Posts Tagged ‘food’
earthly logic
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One found himself at a Sunnyside Yards fence hole often referred to as “the old reliable” waiting for a train to roll by, a desire soon satisfied. There’s a reason I call it the old reliable, after all. I’m learning how to best utilize the subject tracking feature baked into my camera. By design the software which controls this looks for human/animal faces and eyes when directing focus, but it also allows me to lock onto something moving through the frame – like a LIRR train – and the camera readjusts focus continuously as the thing rolls through. This is neat.
During the few instances in the last few months which have seen me actually photographing human beings again, this focus tracking business has produced very nice results. I’ll post them in some future NP post, but you get a very nice separation twixt background and subject when using this particular setting. Good stuff.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On the particular evening that the old reliable was being exploited, I kept on encountering cast off food, like the half eaten McDonalds double cheeseburger pictured above. Personally, I only eat McDonalds 2 or 3 times a year, and that’s usually when I’m either desperate or drunkenly craving fast food. I forego the fries, and my order at the Golden Arches is either a small coke with two quarter pounders w cheese or two regular cheeseburgers with no drink or fries. If it’s not on the dollar menu, it ain’t me.
It’s not like I don’t eat burgers and fries, before you ask. It’s just that McDonalds’ offerings pale before what you can get from any old Queensican diner or bar. Why spend money on semi expensive crap when you can have a decent meal for more or less the same money?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The next bit of food dumping encountered this particular evening is pictured above. Some veg, some garbage, all left out in the rain for someone else to clean up. Grrr.
I carry any trash I’ve generated while moving around in my pockets, and empty them when I encounter a waste basket or other receptacle like a dumpster. This really isn’t hard to do. The mental process involved in leaving the house with a box of cabbage and then carrying it to a fairly remote spot along the fences of a rail yard and saying “here, here is where I will abandon these cabbages” is something I don’t understand.
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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.
peeking through
Minimalist Wednesday.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots in today’s post are decidedly citrus in flavor. During the cold weather months, I’ll often set up a table top studio in my kitchen and experiment with various gizmos and time consuming techniques. In the case of today’s post, citrus fruit is sliced with a razor blade with the goal of creating sections that are about a centimeter thick. I set the slices up on a petri dish, which is in turn affixed to a little stage. Under the stage is a fairly powerful flashgun, which blasts light through the cultivar revealing its hidden structures.
That’s a navel orange in the one above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The lemon one above is one of my favorites, since the light passing through it illuminates the ovum casing of the seeds.
The fruit slices end up operating as defacto light filters, I’ve discovered. The burst of flash lighting moving through the slices gets recorded on the camera sensor sans the opposite color frequency, as in the shot above which ended up with little or no representation on the blue plate of the rgb image. If you really want to get into the “nitty gritty” of how digital imaging works, a controlled environment with known parameters for color temperature and so on can really teach you a lot. Believe it or not, lessons learned while photographing centimeter thick slices of lemons in my kitchen informs and improves the underlying technique used to shoot a tugboat or bridge out in “the wild.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is under medical orders not to eat limes or grapefruits, due to a medication that is consumed daily, which regulates my blood cholesterol levels. It seems that the pill is essentially a refined and concentrated form of a compound found in both cultivars, and that consumption of the fruit might create a dangerous set of conditions in the liver. That’s sucks, as I really used to enjoy drinking a “Cuba Libre” cocktail every now and then.
I’m particularly fond of the shot above, as everything just went right with it.
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Come to the library!
In the Shadows at Newtown Creek – The Roosevelt Island Historic Society has invited me to present a slideshow and talk about my beloved Newtown Creek at the New York Public Library on Roosevelt Island, on November 14th, 6 p.m. Free event!
Click here for more information.!
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.
whisper more
It’s National Crunchy Taco Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One has two surviving memories from early childhood. The first involves being imprisoned in a playpen while my mother vacuumed the garishly colored (typical of the early 1970’s) carpet of my parent’s bedroom, and I must have been two or three years old. The other is sitting on my grandfather’s lap at the conclusion of a family dinner during the Nixon administration, an era when the family meal typically concluded with coffee and cake. I remember Grandpa grabbing my little kid hand, which was grasping a cookie, and then helping me dip it into his black coffee.
To this day, I’m still a black coffee guy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The aforementioned cookie wasn’t oatmeal raisin, instead it was something which members of my family refer to as an “Ida Cookie.” My Dad’s oldest sister, and the de facto matriarch of clan Waxman, was named Ida and she was a well practiced baker. Aunt Ida would routinely show up at everyone’s house with pounds and pounds of baked goods. Nearly everything she baked was designed to be quaffed with hot caffeinated beverages, and for one reason or another, if she had overlooked something to the point of it nearly becoming charcoal, we would all fight over possession of that particular cookie. “Char” was big with the family.
Ida also made amazing apple cakes, pies, and especially variants on the cookies. The most highly prized item she offered was something called a “raisin rock,” which was often shattered by knives rather than sliced.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle has been sharpening her baking skills in recent years. It started out when one of her advertising clients, a nationally known brand, required the production of example foodstuffs for marketing purposes but had no budget for doing it “the right way,” which in advertising speak means hiring a chef and a food stylist. Accordingly, Our Lady built up her skill set and began manufacturing items such as the spread seen above. I’d occasionally wave the camera around at her creations, although she did most of the photography, and we puchased a few low end umbrella lights to augment the process.
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grisly forever
A continuing series of colorful images, combatting the SAD reality of January.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a reason that your summer clothes are always tight when you put them on in June, and it has nothing to do with them getting shrunk by careless laundromat employees. During the cold months, there’s few options open for Queensicans other than to hunker down in their domiciles and blankly stare at a television screen while stuffing food into their mastication orifice. Personally, I’m a big fan of Citrus during the interminable winter months – high in fiber, hydrating, and it delivers a much needed blast of vitamin C.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thing is, living in Queens, one has a lot of options which – while not the smartest choice from a dietary point of view – taste real good. A humble narrator is prejudiced towards the selection of an oatmeal raisin cookie while browsing the bakery case, using the rationalization that since its oatmeal – it’s a better choice to make. One entirely omits the fact that these things are full of the “devil’s grease,” which is better known as butter.
Either way, I’m not even thinking about the sugar.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking of sugar, the shop keeps here in Astoria constantly up their cake game. Often, I wonder if they have struck some sort of deal with Satan itself, committing to slowly murdering as many of us as is possible with baked goods such as the chocolate heart cakes seen above. A true devil’s bargain, and shaped like that which they’re aimed at, these are.
Short term gain indeed, in return for an artery choking case of sclerosis which would send one plummeting to the fiery pit and into the company of the beast.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There are those who work for us, instead, it should be mentioned. Agricultural bounty is available wherever you choose to seek it out. My team of doctors have passed on a simple coda for interpreting foodstuffs of the vegetative variety – bright greens and dark greens are packed with iron and simple sugars, and red things are anti inflammatory powerhouses. Yellow things are also a good choice, but one should generally avoid white and brown things like potatoes due to the carbohydrate load indicated by their coloration.
They are ambivalent about orange things, my docs, which is good as I’m a carrot guy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The coda falls apart when witnessing so called “heirloom” cultivars, of course. There’s a lot of these sorts of vegetable and fruit on the market these days, which are sold with the legend “organic.” Of course, being “Captain Vocabulary” and all – the term has always bothered me as it betrays a lack of knowledge about what words actually mean. My response to the word “organic” is always “oh good, there’s no silicon in this tomato.”
I avoid the purchase of said heirlooms, or hipster fruit as I sometimes call it. If a “regular” tomato was good enough for Harry Truman, it’s good enough for me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Wildly verdant, despite the environmental horror of it all, these “sewer berries” can be observed growing in Greenpoint. I would recommend against their consumption, of course.
Legend has it that quaffing a handful of Greenpoint’s sewer berries will lead to bodily transformations and psychological changes. Vampirism might be rampant on the Queens side of Newtown Creek, but apocryphal tales from hoary Greenpoint involving lycanthropy all seem to tie back to some punter tossing back a few feral berries. At least that’s what’s supposed to have happened to McGuniness.
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impression sustained
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Only 13 days left until the 13th b’ak’tun ends, initiating the Mayan Apocalypse on December 21st. With time running out, it’s probably wise to try and keep your strength up. if you’re on the south side of Astoria, specifically 34th avenue and Steinway, you could do worse than visiting the food cart we locals call “Shwarma Joe”. They do a chicken sandwich here that can’t be beat, which incorporates eggplant, french fried potatoes, and white yogurt sauce along with fiery red sauce for around five bucks. Yum. I avoid Gyro’s like the plague, so can’t recommend that.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Oddly, another of my little quirks is that I like to pick a particularly cold day and go to the local fruit seller for tropical or out of season varieties. This is one of the great luxuries of living in New York, the overwhelming availability of fresh citrus in December, or the sheer caprice of buying a mango during a blizzard. Such carbon churning and earth destructive market availability is a rare historical anomaly. After the Mayan Apocalypse, we will be fighting each other over rat meat, so enjoy it while you can.
The Newtown Pentacle 