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By mike, 15 February 2010 11:17 pm • view full size

Spotted this while walking along the water earlier today. It was accompanied by a few photos showing a middle-aged man posing on or with his motorcycle, tooling around in the garage, and the like. I think the casualness of the photos — as opposed to the usual memorial photos, which tend to show a person in their ‘Sunday Best,’ — made the whole thing seem more real. A snapshot from a wedding reception or a graduation photo just shows the face; seeing someone in their element, with the things they love, shows the person. Looking over the photos tacked to the tree, it was obvious that a person, not a face, was dearly missed.

When I die, I hope they use the photo from my “About Me” page, or something similarly silly. I don’t take myself seriously in life, I’d hate to start after I was dead.

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Minimal post on this one, just some basic tone and curve adjustment, and a black & white conversion from there.

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By mike, 12 February 2010 12:16 am • view full size

Went for a walk on my lunch break (worked from home today) and passed a running track, where a bundled-up runner was doing laps. Winter runners always make me feel especially lazy. I can’t be bothered to run when it’s nice out, and these guys are running in cold winter weather. Oof.

Post-processing was fairly minimal on this one. I added a gradient filter on the top to bring out a little more color in the sky and did some basic level and curve adjustments. I also did a tiny clone job to clean out a distracting part of lamppost in the upper-right corner.

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By mike, 11 February 2010 12:06 am • view full size

Earlier tonight I had the brilliant idea to go out into the driving snow and freezing cold, and take some long-exposure shots of the Triboro Bridge. I won’t bore with the details, but the high moment of the outing involved me standing by the freezing East River, 25mph winds sandblasting my face with sleet and snow while my umbrella whipped around me, my tripod threatened to topple over, and frost and sleet accumulated on the front of my lens as it was exposing.

Giving up the excursion as lost, I packed it up and headed back to the apartment, taking some hand-held shots along the way. It wasn’t until I got back and started going over the photos that I realized I hadn’t cleaned all the slush off the lens. What little had remained blurred and obscured parts of the outer rim of my lens, giving photos this ethereal, glowy quality to them.

The longer you shoot, the more you get used to things like this, these “happy accidents.” Photos where the thing that makes it work the most (or at least one of them) was completely unplanned. It happens more often than one would think. For all the control you try to exert on your shoot, making sure that everything — the gear, the location, the talent, the lighting, the timing, everything — is exactly as it needs to be, randomness always manages to creep in.

It used to give me pause; how good a photographer could I possibly be if some of my most memorable, most lauded, most beloved photos were products of chance? Eventually I started to realize that chance is always a factor, but it doesn’t run the show. The camera didn’t fall out of your bag, land on the shutter release, and take the photo. It was the photographer who put it in the right place, at the right time, under the right circumstances, and took the photo. There was still talent and skill involved with that.

That said, I really love the old-timey feel to the photo. I actually didn’t have to do much post at all. The low light gave the photo the reddish tint; all I did was tweak contrast and levels a little, and built on the vignette caused by the sleet and the corners of my ultrawide. Everything else was like that when I got there.

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By mike, 10 February 2010 9:39 am • view full size

I just love that the bridge is called Hell Gate Bridge. It brings to mind images of demons and hellspawn erupting from some portal to the netherworld. Trains go in through one side of the portal, and a massive snakelike demon emerges from the other, wreaking havoc and laying waste to the countryside.

In reality, the only thing that erupts from the bridge are freight trains and the occasional Amtrak line. And while Amtrak trains are certainly pretty hellish in their own right, they’re not actually of hell, sadly enough.

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By mike, 4 February 2010 10:51 pm • view full size

Contrary to popular myth, New Yorkers are not assholes.

What people tend to perceive as being an asshole is really just being too busy to bother with idle pleasantries. It isn’t that they’re jerks, it’s just that they’re usually in a rush and if you were to stop one to ask them for directions, your answer would be less of

“Aw, new to town? Where you from, hon? That so? I’ve got cousins up there! Beautiful in the fall. So anyway, what you wanna do is go up this street until you get to the second Duane Reade on your right. Then you’re gonna wanna take a right and head down to Third and it should be right there. With the green awning. Oh no problem. You too, buhbye.”

and more of

“Go up to 28th, take a right, go down two blocks. Yeah, see ya.”

New Yorkers, like anyone else in the world, are normal people with normal temperaments and normal personalities. And they’re just as friendly, helpful, and nice as the next guy.

Right up until they get on a train.

The minute a New Yorker gets on a train, all bets are off. What might pass for a civilized society above ground turns into a free-for-all under its streets. Stock brokers, school teachers, pastors, deacons, and all manner of person shed off their friendly personae when they enter the tunnels of the New York transit system. They are no longer men, they are morlocks in a Wellsian nightmare.

The little old ladies are the worst, pushing and shoving and cursing and stabbing you with their umbrellas. They might be somebody’s sweet ol’ gran-gran by light of day, but down in the dark they are little more than hellbeasts in muumuus.

I’m not sure what it is about the subway system that turns people into such animals. Perhaps it’s the lack of daylight. Or perhaps it’s the stress of commuting; there’s a direct proportionality between the bestial nature of riders and how packed the trains are. Or maybe it’s that people feel free to be their ruthless selves, their anonymity protected by the dank and the shadow. Odds are, though, it’s a combination of the three and other things not even considered.

The only time there is a break in the savagery is when they find an enemy-in-common to direct their aggression toward: the MTA. Turn enough local trains express, make people wait long enough for a train that should’ve been there twenty-five minutes ago, trap them in a tunnel long enough because of “train traffic ahead,” and you’ll find that even the worst of enemies will band together in solidarity and snark.

People who were shoving and pushing each other not a second ago are not brothers-in-arms, rolling their eyes together and grumbling under their breath together, bound in a common disdan for “those jagoffs” at the MTA.

Of course, this accord only lasts as long as the problem that brought them together in the first place. Once the system is running smoothly again, they’re back at each others’ throats, punching and climbing over each other to get onto the train, slowing things down for the train behind them.

And then they get off at their stop, climb the stairs out of the station, and go back to being stock brokers and school teachers and pastors and deacons, their abhorrent behavior left behind in the dark, anonymous, shadowy catacombs of Manhattan.