Hudson river from Beacon Waterfront.

In September of last year I moved out of New York City where I had been living for about 13 years.

After some personal turmoil and a financial reckoning which included four months on the dole, it was time for a change.   Beacon, NY is  a small city of about 15,000 residents sixty miles north of NYC along the Hudson River.  The city is currently best known for the Dia Art Museum which houses contemporary artwork in a former Nabisco box factory.    And Pete Seeger who actually lives up the road in Fishkill.

I moved into town without knowing a soul.  I also moved into town as fall took hold and quickly moved into winter.   Today is the 12th of February, deep in the heart of winter.   Two days ago a blizzard covered the town in nearly a foot of snow which now lays on top of the ground which has been frozen solid since December.    In the morning I’ll take the train into the city for my job and will glide down a Hudson river which is encased in a layer of ice which is groaning and cracking under the weight of the snow.

Since moving to Beacon my photography has radically changed.

After living in an incredibly dense urban area, I’ve found myself spending a great deal of time alone.  That time has been spend exploring the several parks maintained by Scenic Hudson that surround the city and breaking into decaying  factories.   The human figure has largely disappeared from my photographs.   Although I work in the city I’ve been uninterested in my former bread and butter of street photography.   Instead I’ve been deeply moved by the environment of winter in the Hudson Valley.

Perhaps its a natural change.  After thirteen years of living in the most urbanized region in the country its only natural that I would seek out the pleasure of solitude.  I suspect this will change with the arrival of spring but for now I’ve deeply enjoyed having winter to myself.

The dock extending into the Hudson River at Beacon

Doorbell, California

One of the things that photography allows you to do is discover details from events and objects  that you stuck onto a negative or a harddrive somewhere and haven’t thought about for a while.   Once you open up the negative onto a print or pop your file into photoshop you have a second chance to see a scene for the first time.

The doorbell belongs, or rather belonged to my grandfather.  I took this picture shortly after his death last year as we were staying at his house for the funeral.   Before everything was put into boxes I went through the house and took pictures of details that I remembered.  Paintings. Lamps. Radios. The television.  I should have taken a shot of  the scotch bottles he always kept on top of the refrigerator.

After scanning this negative I got a closer look at the doorbell and noticed that there was a seal (you’ll have to click on the image to see it larger) which read in part, “live better electrically”.

I found this an especially apt sentiment for a chemical engineer who was born in 1915 and did see his profession change the world.  When he was 18 and on his second year at UCLA the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to economically develop a (still) impoverished area of the country.

My grandfather did believe this was the best of all possible worlds and had a great deal of faith in people.   I’m not sure if he ever noticed the seal, who ever bothers to look at their own doorbell after all but I think he would have seen himself as part of that milieu which would have written things like that.

I come from a far more cynical time even as I  continue to see technology cause radical economic and cultural change.    Perhaps its my own jaded nature but I tend to see innovation driven largely by profit rather than any real desire to improve the world.  Its  difficult to assign any ethical motivation to a drug company that refuses to reduce the price of HIV medication for the third world until India threatens to reverse engineer their patented medications and release their own generic versions.

I was surprised that such a small and previously missed detail would have given me pause.  I’m planning on going through the rest of my negatives and pulling out further objects.   I don’t have any photos of my grandfather that I took myself.  All I can do is show you fragments and talk about them.  The fragments don’t speak for themselves but they speak to me and I hope I can tell you what they say to me.

Chinatown Parade NYC

It was also that Superdull thing but if I wanted to watch a bunch of brawny guys going at each other I have a copy of Querelle at home.   More importantly to this blog it was the first time I really got to take my new (to me) Voigtlander Bessa R3A with the Nokton 40mm f/1.4 single coated lens out for an extended spin.  That Sunday I walked from Chinatown to the former Fulton Fish Market back up through Soho to the East Village and then back down Broadway to the Staten Island Ferry after nightfall.   I still have to finish developing and scanning the 6 or so rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 I shot but I will mention a few thoughts on shooting and feedback on the few frames I did get.

The first thing I noticed on pulling my negatives off the reel is that the 40mm is surprisingly wide.   I’ve worked with several 28mm lenses, I have a 24mm for my Canon T-90, and a 16mm russian fish eye with a Pentax mount that I’ve used on both a Pentax digital (with the 1.5 crop factor its a 24mm with some distortion) which are actually much wider than the 40mm but I never felt that my frame was cramped.  The 1:1 viewfinder might have a lot of to do with this as its nice, bright, and quite roomy.   Even with the 16mm fisheye the small viewfinder on my Pentax K100D felt claustraphobic at times.

There are two important elements to street shooting, feeling comfortable enough taking pictures of strangers and feeling comfortable dealing with strangers being unhappy about you taking their picture and saying something about it.   Everyone has their own strategy for dealing with these two core issues and your choice of equipment does have a great deal to do with it.   After shooting in public spaces like Union Square for a number of years with a SLR I felt much more comfortable shooting.  The smaller size of the rangefinder and more importantly, the compact lens made me feel much less like I was sticking a huge phallic mask in front of my face every time I raised the camera to my eye.

Now we’ll turn to the lens itself and make a few comments about image quality.   I still have to develop some and scan the rest of my images but I did learn very quickly that with a single coated lens a shade is mandatory.

Cops, Chinatown New Year's Parade

Shooting into the sun gave me a lot of glare which killed this photo.   I liked the framing and the subject but I had to fight in photoshop to put some contrast into the scene and crop out of the blown out areas.

I’ve shot with Fuji Neopan 400 and developed it in Rodinal diluted 1:50 many times.   I have a tendency to get overly contrasty negatives which are a pain in the ass to print in the darkroom so I’ve added a few steps in the development process to ease this issue.  I use a lower dilution of Rodinal, agitate every minute rather than every 30 seconds, and then use a 3 minute water bath instead of an acid stop after the development time is finished.   I may need to cut back on the water bath or agitate a little more often as the negatives looked a bit flatter than I’m used to.   The single coating does appear to give less contrast.   I’ll have to experiment more as the VueScan software I use to pull in my images does have a tendency to deliver flat scans.

I won’t say this is a problem, just a characteristic.

So today’s lesson is Use A Lens Shade.   I’ll have more to add as more photos come rolling in off the scanner.   With a little luck I’ll have access to a darkroom again later this week and we’ll have some real fun.

The End Of Coney Island?

The last two years has seen the closure of much of Coney Island’s amusement areas as a private developer, Thor Equities is currently locked in a struggle with the city, the Coney Island community, and the larger communities of Brooklyn and NYC as a whole over the future of the neighborhood.  Thor holds title to much of the property along the boardwalk and is seeking zoning from the city to build several large hotels and big name stores.  The city is currently refusing to grant Thor the zoning they desire and are engaged in talks to purchase the property from Thor.   Local residents are currently caught in between Thor and the city as their area only recently began picking up economically and now they’re facing the closure of much of the amusement zones which brought in a steady stream of visitor into the neighborhood.

Save Coney Island

Vacant Lot, Coney Island

The future of Coney Island is entirely up in the air.  Thor envisions a future as a resort destination with high end hotel towers, shopping, and reconstructed boardwalk.  The community groups strongly oppose this vision as they feel it is at odds with the tradition of Coney Island as a local destination where the boardwalk and mom and pop scale amusements were the draw and present the public with a continuation of the experience that has defined Coney Island for the past 10 decades.   They also argue that Manhattan already offers an endless array of hotels and shopping experiences so the draw to the very end of Brooklyn would be limited.

I don’t have the emotional ties that longer term and lifelong residents have with Coney Island but I’ve always enjoyed it.  The Mermaid Parade is always a high point of my summer.  I grew up going with my family to the boardwalk in Laguna Beach, CA so its a bit of happy childhood in my adulthood on the other side of the country.   The one thing I do miss from Laguna is the daily Hare Krishna procession.

I’ve been visiting the boardwalk and amusement zone over the past several years so I hope to put together my own experiences of the area in a huge transistion as an occasional visitor and participant in the small joys it has to offer.