From Brooklyn to San Francisco
This surreal, Planet of the Apes-like image, taken in 1982, shows sand dunes seemingly at the foot of the World Trade Center towers, when Manhattan’s Battery Park was still a beach
Oh my, I love this.
Longing for the sea
Close
E.B. White writing in his boat shed overlooking Allen Cove, 1976.
E.B. (Andy to his friends) wasn’t so much a hermit, or even a farmer, as a paid correspondent to the natural world. His essays and journals are frank yet soaring; every word a testament to his overwhelming affection for quiet, observant, country living.
Cabin, water, typewriter, quiet living. Sounds like a dream life to me.
The sky and the sea
‘If everyone likes everything, no one photograph is better than another’
James Estrin, writing on the New York Times photography blog Lens, on the proliferation of photo sharing:
A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel.
He goes on to question what this means for photography as a profession, an art, and a form of journalism:
As far as I can see — admittedly from ground level — there are two possible effects on “serious” photography.
The flowering of photographers leads to millions of people who are thinking more visually and whom we may be able to entice to become an audience for documentary and photojournalistic images.
We are bombarded with so much visual stimuli via the Web and social media that it becomes almost impossible to rise above the flood of images. And if everyone likes everything, no one photograph is better than another.
I have no idea which of these situations might happen. Or if there will be a combination of these effects.
Perhaps more than anything else, social media has brought photography to a higher focus. We take more photos than ever before because of how easy it is to share them. We’ve figured out the sharing part, the question now is—and this goes for more than photography—how do we sift through it all to find the extraordinary?
Somewhere in the midst of my internet browsing, I jumped down a rabbit hole of images of the construction of the Manhattan Bridge. (This one is great.) I was especially interested in the photo on the top, taken in 1908 in Brooklyn, looking North on Washington Street. It reminded me of a photo I took this past July, in roughly the same spot, looking North on Washington Street.
There is something endearing about seeing an image taken years ago of something you’ve seen recently. It feels familiar yet not quite the same, a simple reminder of our histories.
Late Nights & Early Lights: A New Photoblog
One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to get back into taking photos on a regular basis. Photography has long been a hobby of mine and has gotten me outside, getting away from the computer screen while still indulging my creative passions. To help with this, I’ve started a new photoblog I’m calling Late Nights and Early Lights
Over the past two years, I’ve found myself leaving my Canon Rebel behind in favor of the camera on my iPhone 4. The camera on the iPhone keeps getting better and better and with fantastic services like Instagram, it makes less and less sense to lug around a bulky DSLR. I used to be an active Flickr user but have found that service’s quality and community gradually declining and not the best way I could share and present my photos.
Inspired by the Instagram format, Late Nights and Early Lights strips away all the extraneous information allowing the photos to be the focus with big, full-screen images. The quieter layout and design really brings out the colors and details of each photo.
I’ve added a few recent photos to get the site started and hopefully will be updating often as I start flexing my photographic muscles again. Feel free to follow along via RSS or on Tumblr.
“If you are implying you cannot express yourself when you are working for money, you are proposing that I might do one sort of work when I get paid and not when I work for myself. But I put the same amount of care into both. You are also proposing that I have a deeper feeling for something when it is not being commissioned by somebody else and that is not true either. Neither of these are true. This is classically how people think about photographers, that they do commercial work they don’t really enjoy doing, where they can’t say what they really want, and they do personal work where they can say things they want. That is not true for me. Every job I take on I do to one hundred percent of my ability and I have to believe in that. Christian Dior, Bjork, SHOWstudio and the others, these are all the things I believe in, and they are about communication just as if I was writing or singing, or if I was doing a film or a painting, it is just communication.”
Photographer Nick Knight (via)
This Space In Between
Just me, Steve Jobs and former Intel executive John Doerr alone in a public garden near Jobs’ house. It was a total coincidence that he was there, and I took the opportunity to capture the moment.
What a photo!
Manhattan
Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, no, let me start this over.
The forgoing of his traditional white-Windsor-set opening credits on a black screen, Woody Allen’s Manhattan opens with a voiceover read by Allen’s character Isaac Davis, while black and white images of city slowly cycle through sets the film up as not just a love story, but as Allen’s love letter to New York.
Movie Stills
Being a designer, I’m often interested in the cinematography whenever I’m watching movies. I frequently take screenshots of frames I’m drawn to and have a collection on my computer of some of my movie stills. I’m usually attracted to frames that could stand by themselves as photographs (I’ve written before about one of my favorites, a scene from Eyes Wide Shut.), and am very interested in composition, color, and how they related and add to the story. I thought it’d be fun to share some of my favorites as well as some from films I’ve just recently watched.
