Posts Tagged ‘moon’
hidden pneumatics
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
May 15th was a busy day for me, with a Newtown Creek Alliance event in the morning that I helped out on and an astronomical anomaly in the evening. The approaching lunar eclipse saw me planning and plotting, but as it turned out – the weather had other ideas.
I managed to get set up and execute a test shot before a solid sheet of clouds obscured the body. Said test shot is above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned several times, Newtown Creek Alliance HQ is found atop a television production studio in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section. Downstairs, they’ve been shooting “The Equalizer” tv show, but I still haven’t gotten to meet Queen Latifa.
Upstairs, however, is the Kingsland Wildflower roof, which I enjoy access to. A couple of phone calls to my peeps to arrange, and I’m up top with fairly unparalleled and unique views. The plan, which was extremely well thought out, was to get the blood/eclipsed moon hovering over the sewer plant. C’est la vie.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had actually rented a Zip Car on this evening, given that I’m again a licensed driver according to New York State. The investment in the rental was to ensure that I could quickly dart around and “get” the shot from a variety of locations but with the moon occluded by clouds…
What? I was just going to go home? You kidding? Who am I?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We have waterfront access at HQ, so I headed down to the bulkheads after locking the doors up on the roof. The tripod was deployed and I waved the camera around a bit.
It’s a very weird sensation hanging around the Newtown Creek waterfront at night and all alone. This is normally one of the busiest places in the entire City.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator was quite frustrated by the whole weather thing, and it seemed that whenever I was ready to shoot – nothing was happening. You can’t control serendipity, however.
I was also annoyed that I had dropped $100 I don’t have on renting a vehicle which I didn’t make terribly good usage of. Truth be told, I spent two hours just driving around and enjoying the mobility of a car. It’s been a long time, and I used to absolutely love driving. Turns out that I still do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t get caught out for drunk driving or any sort of violations, before you ask. I just stupidly missed the window for renewal of the document, and then it became a “thing” to do so. I avoid dealing with “things” assiduously until I have to, but since the plan for the next year involves moving out of NYC to “America” – you need to have a car in America, so I had to deal with the “thing.” I had to essentially attend a Driver’s Education class and take a road test, so sweet memories of High School were in the air for me earlier this year.
Insult to injury section: just as I broke down the camera from its tripod mount and was heading towards the gates, a tug approached the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge and the span opened for it. Missed it.
Serendipity, it affects us all.
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“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.
in cipher
On this day in 1898, the City of Greater New York was born.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Happy New Year.
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finally shunned
It’s National Water Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Continuing my week of presenting photos of non horrible subjects, today here’s a few shots of the moon. One will state this unequivocally – getting an ok shot of the moon is hard. The thing is moving across the sky a lot faster than you think it is, and from an exposure triangle point of view – it’s about half as bright as the sun and set against a background that’s darker than Satan’s beard. You need to account for the rotation of the earth, as well as the orbital pathway which the satellite itself is racing through. Then… you’ve also got the issue of trying to fill the frame.
I like a challenge, of course, but lining up all the gear you need to accomplish the shot (tripods, lenses etc.) and doing the exposure math first is a real bugger. It ain’t exactly “click” and then I got it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The moon without environmental context is challenging, and if you’ve got it once you’ve pretty much conquered that mountain. Setting exposure for the moon posed against the landscape is another bannana entirely. The “proper” way to do it, and the manner in which a lot of those shots you see from Jersey City showing the Statue of Liberty and the lower Manhattan skyline with a perfect looking moon and sky behind them is basically “exposure stacking,” meaning you do two or more shots and then combine them in photoshop. It’s a variation of the technique which is used for product and macro shots where you move the point of focus around in the frame across multiple exposures to compensate for depth of field blurriness and then combine them into one super sharp image.
Without exposure stacking, you get something like what you see above, with the moon taking on the appearance of a dim midnight sun.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Getting the moon’s aura is one of the hardest things to capture, at least for me. The light frequencies of the aura are operating at the very edge of human visual perception as it is, and you need to catch just the right weather conditions for it to be visible to the camera. Were the moon static… you’d be able to just do a long exposure and institute the exposure stacking technique, but with my equipment catalog there’s just a few seconds available to me before the motion of the planet and the satellite “smears” the shot.
There’s a relationship – mathematically – between focal length, aperture, and sensor size. If you were to google the term “astrophotography” you’d find that it’s quite a speciality and there’s all sorts of techniques and specialized gear involved. Intriguingly, there’s actually mechanical tripod heads which can track the movement of your celestial target and keep the camera aimed at it, but that’s not the sort of thing I can justify investing time and treasure in.
As it turns out, in the midst of writing this post, a nicely written and quite descriptive piece – discussing astrophotography related technical matters, techniques, and device settings – from lonelyspeck.com, appeared in one of my RSS feeds.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If anyone reading this is interested in diving into trying to photograph the night sky, and you’re on the eastern coast of North America or in particular New York City, the disadvantages are both anthropogenic and naturally generated environmental in nature. “Dark sky” as it’s known, doesn’t exist here due to light pollution. There’s all sorts of vibration in the ground from traffic and subways, and the oceanic influence on the air means that there’s always a certain amount of humidity creating atmospheric diffusion. The best nights for shooting the moon in NYC are the worst ones to be outside – when it’s wicked cold and utterly clear.
You’ll need a “bright lens” and a sturdy tripod, and I’d recommend a shutter release cable of some kind so you don’t have to touch the camera which causes shake and vibration. Additionally, autofocus should be avoided, do it manually. The moon isn’t terribly contrasted, color wise, and your camera’s autofocus will just hunt back and forth seeking something to lock onto.
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khephrens gateway
Shooting for the moon, in Astoria, Queens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Like everyone else in North America, a humble narrator was up on the roof the other night getting shots of the supermoon/lunar eclipse.
My experience was somewhat less than salubrious, due to the fact that the restaurant on the first floor of the building I live in was still open and their exhaust system operating. This equipment created a constant vibration in the concrete surface of the roof, which is ruinous for long lens shots. Pictured above, a view of the moonlight drenched Shining City as seen from Astoria.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The actual eclipse itself, a so called “blood moon.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Looking east from my vantage, and through a flight path leading to LaGuardia airport.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The moon as the eclipse was still forming up, moving towards penumbra.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A vertical shot looking eastward along Broadway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As long as I was up there, one last shot of the shining city. In an ideal world, the eclipse would have happened later in the night, when the moon was stationed above Manhattan.
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October 3rd, 2015
Calvary Cemetery Walking Tour
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typical denizen
Beneath the sodium light of a salty moon.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Today, in 1881, the bleeding heart Russian author Dostoyevsky died from a triad of pulmonary hemorrhages. In 1913, a mysterious series of fireballs streaked across a 7,000 mile long patch of the night sky, which scientific opinion described as the break up of a previously unobserved natural Earth satellite – a tiny moon. It’s also Ash Monday, aka “Clean Monday,” which kicks off the liturgical calendar for Easter in certain variants of Christianity. Queensicans rejoice on February 9th, for on this day in 1956 – Mookie Wilson entered this world.
For me, it’s just Monday. I hate Mondays.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Whenever it has been possible, as the weather has been decidedly antibiotic, one has engaged in the usual pursuit of hidden knowledge around the dustier sections of North Brooklyn and Western Queens. Most of the aforementioned objects of my interest have been a bit better hidden than usual, given the blanket of snow and ice which occludes the pavement. Luckily, the Real Estate Industrial Complex is at work in Greenpoint converting the toxic East River shoreline of that ancient village into a residential zone. A protective wall of condominiums will rise, ones so stout that they can protect neighborhood streets from fire and flood alike.
A few of them will be residential transformers, I imagine, able to turn into giant robots who will defend Greenpoint and Stuyvesant town against an attack. They will be known as CondoBots. That earth mover you see in the shot above? Yep, that’s a small one, and it calls itself Payloader.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The latest bit of hidden knowledge I’m working on, incidentally, is figuring out where all the hidden or filled in tributaries of Newtown Creek are or were. One branch of Maspeth Creek used to terminate at the locus of 58’s – avenue, street, road – nearby the Clinton or Goodfellas Diner. Under the Kosciuszko Bridge, on the Queens side, there was a largish tributary that flowed south out of the heights of Sunnyside, and ran between Laurel and Berlin Hills on its path to Newtown Creek. It’s “map work” and since I have zero budget for acquiring facsimiles of historical plottings, quite difficult and slow going. Headway has been made, however, and all will be revealed soon enough.
It’s all so depressing, really. Look at what happened to Dostoyevsky, who died of a bleeding heart.
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The Newtown Pentacle 