All Day Parking

One of the crappiest parking lots in New York is under the 59th street Bridge (Manhattan Side). The gas pumps are covered with flakes of rusted something - probably lead - from the shaking of the bridge. If you stand there long enough you'll need a good cleaning too.

I Love Everybody

I've been forcing people to listen to Lyle Lovett through my iPod wherever I go, but I haven't made any converts yet. Why, these are all ballads, they say. This is like your other country stuff. What's that guys name -- John Prine? How come you like this country stuff anyway. Huh?

The song that is especially hard to find appreciation for is "I Love Everybody" which is the title song of the CD. I realize it's a little sappy, but it makes me feel like I'm sitting in a little mythological bar in a mythological town with a bunch of good ole boys - waving mugs of beer around. Many of us in the bar are crying over lost love. Some are silent, staring off into space with a funny look - maybe thinking about their wives.

There's a John Ford western bar room mirror with a crack in it and a picture of Lilly Langtree. The trouble between the cattle owners and the sodbusters has momentarilly been put on pause.

If you look through the mirror - you see a dusty road that turns into a highway and then into a modern city. Did you know that 100 years ago nearly everyone lived in a town or on a farm and now they're all crammed into the big metropolis?

I love everybody, especially you.

* * *
Four more prints to do for Matt's gallery and then I think I may actually go out and do some shooting. Especially if there's a subway strike (which I still doubt).


Lenox Lounge, © Matt Weber

My Door

I often leave my front door open so the cat can stake out some territory on the top of the stairs. He does like to roam around.

Yesterday a real-estate agent with a prospective tenant stopped by. They saw my opened door and the young woman who was contemplating an apartment in the building wanted to ask me a few questions.

How's the super here, she asked. He's okay, I guess when you can find him. He doesn't live in the building though.

How's the heat in the winter? It's okay. I remember using the word okay several times.

She looked hopeful. Wanted to know about the neighbors. I didn't tell her that they generally came in young and fresh like her and left for something better after a year. There are about five or six of us in the building that have been crammed in here for a few years or more.

Then she made the mistake of asking if she could come in and look around. Okay, I said. And she took a few steps in and couldn't get much further because the vacuum cleaner hose was blocking the way. But she stepped over it. Took a look around. I could see her jaw drop. Not exactly the model apartment she was looking for.

She politely thanked me (doubt if I'll ever see her again) and left. I looked around after she left through her eyes. What I saw was a workshop. Cramped. Messy. Not a touch of anything remotely feminine, or homey to be seen.

I saw that every square inch has something to do with film or printing. I recently moved my liquid chemicals into the only kitchen cabinet because in the bathroom they were too close to the steam pipe. I left the photoflo bottle in there though thinking it's just soap.

Open the fridge: batteries, juice, some ancient olives - and film. I don't cook here anymore. There's no room.

The kitchen counter is just a mass of wires, extensions, scanners, and a printer (2200).

What was once a spice-rack has tri-x boxes in it.

Look up and you'll see the loft - more boxes with packaging supplies. I don't really mind the place until someone new and fresh stops by and then it seems like a peculiar way to live. I once read an article - I think it was in Lensworks about a photographer who didn't even have a bed and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his apartment. Looking at it from that point-of-view I consider myself well off.

I didn't always live this way. Before moving up here I lived in a five room apartment on the lower east side with my girlfriend. There was the one room for darkroom equipment and the rest of the house was like your usual house with a bedroom and living room. Sometimes we'd have guests over for dinner and open a table. I once did Thanksgiving at that house for both her and my family. When we split - I let her have the apartment (and was glad to get out - you know how those things go).

Sometimes, as I'm falling asleep - I think about what it would be like to just pick up and move someplace cheap and homey. Someplace with wide open skies and vast horizons. Big rooms where you could stretch out and watch the sunset through panormic windows.

The grass is always more saturated someplace else. There are people out there saying: Gee - wish I could do what Dave is doing. And then there's Dave thinking - I wish I could get a job at a filling station in Mayberry and come home - pat Opie on the head - and sit and smoke my pipe on the front porch. Mayberry and the photographer's life - all a dream. Might as well keep it beneath closed eyes.

Ilford - Kodak

Barrett e-mailed this link

"Dear Customer,

Mono Paper, Film and Chemical Equivalents Charts

ILFORD Photo has produced a pair of charts showing the ILFORD equivalents for Kodak and Agfa Papers, Films and Chemicals, thus enabling users to switch with no problems and no need to experiment to find an alternative product. "

Do they know something we don't?

Rent Demonstration

I'm always asked - so what do you shoot? I shoot:

I shoot looks. Glances. Sunrises and sunsets. Trees if they lean towards me properly. Demonstrations when a kid's tongue sticks to a railing. Shadows if they have the proper politics. Mystery and mayhem. Night floating down the river with a diamond necklace made from gleaming bridges.

I specialize in kids and old people. People my own age are 2-dimensional beings. They specialize in hiding during the middle decades. You can't appreciate them until you are in your eighties.

I shoot whatever presents itself to me, whether it exists or not. Sometimes I just sit and wait by the river and wait until the great moment approaches from behind me and taps me on the shoulder with cold steel fingers. The fingers have an ancient patina on them. They reach out from the monumental factory that once manufactured faucets. The faucet fingers are all that's left of the ghosts walking through corridors in the open sunlight near the river, near the piers where a father and son fish the now polluted waters.

That's the sort of thing I shoot.

Matting Info

The museum 4-ply board arrived from Stu-Art (sort of). They sent it to the building next to mine but the woman who got it let me know and so all is well. The mat and cuts looks great.

Remember - when comparing these prices - the Stu-Art window mats are custom cut to my specs. the Light Impression Boards are not.

So - the window mat is 4-ply archival M11 Museum White with custom bevel window cut. Backing board is MM type.

Stu-Art

8 x 10 mat size = 1.91 ea. + .39 backing board = $2.30 ea.

11 x 14 mat size = 3.50 ea. + MM back .74 = $4.24

16 x 20 Museum Board with any opening: $5.00 ea + $1.25 back = $6.25 ea.

Light Impressions (not custom cut):

8 x 10 board and back with 5 x 7 opening = $4.59 ea.

11 x 14 board and back with 8 x 10 opening = $5.99 ea.

16 x 20 museum board and back with 11 x 14 opening = 7.59 ea.

You can see - the biggest savings with Stu-Art is with the 8 x 10 inch size.

Google Image Search

You might find this interesting - I remember that Heath was looking for something along these lines. If you leave the field blank, it will bring back every grayscale image in the Prints-For-Sale directory - though I'm still trying to figure out how to get it not to pick up the index files though. But generally if the text you are looking for is in the page, it's picked up.

Here's the search page using google image search. It's still pulling up the index pages (which I don't want), but this is about the most useful thing I've found for searching particular parts of the site and returning images. It only returns jpgs that are "grayscale." There are some other parameters I can fool around with as well.

Sunrise, Atlantic City

Sunrise, Atlantic City

Update

This has been a long and tiring few weeks. In the middle of the busy season I was trying to do too many things at once: calendars, books, new scanner, re-scanning and re-working old images, new PS techniques, and of course trying to get prints out.

The calendars and books came to nothing - though I learned a few things. I re-did the Photography Store so that images that are available in smaller sizes appear in the main Photo gallery.

This morning - as I walked to the corner through huge snowflakes - I noticed how beautiful the city looked but had no desire to pick up a camera. I would rather sit at home and work on some older images and finish the book I'm reading (White Man's Grave - which I think is giving me nightmares, but I can't put it down).

I'm planning to spend the next week really re-organizing negatives. There are many good ones sitting around that have never been printed.

Along the way - I sometimes look through some of the digital captures - and there are good images there as well but as soon as I start to work on them - there is almost always some damned thing in it that annoys me and I curse myself that I didn't get it on film.

Maybe some overly smooth highlight - or last night I was working on this shot of two people on an escalator and at the point where their feet touch the elevator grating there is this annoying jagged design that wouldn't have been there with film. I'm not sure what you call that - fringing? Whatever it is the sensor was confused by where the persons foot and the escalator met and it wasn't captured properly. I can fix it - mostly with a bunch of PS techniques - but - there's no reason I should have to.

Other digital shots are perfectly fine. I've been adding grain to them with PhotoKit Sharpner and it's not a bad look. But there are some shots that I can't fix.

Christmas 2005

It's Christmas. No doubt of it.

The Victoria's Secret mannequins are in skimpy Santa Clause outfits. The emblazoned slogan on the windows proclaims: Have A Very Sexy Christmas.

The landlord (that we've been fighting with to put a lock on the front entrance) has placed a green plastic wreath on that door.

The office-workers are listening for rumors about their Christmas bonuses.

The CIA is sending Christmas dinners to secret inquisitions drops overseas.

In the old days - He drove the money-changers and merchants out of the temple. Now He returns to find that the entire economy of the country is based on his birthday. He finds everything from underwear to electric screwdrivers being sold in his name.

So He stands on the corner of 59th and Park Avenue and begins to rail out against how his name has been commercialized. He still has his old clothes on, and looks somewhat scruffy. The local cops aren't even sure what language he's speaking but it sounds like something middle-eastern. Definitely not English. No identification. He has picked up a few words and he's apparantly angry about Christmas. Angry about Christmas? Foreign? Could be a terrorist. Better check him out.

New York's Finest pick him up and notify the FBI.

He's brought in for questioning.

Next thing he knows, he's on a plane headed for a secret drop point in Jordan. At first he thinks he's being taken back to his birthplace, only to find himself deposited in a small cell where he's pumped with drugs.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch - there's a big brouhahah in D.C. about whether they've got a Christmas tree or a holiday tree in front of the White House and whether or not Pres. Bush can say "Merry Christmas" in his greeting cards or not.

Oh the point. If there is one. If Jesus ever did re-appear he'd probably just get himself into trouble again. He'd be denounced by the Christian right. He'd be seen as anti-American. And before you knew it - he'd be out of the way. I don't think he'd be allowed to be martyred again. Just disappeared.

John Lennon

Should I go out to the John Lennon thing tomorrow at Strawberry Fields. Starts so late: 10:52 p.m. or something like that (time he was killed). Is it going to be snowing? I'm getting lazy. Plus there's some talk that the park authorities are going to close the park at one a.m. and the fans may want to stay longer. Guess I'll play it by ear. Or play it by fatigue factor. This has been a long couple of weeks. If I go - than it'll be Tri-x in Microphen at 1600 all the way.

Cat, Factory Window

Have you ever tried to photograph a feral cat with a view camera? This is from a 4 x 5 negative. The cat crawled out from the rusted hole in the factory and sat there watching me long enough for to get one shot, then turned and jumped back into the factory. The right eye is bright and curious, but the left eye is wounded.