Wire - Less - 1

 

Lady Diana

The Diana F+ is a plastic toy camera - a replica of an old Russian-made camera from the 1960s. It is made of plastic, has a plastic lens (frequently with irregularities), no ability to zoom, questionable focus and only four aperture settings (sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy or pinhole). It uses 120 format film. There is little control over the images - light leakage on the film is common, shaking is inevitable even when mounted on a tripod, and in these days of instant digital gratification, one has to manually drop the film at specialized film labs with 120 film processing capability, and wait 24-90 hours to see the results.

...oh, and it takes absolutely breathtaking pictures!

One

These pictures were taken on a frigid morning drive through Yellowstone's Hayden Valley. The previous evening had brought an unexpected snowstorm, and since we hit the road before the sun came out, the snow was still on the ground. A herd of bison was moving through the valley toward lower regions and we were lucky enough to encounter them.

The title of the post alludes to the U2 song, one of the videos for which features similar images of bison. The sight of the animals reminded us immediately of the video, and Stuti successfully captured the images. Anytime you can even partially recreate the work of Mark Pellington or Anton Corbijn, it counts as a success!

Ocean Silhouette

I really have never understood the appeal of the beach on a sunny summer day (read: rotting washed-up seaweed, hordes of fishermen, dodging sandcastles, dodging volleyballs/beachballs/baseballs/frisbees, crazy children and crazy dogs, joggers and cyclists who don't like people in their way, parking-spot wars, elaborate cleanup rituals, sandy cars and sticky clothes). Besides, the water is southern California is cold!

Fortunately, the hordes leave en-masse after sunset, leaving the beach to the locals. This is convenient, because this is when the ocean tends to be at its most evocative. While I believe that both sunsets and silhouettes are somewhat cliched photography subjects, I am constantly struck by the touch of poignancy they add to any picture, especially when in combination.

Below is a series taken during a recent late-evening walk on La Jolla Shores beach. There is nothing overtly conceptual about these images. They're just...pretty.

...and sometimes, pretty is all you need!

L A......

Sharing some pics I took when Lensored met up in LA...

Fire !!!

After an awesome trip to LA what can be a bigger dose of reality? The call of The Laundry. Follow that up with a crazy fire burning up on the roof of a brownstone across the laundromat just sums up an average day in Brooklyn. For some! These are some images I captured of the inferno-from-across-the-street-from-the-laundromat. No one was hurt.

Lensored in LA II: Griffith

As documented in the preceding post, the Lensored gang got together in Los Angeles last weekend. While I had no initial plans of posting any pictures from that trip, yesterday I came across a quote from Leonard Nimoy in the New York Times, where Nimoy paraphrased Robert Heinecken. Heinecken (a concept photographer) supposedly stated that if one saw an object falling from space, one should only photograph it if one was on a mission to photograph objects falling from space, and that anything else would be mere photojournalism.

Thinking about this quote, I went through my pictures, and picked out the series below, all of which were taken outside the Griffith Observatory. These pictures are not part of a mission to photograph the observatory - however, Robert Heinecken was at UCLA, Leonard Nimoy has a theater named after him at the Griffith Observatory, and observatories, in general, spend a lot of time contemplating objects falling from space.

On a more personal note though, this post is tip of my hat to the old friends I met this weekend, one of whom gave us the reason to get together, one with whom I am engaged in an ongoing debate about concept and composition (which underlies much of the thought behind this post) and one who taught me to appreciate and photograph architecture (which I have attempted here). The old times aren't really the old times if we get to refresh them ever so often!