Posts Tagged ‘newtown creek’
inmost mysteries
DUPBO.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Avoiding population centers as I’ve been, it’s been a while since I’ve been to the DUPBO (Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp) area in Long Island City’s Hunters Point section, preferring the more industrial quarters further east… Blissville, Industrial Maspeth… all of my happy places. Yes, the illegally docked boats are now observed three and sometimes four deep here in DUPBO, bobbing around in Newtown Creek and tied off to trees and fence posts. This activity has largely undone the positive influence of the HarborLab operation on the shoreline, but the only laws which matter are those which are enforced and the powers that be have incongruously looked the other way at this behavior, so…
Live and let live, right? Nothing really matters, ultimately. It’s all just a fiction.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things which drew me down here was a rumor of a tent colony having been set up under the Pulaski Bridge, which turned out to be spurious. There are a couple of people living in RV’s down here, one of whom has a particularly enthusiastic dog, but nothing that could qualify as a tent city. Last guy I met living in a tent down here was a veteran, and I helped hook him up with shelter via my pals in the liberal/progressive/socialist conspiratorial gobernemental cabal. They’re so evil, I tell ya.
I often consider starting a blog aimed at the Fox News crowd. Headlines like “Amphibian Genderfluid found in vaccines” or “Evidence of Devil worship in China revealed” are probably too high brow, though. Is “Trans Toad VAX horror” more like it?
Hey, check me out! Hangs out under bridges, starts to troll. Hah!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Long Island Railroad usually has an engine sitting nearby and ready to roll with its works active for some reason, and a particularly long in the tooth one greeted me the other night. A maintenance of way tool, EMD MP15AC is what it’s manufacturer (General Motors) would have described it as during the production years of 1974 and 1985. I’m told it’s a “diesel switcher/road-switcher locomotive” which delivers 1,502 HP.
I took a picture of it. There you go.
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, May 25th. 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 as we move into April and beyond, 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.
dissolved in
Dutch Kills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s become a fairly rare thing for a humble narrator to be out and about whilst the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself is still wobbling about in the sky, but just the other day this was the case. The light was purple in coloration, given that the aforementioned ocular fireball was descending in the west behind New Jersey.
The air smelled uncharacteristically nice at Dutch Kills, which is a tributary of the fabulous Newtown Creek. Dutch Kills diverges from the larger waterbody some .7 of a mile from Newtown Creek’s intersection with the East River, and proceeds into Long Island City roughly 3/4 of a mile. It’s crossed by multiple bridges, and since maritime industrial usage of the bulkheads is zero, self seeded vegetation lines Dutch Kills’ banks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If you could see through time like me, you’d observe a swampy marshland here in the pre industrial Dutch Kills watershed. Islands forming around Juniper and Cypress roots covered in cosmopolitan plant colonies – mixed speciations of salt resistant shoreline vegetation. Critters would abound – the Dutch settlers in this area often commented on the vast numbers of deer and birds in this area. So many deer, in fact, that the north side of Newtown Creek reportedly had a wolf problem and Government entities offered a paid bounty for wolf pelts all the way up to the Civil War in the 1860’s.
Upland streams and wetlands were eradicated between the Civil War and the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, and the subsequent creation of the Sunnyside Yards and the Degnon Terminal in the 1910’s and 20’s finished the job of isolating Dutch Kills from the land surrounding it. The waterway became an industrial canal, with railroad tracks crisscrossing the reclaimed land around it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It turns out that some of the trees pictured above, the ones with the purple flowers, are called Empress or Princess or Foxglove Trees (Paulownia tomentosa) and their presence is directly linked to the presence of those rail tracks. To start, Empress Trees are quite opportunistic, and can root themselves into cracks in the concrete, or even in the mortar between bricks. They are also an “invasive specie” native to central and western China. Ecologically speaking, they are amazing organisms to encounter, as their leaves “fix” nitrogen in a very efficient fashion and enrich the soil they grow in as dead leaves decay on the ground. Empress trees also drink up a lot of CO2, sequestering 103 metric tons per square acre of the greenhouse gas into their wood. They also look cool, and as mentioned, the flowers are pleasant smelling.
It seems that during the 19th century, Chinese porcelain manufacturers would use the pillowy seeds of Empress Trees for the same purpose that a modern day counterpart would use styrofoam packing peanuts. Cargo traveling by boat and rail spread the seeds along their courses, which is theoretically why you see so many of this type of tree growing wild in areas like Dutch Kills. Perhaps, in a century or so, there will be styrofoam trees found here.
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, May 25th. 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 as we move into April and beyond, 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.
stirred stealthily
Borden Avenue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I got scared the other night, thinking I had spotted a pride of teenagers roaming about LIC, so I hid behind one of the structural legs of the Long Island Expressway and pondered a few things. Yes, teenagers travel in a “pride.” Busy body white ladies, the “Karen’s” you see all over the internet trying to boss people around, form up a “privilege” when they gather, as in a “Privilege of Karen’s.” A band of teenagers is less than five individuals, whereas a pride is a large group comprised of a lead Alpha team commanding several Master Betas who in turn lead individual bands. Dominance behaviors familiar to any primatologist are displayed. Deep and turbulent currents occur when a Pride encounters a Privilege, with both sides threatening to summon a Cadre of Cops while recording each other with cell phones. Invariably, someone shouts “world star” or “welcome to YouTube.”
As a note, Cops usually come in pairs. Six or more Cops form a Cadre, whereas a full precinct wide deployment is a “fuck ton” as in “Holy Shit, there’s a Fuck Ton of Cops out there.” Any wonder why I choose to just hide behind and beside the structural elements of the built environment?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Mitch, there’s no such thing as salt and shade resistant plant species which could survive around the outfall pipes of NYC’s elevated highways,” I’ve been told that by botanist, parks personnel, and everybody else in positions of City or State authority over NYC’s elevated highways. As you can see from the self seeded vegetation in the shot above, whose speciation is cosmopolitan, they are right and I am as always wrong.
Looking out of your narrow windows at a world which you despise, and comparing your world view to mine, it is quite easy to describe me as naive, badly informed, or as some sort of agenda pushing hack. Call me names, abuse my statements, say whatever you wish as it is your absolute right. The fact is… life finds a way. Abandon orthodoxy, see what is and what grows, be organic in your logic. You’ll be happier working towards creating the world you wish we lived in than the dross corner which pain and shattered hope has painted you into. Go take a walk, and watch the world. It can be beautiful. You don’t have to pronounce everything as false and perverse to protect your heart. You just have to embrace the fact that green things can and do crack through the concrete.
Watch out for Prides of Teenagers though, they have zero impulse control.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s funny, actually, that I never seem to grow tired of shooting around this outlandish steel traffic viaduct in LIC. The thing arches over Newtown Creek’s Dutch Kills tributary, where it rises 108 feet up, with the Queens Midtown Tunnel and Greenpoint Avenue at either end. The utilitarian esthetics embraced by the engineers of the House of Robert Moses have always spoken to me, design wise, but I like a good onramp.
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, May 18th. 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 as we move into April and beyond, 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.
roughly be
LIC.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More time has been spent in the last two months around the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek than anywhere else in walking distance, barring my fortress confine back in Astoria, by a humble narrator. It’s deserted here, but for the small armadas of very fast and very loud cars being driven about the empty streets by area youth. They’re blasting around, playing truly awful music (that auto tune crap has to go), but what do I care? Can’t imagine how awful it must be to be young, dumb, and full of quarantine during this interval. I’ve been noticing one of my teenage neighbors straining against her inclination to be vivacious and out in the world. Not my problem, ultimately.
As far as the shot above, there’s a reason I call this particular stretch of LIC “The Empty Corridor.” My big problem at the moment revolves around empty pockets, as in the absence of cash money. Tick tock, tick tock. Ringle tinkle, coins when they mingle…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I won’t bore you with another posts about the particular peregrinations of photographic settings and techniques utilized in the production of these shots, but suffice to say that you’re looking at a lot of button pushing and parameter dialing embedded into those pixels. Hey… when you’ve got the time to rethink how you do things, come up with new methods and experiment, it would be foolish not to take advantage of opportunity,
Pictured are the ruins of the Irving Subway Grate Iron Foundry, overflown by the Queens Midtown Expressway section of the larger Long Island Expressway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Borden Avenue retractile Bridge pictured above, looking westwards across Dutch Kills towards midtown Manhattan.
As stated in the past, one continues to eschew areas which can be constituted as being heavily populated, given that we are all living in what’s essentially a random number generator as far as getting sick with Covid 19 goes. Precautions, when moving around in my well populated neighborhood, are routinely taken. Sensible usage of a face mask and the regular washing of hands are religiously observed. When I leave the area, and enter these unpopulated industrial zones, the mask comes off and one can breathe free.
Well, as free as you can breathe at a Federal Superfund site, at any rate.
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, May 18th. 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 as we move into April and beyond, 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.
and beyond
LIC and Dutch Kills.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since the Quarantine bubble seems to have autonomously popped last weekend due to the arrival of warm weather, with thousands taking to the streets after the long hermitage, one decided to direct a recent constitutional walk towards the deserted precincts of Newtown Creek. The sidewalks of Astoria were teeming with people, but once I had moved southwards to Northern Blvd. the only traffic encountered was vehicular. That is, until I got to the corner of Honeywell street and Northern, where a wild eyed wackadoodle suddenly appeared who seemed desirous of confrontation with a humble narrator. Either high on goof balls or demented due to a feverish state of mind, the fellow meant me no good, and luckily I managed to brush him off.
As the wackadoodle was walking away, he called me “Pops.”
One continued along his own path, heading towards the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek with the intention of gathering images specifically intended for the focus and exposure stacking techniques which I’ve been experimenting with. To wit, the image above and those below.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Like any other software process involving the capture of raw data using one device which is then processed using a computational algorithm on a second one, reliable result is dependent on predictability. Predictability is formed by experiment. Ideally – You shoot images A, B, C, and then execute steps 1-4 with them on the computer, then you get something you had in mind for the final result. Getting to predictable result, however, requires experimentation, experiential trial and error, etc.
The image above represents something like 24 individual exposures, 12 for the water and 12 for the land, welded together. It’s not a home run, image quality wise. There’s an “uncanny valley” feel to it, but that’s what a learning process often looks like.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The wide open aperture used in all 3 of these shots, wherein the focus point is moved into different areas of the frame, allows for a softer capture of ambient light with “truer” color capture than a narrow aperture does. By combining multiple shots with that point of focus moved through the frame, you can additively assure tack sharp focus through the image, as I’ve discovered. Again, not a home run, but I got on base and possibly stole second.
Normally you’d use this technique in woodland or seaside landscape, or macro photography, and I’m working on making it predictable – as in “I shoot this, I get that.” That predictability is the name of the game, behind the camera.
I’m Pops Waxman, signing out for today. See you tomorrow at this – your Newtown Pentacle. May all your wackadoodles be merry, and all your photos in focus.
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, May 18th. 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 as we move into April and beyond, 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 