August 1, 2001 Scenes from New York City: I’m walking back from the Ad Agency where I’ve been doing a few hours a week consulting. I’m wearing jeans and a tee shirt. My camera bag, which really doesn’t look like a camera bag, is carried cross-wise, from one shoulder to hip, with the bag behind me. As I pass an old black woman smoking a pipe, she grins at me, showing many missing teeth. She [more]
Posted: 7-28-01 This is a brief account of my transition from the Contax G2 to the Leica M6. About 8 years ago, I stumbled across pictures by Cartier-Bresson. I couldn’t figure out how they had been shot. I began reading about him and the Leica name popped up. I had also seen some 16 x 20 inch prints in a gallery (I don’t remember by who) that were done with an M6. There was a [more]
July 1, 2001 A new month, and a new page. For your amusement, I present web statistics from davebeckerman.com for the week starting June 26, 2001. General Statistics Hits Entire Site (Successful) 54,323 hits are not really important. each little graphic on a page counts as a hit. if you have a page with 100 little graphics and its looked at once, that’s 100 hits. people talk about hits as having some kind of meaning [more]
5-26-01 I bought a Leica yesterday. The M6 with .85 magnification. I traded in my view camera which I hadn’t used in over a year and a half, so it didn’t cost me anything. I had been shooting with a friend’s Lecia for a while, hoping to get this out of my system. But instead I fell in love with it. 5-31-01 Started with the m6 with the .85 magnification and the 35mm f1.4. The [more]
3-02-01 I’ve really given up on the digital black and white printing. I guess I experimented with it for about six months. The results weren’t bad, but not the same tonal range as the darkroom stuff I’m doing. Also, the equipment, seems more finicky. The printer was working fine for a month or so, and then I started getting banding. I spent a lot of money on cleaning, using different inks etc. but for sure [more]
Why Photograph the Subway? Many years ago, returning from a party, I found myself, sitting in an empty subway car. The lights from the stations gleamed on the hard, plastic graffiti-proof bench opposite me. I took a small camera from my pocket and took a black and white picture of this empty grayness, and streaks of light. This sterile stretch of plastic spoke to me. Somewhere, probably in Japan, a place to seat New Yorkers [more]
01-13-2001 Yesterday was one of those days in the darkroom where everything went right. Did ‘Equitable and Flat Iron’ which I hadn’t printed in a few years — and found a way to keep the detail in the Flat Iron while still contrasting the Equitable in the storm nicely. Also did smaller prints of ‘Subway, Overview’ and ‘Two Men on Subway’ and was pleased with both of them. In the middle of my printing session, [more]
11-10-00 This has been a wild week with a lot of ups and downs. I was in Sedona Arizona for a week. I did quite a bit of shooting, but Sedona was not what it once was. When I was there two years ago with the view camera, it had still had a certain isolated, western feel. Now it was filled with tourists. I couldn’t find a parking spot. Traffic was bad. Malls were shooting [more]
7-29-2000 The last month and a half disappeared in a blur. I fell into the digital print world. I had been talking about the inkjet stuff with a friend of mine for the last few months, but when I saw with my own two eyes what was possible, at least in color, I thought it was worth investigating. Luminos had just come out with monochrome inks for the Epson 1160, so I figured for a [more]
6-2-2000 Not much new. Although I’m getting about 5 new registrations per day, nobody seems willing to buy a screensaver, which I thought at least a couple of people would like. C’est la vie. Either I don’t know how to sell them, or the price is too high, or its a long way from liking something to plunking down a few bucks over the internet. Well, for now, I’m not going to worry about it. [more]
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