, all that light went traveling straight up through the thing, revealing all the internal structure. Haven’t quite perfected this procedure yet, but intriguing – ain’t it?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots above and below are long exposures, coupled with that flash traveling up through the Plum to reveal the internal structure of the skin.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one above is my favorite of the plum series, mainly because you see both exterior and interior of the thing simultaneously. I had to jump through a few digital hoops developing these things, incidentally, as my improvised lighting and flash set up hopelessly confused the camera.
I’ll be doing more of this kind of thing periodically, as I’m having a lot of fun, and eating a lot of fruit.
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