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By mike, 11 February 2010 12:06 am

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

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

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.

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By mike, 4 February 2010 12:34 am

My first update in over two weeks. Funny that I should break my shooting dry spell with a shot of the first snowfall I’ve seen all winter. I was expecting mountains of snow for my first New York winter since 1981, and instead I got two months of nothing and a light dusting of snow to finally break the drought.

—

I think I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately. It’d be easy to blame my lack of shooting on the miserable weather or the lack of light, but really I think I just haven’t felt the creative juices flowing. I’m not too worried, though. Our relationship with art is just like our relationships with people; it can’t be expected to be fiery and all-consuming all the time. If it were, we’d burn out in an instant. There are ebbs and flows to it, and the trick is to know which is which; to know when to ride the current and when to just sit back and let the wave come to you.

I’ve spent the last two weeks mostly indulging myself in idle distractions; TV shows and movies and reading and video games and the like. I’ve seen enough writer’s blocks to know that fighting it only leads to frustration and aggravation. Better to just resign yourself to the fact that, for now at least, the waters are still. And you can either try and force the issue by paddling yourself and get real tired real quick, or you can just lay back on the board, look up at the clouds, and enjoy the moment.

Just remember to sit up every now and then and check the currents, or you could find yourself out to sea without realizing it.

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By mike, 9 December 2009 11:03 pm

Spotted in a shoe store window in midtown. I’ve seen a lot of Christmas decorations in my time, but this has got to be one of the more macabre ones to date. It reminds me of those witch doctors’ shrunken heads you’d see in cartoons and comics. The only things that are missing are lifeless eyes and sewn-shut lips.

—

I fly out to San Francisco on Saturday. Hard to believe I’ve been living in New York for almost four months now. Time has a funny way of sneaking past you. It’s been an interesting four months, that’s for sure. I don’t know if I feel like a New Yorker yet, but that might partly be due to the fact that I don’t really spend much time in Manhattan. I’ve always equated Manhattan and Brooklyn with New York, and not living in either has me not feeling 100% New Yorkerly. Which is entirely silly, of course. Every borough is just as New Yorkerly as the next (even Staten Island), but there it is.

In any case, I’m looking forward to my flight back. It’ll be weird being in San Francisco as a visitor for the first time in eight years. Maybe I’ll finally get around to riding a trolley.

Probably not.