Oct 252010
Oct 252010
Oct 242010
on 83rd street…
If you look at it carefully, you’ll see it doesn’t quite make sense. Can you see what’s wrong?
Oct 242010
Don’t know how it is for you — but when you reach a certain age — you begin to go back to the small pleasures of your youth. You can be sure that when this woman was a child, a hot-dog was 10 cents or less.
For me, a hot dog was 25 cents. For lunch we could go to the Jewish deli across the street and for 90 cents get two hotdogs, french fries and a can of soda. We knew the owner – Mr. Ronai – and he and his wife kept an eye out for us, sometimes giving us food for free if we pressed our noses against the window.
We were what you know call latch key kids, since my mom and dad both worked during the day. Besides the street in front of the house, or the courtyard, we (my friends, sisters etc.) could stay with the tailor who had a shop on the corner; the Ronai’s who were from Hungaria, or Joe the pizza guy – who didn’t care if we just sat in the back of the store and did our homework.
Of course, we could home as well, but you never did expect to find any treats there. For example, when they made juice from a can of frozen concentrate, they didn’t believe in what it said on the label – add three cans of water. My father was certain this was a hoax, and that you could just as easily add six cans of water, or even ten.
One of the ongoing mysteries in the house for several years, was why the soda always tasted so strong when we first go it, and so weak later on. My dad explained that it had lost it’s carbonation. But that didn’t hold up when I found him dilluting the bottles of Pepsi one day with water.
Not everyone that lived through the great depression came out with this attitude. My father (it was mostly his idea) was the only one I knew that took it to this extreme.
Well – that’s what this picture evoked for me. That, and the fact that all my aunts had blonde or red hair, long after they had hit 70 years old. Did they really believe they were fooling anyone? And then there’s the tip of the walker, or cane which I admit I didn’t notice when the shot was b&w.
Oct 242010
Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. The two islands are neighbors in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel eight hundred yards wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are “not six inches high”, i.e., about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings. Both kingdoms are empires, i.e. realms ruled by a self-styled emperor. The capital of Lilliput is Mildendo.
The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel which involved a quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Formerly, in Lilliput, all eggs were broken on the larger end; but a few generations in the past, an Emperor of Lilliput had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to “six rebellions… wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown”.
Oct 232010
Continuing down the color track…
p.s. the previous “talkie” videos had a problem, in that I had trouble recording the mono track in stereo… the mike goes through a mixing board and I just didn’t have the right wires… so last night up to the loft I went… into a big tub filled with wires… so many wires… usb wires… rca wires… adapters for stuff, i don’t know what stuff anymore… and eventually found the wire that took two rca feeds into a mini-plug and problem over… these are all the little things going on when you may not see much happening…
And I even came up with an idea for the next Pixiq post — a how-to about movement blur with examples.
I think that’s the main difference right now between my Pixiq posts and this blog… I’m not going to put up just a single shot on Pixiq… although if I did that I could do it every day… I don’t think that’s what they’re about…
Whereas this blog is where I continue to write more of the trivial, which is to say, the real stuff that goes on. Sort of like a private journal, that’s not private.
As far as the shot in this post – it does work in color, even with the camera shake (one type of movement blur) but loses a lot in b&w. It was shot in near darkness, Grand Central – the dark area.
Oct 192010
I’ve put this shot up in b&w a few times; but it works better in color. On the other hand, it probably isn’t sellable unless DeLaVega is more famous than I realize. 2004.
Speaking of Lively Deaths — here’s an excerpt of an
Memoir I’m posting on Pixiq
. I’m not putting it in this blog because most longtime readers have been through this pitiful material before.
Oct 142010
I did get a few emails complaining (though nicely) about all the color stuff I’ve been working on lately. And I can understand that a lot of people have followed me through black and white for years and don’t know or care why I should be doing all this color.
If you’ve followed the blog for a while, you would have seen me dip into color once in a while; and it might last for a week. You could just stay away from the blog for a while pretty assured that eventually you’d see new black and white shots and talk about b&w.
And that may be what happens this time, though I’m already at it longer than before. It happened like this.
I began to experiment with Photomatix, maybe what – six months or more ago. But in b&w. Somehow as I got better with the tools I could see that certain shots simply looked better (I hope to write about what that means later) in color. And so I’m on this road (I think) for a while. This is a shot that I simply couldn’t get much of anything out of in b&w because – duh – how do you do autumn without changing colors.
