I’m pretty sure that any New York photographer has a bunch of steam shots, whether they saw Taxi Driver or not.  I came across this one while looking for the lost negative; and it’s one of my favorite steam shots.

How was it that I couldn’t find the negative ?? Very logical in retrospect.  I was sure that it was a 35tmm negative but it was taken with the Pentax 645.  Now, why did I think it was a 35mm negative?  Because it was taken a really really long time ago and I just didn’t realize I was shooting with any medium format stuff back then; and I also didn’t pay much attention to what I shot with the Pentax 645.

That’s it.  Now it has to be spotted, cleaned, and turned into a good print.  I don’t think I’ve ever sold this one before.  And I don’t even remember how I could have put it into the store without having a high res version of it somewhere.  Which I don’t since I actually looked through every image on the mac.  Enough of that.

Have a good day.

Relax.

And stay cool people.  Don’t get turned all upside down over one friggin’ neg.

Walker Evans – I don’t think of him as a street photographer, but I was very influenced when I started out by his subway series and used similar techniques (stuff like cable releases up the jacket sleeve; and other stuff that nowadays would seem sneaky.) As time went by, you begin to get inured to possible reactions; and you get faster on the draw.

Just more stuff I’m finding while looking for the mysterious missing negative.

Stuff happens in threes.  Every scientist knows that.  So the second thing that’s been happening today:

I was getting many requests from potential customers who wanted to just view horizontal images at one time because they would go together better than mixing horizontal and vertical pictures.  So, this was easy enough, and I tagged the images as either horizontal or vertical, and put links in the store so you could view all the horizontals, or all the verticals.

A funny thing happened though.  I got several calls from people who were sitting in front of the full-size web image and wanted to know if it was a horizontal or a vertical picture.  I also got a bunch of emails about this.

(You can see what I did by clicking on the vertical picture or the horizontal picture) links.  So I couldn’t really figure this one out.  It was just confusing the viewers, or at least some of the viewers.  So then I thought, maybe I was using the wrong terminology, and should call it landscape vs. portrait orientation.

But I’m afraid that people may think I’m only selling landscape and portraits.

Any other words that would make sense.  I wanted to do one more thing which was to make little collections of images that go together, but I’m sure that once I do that, someone will want to change them.    I just thought it would be a good idea to group images together as a starting point for customers – but it is beyond my imagination what sort of problem that will cause.  Should I try it?

How many in the collection?

just spent two months organizing and scanning negatives (as necessary) and adding about 30 prints to the site (from negs. and from digital shots) – considering that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that everything was catalogued in Lightroom; yes, you guessed it, I can’t believe that  a negative has gone missing, both the scan, and actual negative.

It’s an old negative, maybe from 12 years back.  I may have re-scanned it, or maybe I didn’t.  I don’t know anymore.  Let’s say that I didn’t.  But when I was writing the description of the photograph I had the negative in front of me because I made reference to it being a 35mm negative….

Where the heck did the friggin’ thing go?

It’s one of the reasons that I disliked working with negatives so much.  I’m absent-minded.  I’m disorganized.  No matter how hard I try, I’m no good at filing stuff the way it should be filed.  On the other hand, every digital image has a unique number as part of the file name, and I can always find it by searching for that number in Lightroom.  To put it another way, I’ve already spent almost the entire day searching for this one negative (it’s part of a larger order); and it will be embarrassing to tell the client that I can’t find the negative.  I’ve never had to do that yet.  Negative always turns up.

I’m sure I’ll find it today.  But man – a waste of time.

The cigar boxes come in handy for organizing the medium and large-sized negatives.  But after all, we are dealing with way over a hundred thousand negatives of all sizes, most are not scanned; and barely filed; and I suppose about 40,000 digital negatives, all easy to find if I’m looking at the web jpg.

Anyway – that’s what’s going on now.  I’m just taking a break before going back to the hunt again.

And believe me, know there are photographers with many more negatives who are able to put their fingers on anyone they need and have worked out wonderful filing systems – but I have to tell you – that has never been me.  Whether it was paperwork for software projects, or anything at all that needed to be filed – you are looking at the original Oscar Madison.

I went down to have a cigar and only had the iPhone in my pocket.  There was a big fire in the Pizza store (no not Two Boots, I think it’s called Fat Sals) but a crappier store on second between 83rd and 84 on East Side of street.  What is amazing is how many shots I managed to get my thumb into, never having used the iPhone before for shooting.  I then imported the shots (most of them screwed up in one way or another) into Lightroom.

It’s the Pizza store right next to Monicas’ bodega where I get my breakfast once in a while.  Hope Raul didn’t have any damage done to his place.

I had been using TweetMeme for the last month or so, which puts the Tweet thing with your Tweet Count by your posts… and then read recently in the Times that Twitter had finally made their own Tweet Button for use on blogs or any website where you want users to be able to tweet the article or post etc.

I guess that puts an end to TweetMeme, although they say they are working with Twitter on the new button.

Here’s the link to make your own Twitter button — Twitter Button Page.

Of course I lost all my counts that had been saved in TweetMeme to they’re all set to 0 now.

I added it to the Store sidebar and I’m putting it up now in this blog.

One thing to note – if you’re not using self-hosted Wordpress, i.e your using something like blah-blah.wordpress.com it won’t work, at least the button I chose won’t work, because it uses javascript which ain’t allowed on wordpress.com

Another thing – you’ll have to stick the thing into your Wordpress template files, where you want it to show up, i.e. if you want it for each post you’d need to stick it in single.php.

Tweetmeme used to do all this sort of stuff for you, including positioning, and a bunch of other nice tidbits.

So, what I did just now, sticking it in the widget panel of the blog doesn’t make much sense… I’ll have to put it in the wordpress template for single posts and pages for it to work properly.  Also, although they don’t call it a beta – I’ve had enough whales showing up with Twitter to be a bit hesitant about it slowing things up… but we’ll see.

I remember when I was writing software, I was always thinking, what if the big company writes this before I get it really launched.  With Tweetmeme they reallly had that thing accepted everywhere… and for Twitter to make their own… that’s got to be painful unless they get bought out.

* * *

And the answer is.  There are already plugins for wordpress.com sites and for self-hosted sites like this one.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetbutton-for-wordpress/

Takes the place of TweetMeme.  Very very similar look and feel in the dashboard.  Basically looks and works like TweetMeme but with a few additional options that the “official” twitter button has.

and

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/new-tweet-button/

for the Wordpress hosted blog.

Hey, what else could you ask for?

Buddy continues to do better.  He was given a bottle of pills to tune down his thyroid, and he likes them.  He thinks they’re treats.  As far as getting the eyedrops in his right eye – that’s still an adventure.  He doesn’t like that at all Probably burns.  Plus even if you hold his head still, he’s got the upper hand in that you really can’t exactly hold his eye open.  So that’s been hit and miss, mostly miss.

* * *

Still not smoking cigarettes. Stopped July 1.  But I have replaced them with about two cigars a day.  Right now, my favorite cigars are from the H. Upmann line.  Either the half- or the full coronas.  Of course, anyone will tell you that it’s better to stop altogether, but for an addict, this is a different experience from cigarettes.  Cigarettes are simply a very fast nicotine delivery system.  You don’t exactly savor them.  Cigars are  all different.  You don’t inhale the smoke, and you sort of roll it around in your mouth like a sip of wine.  If you like this sort of thing, it’s an enjoyable experience.  I even seem to enjoy chomping on the thing when it’s no longer smoking.

* * *

One project to finish – my Bronx portfolio.

This was my room on University Avenue until I was thirteen.  My father and I went back to photograph the apartment about six years ago when I started the Bronx photography memoir.  The window looks out on street level at University Avenue.  On the right it’s a few paces to the bathroom.  You can see the cable wire on the floor.  Obviously when we lived there from about ‘52 to ‘65 there was no cable.  How many coats of paint does that room have by now?  Must be dozens.

And yes, it is tiny.  My two sisters shared a slightly larger room which was off to the left and looked out on the alley where the super kept the garbage cans.

So after doing a ton of work on the storefront, I figure it’s about time to check it in various browsers.

I had bee working with Dreamweaver as the design tool, in Max OSX, and I have parallel and Windows 7 installed, though I haven’t used either in many months; and the only reason would be to see what stuff looks like in Widows IE and Windows FF.

As Parallel is starting up, I get an error message saying something is wrong with Windows, and asking if I want to repair it.  If I do repair it, the message warns me, then any changes that are made cannot be rolled back.  It’s true, that I have a mirror image of the all the drives, but still, why should I have to fix something that I haven’t touched in three months.

I’m mumbling to myself, this just ain’t right.  This just ain’t right.  When suddenly the black box with the message goes away and it says, repair cancelled, and another box pops up, with a few dots and some more messages, and then suddenly I find myself in Windows 7.

The first thing it asks is whether I want to upgrade to windows 8?  I think it was 8.  With a few things that will be useful to me if I upgrade.  But frankly, I just want to see what the cosmetic changes in the store look like.  And sure enough, right next to the LOGO (upper left-hand corner) their is a middle blac empty rectangle.

So this is new. I haven’t seen it in all the time I’ve been designing in mac environment.  It wasn’t in Mac Firefox, and it wasn’t in Mac Safari, and it wasn’t even in Safari on the iPhone.

What the f*** is goin’ on.  This just ain’t freakin’ right.

I know where the black background is coming from.  there’s a table (yeah, I know, don’t use tables, use CSS) but sometimes tables are easier to maintain, and so it’s a table with three columns, and the cells are all marked to have a background color of white.  There is also some CSS around the table but that also tells the background to be white.  In fact, just about every freakin’ thing, in every little bit of code I can find is tellin’ the background to be white.

I take it one step further and do a regular expression search for * (anything) that points to #000 or #00000 (black).  Nothing to be found.

Well, I’m too tired to try to ponder it out now.  But there you have it.  Just amazing what MS manages to do.  And it does look so nice in Mac Firefox…  or if not “so nice” it looks homey and sophisticated at the same time and simple to use.  I’ve got a gray bar going across the screen that has my promotion about shipping about it (that doesn’t move) but sits there like I want it to while you do your scrolling.  The categories and the pages on the top and bottom are both done with a nice CSS  menu plugin.  All in all – easy to maintain.  Now to find out where that black space is coming from.

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS WITH CASCADING STYLE SHEETS, HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE MAJOR COMPANIES CAN’T AGREE ON HOW THEY SHOULD WORK, AND WHAT THEY SHOULD DO WHEN INCORRECT CODE IS USED.  I SUPPOSE THAT ONE DAY I’LL WAKE UP ON AND READ THAT THE FDA HAS OUTLAWED POT FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES AND THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS OKAYED IT’S USE FOR MEDICAL REASONS.  Naw… that couldn’t happen… could it.  No freakin’ way.

Remember that movie Charlie – about the retarded guy who is given a drug (Claire Bloom and Cliff Robertson)  which allows him to become almost a genius before the effects begin to wear off.  Very sad story with Robertson raising the white lab rat – Algernon (sp?) – the book was called Flowers for Algernon (I think).  But I came up with a logo which is sort of based on the logo for that film.

What sense that makes, I don’t know, though I often just go with what feels right without analyzing it too much.]

It reminds me of my notes from my old darkroom lab journals.

Now – just to note – what I had before was a heading 1 tag with the phrase: Black and White photography / New York Photos as the home page link.  Will the wise and magnificent G. punish me for using a graphic (yes I put alt and title tags in) rather than a header?  That my friends is the question.  And should be answered within the next few days when I might disappear from my nice spot on the first page of G. for that particular phrase.

Have a good night everyone.  I’m pooped.

Buddy continues to be on the mend.  Good.  He does seem to have nine lives.

The changes to the store have worked out; but the one thing I haven’t tackled, which is usually something that web designers would’ve done ten years ago, is the freakin’ logo.  “Freakin’” is a very New York word that is usually used to replace more graphic language.

I’ll bet a whole book could be written on the use, and etymology of freakin’ and yes, I don’t think you can use it without leaving off the last G.

I don’t want to look it up, as that would give a lot away, and I’d rather imagine a bunch of small time hoods sitting in a cellar of a lower east side tenement when the boss, for some reason, is forced to stop using the real F word and replaces it on the spot with Freakin’,

The freak show was popular at the time.  And small time hoods liked to relax in the relative safety of the side shows where they became friends with the freaks who were also outcasts from legitimate society.

However, it may have nothing at all to do with the actual meaning of the word Freak, as it is also easily exchanged for the word, Friggin’

In other words, it would be perfectly alright to say, I would like to get this friggin’ logo done already, or this freakin’ logo has been giving me a hard time.

The word freak, well that’d be a noun most of the time.  Though in the 60’s it got additional usage with Freak Out! And the like.  And is still used to describe a bad experience that doesn’t have anything to do with the original meaning of the noun.

Friggin’ probably comes from sailing ship slang.  Anyway – the whole subject doesn’t seem to have anything to do with photography, other than that if you knew me well, you’d find that I use both of these words a whole freakin’ lot when I’m talking to myself, as in: damn, missed that freakin’ shot again.

And I almost never use the real F word.  I’m sure that Lester will be able to do a bit of research into the origin of the word freakin’ and I thank him for that as now I’m going into Fireworks to make the BECKERMANPHOTO LOGO.  Funny how photo and logo rhyme.  I wonder if anyone has registered PhotoLogo yet?

Phew.  It was nerve wracking, but basically he’s fine.  The vet thinks that he has an infection that is pressing on a nerve that causes the inner eye to show sometimes.  I’ve been giving him eyedrops (that’s a lot of fun) – and already his eye is starting to look better.  The inner eyelid doesn’t show in the morning, but it does start to show in the evening.  That’s the sort of thing that’s common with an infection where it gets worse at night.

He also has a slightly elevated thyroid condition that I’m going to be giving him medicated treats for (hopefully).  I’ll pick them up tomorrow from the vet.  They’ve been very careful and responsible so far and I’m relieved that it’s nothing serious.

The vet thought it was possible that the elevated thyroid was something he may have had off on and on for a while – and that it might have made him more sensitive to “fast-moving” or let’s just say, nervous people.   Which would really explain why he had a lot of trouble early in his life where he would always attack bare feet as they went by, and was deemed to be a difficult cat.

I felt that with him, from the beginning – that he needed to be in a calm environment.  And although you might not be able to tell from my writing – I am basically easy going, and hit it off with the cat even though he was just about to go back to the home for the last time when I took him in.

* * *

As far as my own day went.  Last night, I did a survey of top photography web stores, and could see that mine still had some major mistakes in terms of the number of clicks it took to get to images; and that important information needed to be repeated.  At any rate, I woke up early, and was going to package two orders that should’ve gone out today, and ended up finishing the revamp of the store 16 hours later.  (As usual, it’s not completely finished, but the basics are in place and it’s much easier to navigate, and even looks better in terms of LNF).  As anyone who maintains there own site knows – it is time-consuming.  Fortunately, that’s one of the parts of the business that I enjoy.

* * *

In case you’re wondering what I’m up to, I working on cataloging my Bronx images (mostly from about three years ago). This is one of those lucky catches. I was driving by the House Bronx of Detention when I decided it was a spot I should at least try to photograph. I expected guards to come out as soon as the camera made came out, but although there were guards walking in and out, nobody paid me any mind.

That’s the irony of street shooting. You just never know who is going to be touchy and who won’t. As a general rule, city workers, especially if they’re working in public are the most touchy. But not always. And sometimes it just depends on your own karma. But back to to the picture. Yes, I watch the black cat scramble up the fence, make it’s way over the barbed wire and jump – and that was the shot I was waiting for. I caught him just before he landed and scooted off.

And then off I went.

IMPORTANT;  I PLAN TO PUT IT IN THE PRINT STORE TOMORROW, AND I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO SELL AT LEAST ONE OF THESE SINCE IT IS ONE OF MY BEST SHOTS SO IF YOU ARE A PHOTOGRAPHER, OR JUST A LOVER OF PHOTOGRAPHS, PLEASE DON’T TWEET OR COMMENT THAT YOU LIKE THIS, SINCE THAT IS THE KISS OF DEATH AS FAR AS SALES GO.  THERE ARE TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS OUT THERE THAT REALLY HAVE THE KNACK.  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.  IF YOU COMMENT THAT THIS IS ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE BECKERMAN’S WELL – THAT’S THE END OF ANY POSSIBLE SALES FOR THIS PRINT.  I SHOULD PUT A SMILEY AT THE END OF THIS – BUT I KID YOU NOT.  IN FACT, IF YOU COULD WRITE SOMETHING DISPARAGING ABOUT IT, THAT MIGHT HAVE JUST THE RIGHT EFFECT.

I’ve put most of the Paris / French shots together; most of the Southwest, there’s still The Mermaid Day Parade which I shot for about eight years in a row, and of course the collection for the Bronx which took me about a year to do.

Once everything has been put into a handy place – then I’ll begin to lay them out into small books. I haven’t decided whether they’re going to be based on place yet; but at least I’ll have a good idea on where to find everything.

I was also asked to contribute to a new photography startup that sounds pretty interesting. My first step is to add to my todo list, another list of articles, either that I’ve written already; or that I could write in the future. The site will be backed by a large photography company, and it should be a good mix for both of us in terms of what I’ll call cross-pollination. I almost always have more to do than I can handle these days, so I have to be careful who I say “yes” to.

Anyway, if a black cat crosses your path, you may wind up in the HOUSE OF D

Tonemapped from b&w negative. One day I’ll do a little Blurb book with these distorted memories of my youth in the Bronx. As I’ve written before, the stoop and the courtyard were the center of all our activities that took place before and after the lockup known as public school.

How to tell if you are eating with a “street photographer.” As you enter the restaurant, there’s a scoping out of the seat with the best view. If the two of you are friends, you’ll be able to say something like, “c’mon, you had the good seat last time.”

There is no way of really knowing what the best seat is going to be, but the possibilities are always swirling around your brain. You may be talking, or laughing or just wondering about who’s going to pay the bill; but instinctively, you will move to where you think you’ve got the best possibilities. In this case, either side of the booth would have been okay. I placed the camera on the edge of the camera, feeling that I didn’t want to attract too much attention; and waited for the so-called moment… in this case it was just a moment of engaging banter between the two women. Click. And now you can concentrate on your own breakfast or the Mets, or whatever you were talking about with a feeling that you may have caught something. Thinking over the backlighting, and the shutter speed. In the film days it would be a while before you knew for sure if you got something.

The tiny plastic  orange juice glass is part of the so-called breakfast special.  Not a very good diner, but it’s still around twenty years later.