Category Archives: Photography

Four Pictures

I’ve had family visiting all week, and I’ve been doing my duty as tour guide. We’ve seen the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Yankee Stadium, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and went around Manhattan on the Circle Line Cruise, among other things.

Throughout, I’ve had my camera with me, mostly for the sake of documenting my totally awesome nephew. Setting aside those several dozen pictures, I just sorted through a week’s worth of photography and came up with exactly four mildly interesting shots to share here.

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Way Out West

This weekend I’m in the beautiful state of New Mexico visiting my good friends Gong and Bonnie, who live in Santa Fe. It’s my first trip here ever, and it’s beautiful. The light, in particular, is unnaturally gorgeous. Or, at least, that’s how I’m explaining the photos I’ve been taking today.

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Through a Lens Expensively

Sigma 28mm Macro LensIn the wake of that photography class with Joseph O. Holmes that I took last year, I’ve only been able to make halting further progress in developing my camera skills. There just hasn’t been a lot of time to continue to take pictures as often and as intensively as a class environment allows, is one excuse. The other is that I’ve been dissatisfied with the lenses I’ve had for a long while now.

Aside from the absolutely middle-of-the-road 18-70mm lens that shipped with my Nikon D70, I’ve been using two others for about eighteen months now. First is a 50mm f/1.8 that produces beautiful results but works satisfactorily under relatively few conditions. It functions well with little light and its depth of field is evocatively abstract, but it’s visual range is fairly narrow and it’s not really the kind of lens that matches my aesthetic.

I’ve also got a highly imperfect but otherwise likable 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Nikkor telephoto zoom. As it turns out, I’m really a telephoto zoom kind of guy; I feel very comfortable with the reach of these lenses, the way they allow me to traverse great distances to capture small details and, let’s face it, to gently invade people’s privacy from afar. (A friend worries that if I upgrade to a longer lens, I’ll become a full-fledged pervert.) What’s more, I’m crazy for the spatial flattening effect that these lenses produce. Composing photographs through a telephoto lens feels very much like designing to me; the lens compresses space dramatically, reducing depth to a shallow, almost flat phenomenon, and the result feels akin to shifting nearly geometric shapes around on a plane.

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Last Class

Herewith, the last of the photos from my “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop” class at New York University. Tonight was the last night, sadly, but I learned a hell of a lot, a hell of a lot. And I had a tremendous amount of fun, too, which doesn’t hurt at all. All of which is the result of the easy-going yet comprehensive expertise of our instructor, Joe Holmes; he’s going to be teaching this course again in the fall, and if you own a digital SLR camera and want to become a better photographer, I highly recommend signing up. Worth every penny.

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Shooting Spree

There are just two more classes to go in the “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop” course that I’m taking at New York University with the noted street photographer Joe Holmes, who happens to be one of the most relaxed yet effective instructors from whom you could ask to learn photography.

It’s been enormously fun and I’m still learning loads every session but… thank goodness it’s coming to a close, because meeting twice a week is kicking my ass. The class has been spending six hours a week together, half spent on Wednesday evenings and the other half on Saturdays. But this past week, I had to redo an entire shoot on Tuesday night, and, in a selfless and unpaid bit of overtime, Joe extended our mid-week class by about ninety minutes to teach us some night shooting techniques. Now, I’m up early on a Saturday and preparing to leave for the first of these last two classes — we’re meeting out at Coney Island to take photographs at the annual Mermaid Parade. If I’m not exhausted enough already, I’m sure to be by the time I’m back from Brooklyn.

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Pictures of People

This photography course that I’m taking is only about four weeks long, so I thought I would follow up with updates on each week’s progress. I’m not going to write extensively about the lessons taught each week, but at least I’ll be posting new photos to Flickr — now organized neatly into their own set, called “Photo Class” and making some brief comments. Don’t worry, if it bores you to tears, we’re already near the halfway point, and it will all be over before the Fourth of July.

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How to Shoot People (and Places and Things)

After flailing around for about a year and a half with my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera, I resolved several months ago to finally take a proper class and learn how to use it for real. I found one that suited me at New York University: “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop,” taught by Joseph O. Holmes of the noted photoblog Joe’s NYC. As its title implies, the course allows me to forgo any education about the chemical processing of traditional photographic film — I have zero interest in that — and focus on shooting, handling the camera and responding to different shooting environments. Perfect.

Class meets twice a week: on Saturday afternoons, we make our way to select spots around New York City and take photos, with Holmes giving impromptu talks along the way. Then we choose five selects from those shots and review them, unmanipulated by Photoshop or any other process, in a group critique on Wednesday nights. It’s a short course lasting only about a month, and I’ve just come back from my first Wednesday night.

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How to Shoot People (and Places and Things)

After flailing around for about a year and a half with my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera, I resolved several months ago to finally take a proper class and learn how to use it for real. I found one that suited me at New York University: “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop,” taught by Joseph O. Holmes of the noted photoblog Joe’s NYC. As its title implies, the course allows me to forgo any education about the chemical processing of traditional photographic film — I have zero interest in that — and focus on shooting, handling the camera and responding to different shooting environments. Perfect.

Class meets twice a week: on Saturday afternoons, we make our way to select spots around New York City and take photos, with Holmes giving impromptu talks along the way. Then we choose five selects from those shots and review them, unmanipulated by Photoshop or any other process, in a group critique on Wednesday nights. It’s a short course lasting only about a month, and I’ve just come back from my first Wednesday night.

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Post-Trip Wrap-Up

Viet NamJust a word to say that I’m back from my trip to Viet Nam. Technically, I’ve been back since about 11:30p on Sunday evening, when my plane touched down at the end of 22-plus hours of transit. But I’ve been dealing with the inevitable jet lag, as well, which accounts for why I’m writing this post at 6:30a (and I’ve been awake for two hours already!); in case I hadn’t mentioned it before, Viet Nam is exactly twelve hours ahead of New York, so you can imagine my body clock is completely off. Somewhere between the haze of insomnia, walking catatonia and catching up with work, I also managed to corral all my trip photos together into a Flickr photoset, and this morning I went through them all and added titles and captions, so if you’ve browsed through them already, it might be worth another look for more back story. More posts as soon as I’m all caught up on sleep…

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