This is, believe it or not, a brand new building in my neighborhood, with obscenely priced (although I’m sure very beautiful) condos. The rusted steel on the outside is intentional. It’s called the Atlantic Plumbing building because it occupies the former site of Atlantic Plumbing Supply. Late evening sun illuminates it perfectly, pushing the strong lines of the rusted steel and glass into deep relief.
I’m a big fan of the Maryland Renaissance Festival, where people get dressed up in all kinds of reasonably (in)authentic garb and indulge in the fantasy of being in another place and time for the day. Costumes range from Renaissance royalty to fantasy characters inspired by Lord of the Rings and other sci-fi/fantasy stories.
While I often get tarted up in my own RennFest costume (I pass for a lesser lord of the Realm in my velvet doublet and tights), it was hot enough out that I decided this time discretion was the better part of valor and I would be better off in street clothes, just taking pictures. I wasn’t as photographically focused as I’d have wanted to be, pardon the pun, as I had a friend in tow who wanted to take in the sights. This was another photo outing where having the Rollei really came in handy, as people would quite willingly (if not eagerly) pose for the cool camera with the two lenses.
Photographing the fairy-wing girl was a hoot- she saw the camera, geeked out over it, and got even more excited when I pulled out my hand-held meter to take an exposure reading: “Are you metering me?? That’s so COOL!”.
I felt so sorry for this poor boy, out selling floral hair garlands from a hand-cart in the blazing sun. Black feathers in your hair, while they do provide some shade for the face, can’t be the coolest thing to wear when it’s approaching 90F / 35C.
I did take this one as a candid, since the Maryland Man was so deep in conversation with the lady.
The living statue was busy posing, like a statue, and would only change or break pose if you put a tip in her cup. A little girl of perhaps five or six years old was enraptured by the statue, and an adult woman who was monitoring the child had to keep admonishing her (in the gentlest and situationally appropriate tone) “Don’t touch the statue- she doesn’t want to be touched”.
Another cast member at the RennFest who was approachable, thanks to the Rollei. He did get a bit distracted by I think a rather buxom young girl in a harem costume passing by just as I snapped the photo, so his expression isn’t what I was looking for.
And yes, if you’re wondering, that’s a Pokemon figurine on his necklace. See what I mean about not hewing to historical accuracy?
Now THERE’S a phrase you wouldn’t normally expect to read, with the possible exception of the “Local Crime” section of the Washington Post. But it’s true. The Kennedy Center, like so many other cultural institutions, is having a hard time attracting young audiences. In a bid to outreach, they set up a skate park on the front terrace and invited local skateboarders to come and perform, and tossed in a stage for live bands.
This was one instance (of many) where having my Rolleiflex was a huge advantage. It gave me an entree to talk to the skaters and ask for portraits. Everyone loved the camera and if I asked, they posed willingly. On the few action shots I took, it also helped by having no mirror blackout at the moment of exposure, so I could see exactly when I was pressing the shutter button, like in this shot above.
I initially approached the asian skater about taking his picture. He pulled in his friends and all of them posed together. I was surprised at how willing they were to pose, as I mostly shoot candid street photos and people don’t always appreciate that. I don’t know what it was about that day but everyone was just so natural in their posing, it all worked out so well and I didn’t have to direct anyone.
This was a fun shot to take, as I was anticipating this kind of motion blur, but couldn’t know what exactly to expect because the eye doesn’t see motion blur at 1/30th of a second. But I knew I got the skateboarder in the right place.
This girl was working the lights at the event. She saw my camera and asked about it, so we chatted for a couple of minutes about the event, the folks skating, and the weather (it was scorching hot that day, and inside the light tent had to be even hotter). I asked for her picture and she immediately said yes, and even suggested the backdrop instead of inside the lighting tent.
The kid in the white shirt saw my Rollei, and asked some questions about it, and was very excited by it. Again, I asked for a photo before he started his next run, and he pulled his buddy over, they wrapped their arms around each other, and posed. All on their own, no direction from me. I was very chuffed to see how the shot turned out, as I was shooting on the run as it were – one of the docents for the event had earlier shooed me off from the spot where I was standing to take the picture because it was in the path of potentially out-of-control skateboards.
Just some more of those things I see when I’m out walking about, that we normally take for granted and/or ignore.
An electric meter that is not well-loved (but who loves an electric meter?):
Recycling cans outside the National Portrait Gallery:
The letters “URTS” cut out of a sheet of steel road plate used to temporarily cover a hole in the road:
Many photographers complain about “I don’t have anything to photograph where I live… there’s nothing interesting, blah blah blah… I get tired of seeing the same things over and over again”. If you’re getting tired of seeing the same things over again, then you’re not looking right. Not only are you not paying attention to what’s around you, but you’re failing to observe change in your environment and to record that change, which is one of the greatest functions a photographer can fulfill.
Case in point: two images of the same house, taken about two years apart. The first image is the earlier one. I was foremost interested in the gas meter as an organic pattern against the rigid geometry of the red brick and the white window at the time I took this one. The window and the gas meter were each singular objects set off against the dark, weathered red of the wall. At a bright and cloudless sunset, the meter casts a long shadow, further repeating its organic pattern.
Returning two years later, the house has been re-painted, this time in BRIGHT red, along with the gas meter plumbing and the bollards protecting it. Instead of looking at singular items tightly framed, this time I pulled back a bit and gave the scene a narrative – there’s a person visible inside the bars of the one window, the other window closed. The lighting is flat from an overcast sky, pushing the drama of the scene into the deeply saturated colors and the enigma of the house – who is that person inside? how did they get in there when there is no visible door? Why is the one window bricked up but the other one open?
By re-visiting the same subjects, we not only learn to see them, but to see them differently instead of as static, unchanging objects. It also helps with story-telling and narrative development. Being able to tell a story with an image is one of the key differentiators between a factual record (“on this date, this building/car/person/plant/animal looked like this”) and an artistic output (“why does this look the way it does? Who is that? Why are they there? Why are they doing what they are doing?”). I think that we should all strive for that artistic output and not just factual recording (not that there is no value in recording of facts – we need facts recorded!).
This is one aspect of photography that I would hope to help inspire my students toward, as an educator. But it’s also the hardest thing to teach – photographic vision is something that has to happen, organically, natively, within the individual photographer. The best you can hope for is to provide exercises to stimulate them in the direction of building their vision, and to provide constructive critical feedback to focus that energy.
A few views of the area around the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial.
If you recall my earlier posts of the World Health Organization/Pan-American Health Organization headquarters building, I like architectural abstracts. These are some color abstracts I shot on two different excursions – one down to the National Mall at sunset, and the other on my routine walk home from work.
The African-American History museum is still a work in progress – I think it is slated to open in 2016, but it could be 2017 or even 2018 before it is ready for visitors, even if the structure is finished (which it appears will be true sometime this year, from the look of it). The building design is made to look like a traditional African crown with three tiers of bronze-colored mesh. The repeating pattern of the mesh screening lends itself extremely well to abstraction, and the missing panels (from the architectural renderings on the signs outside the museum, they are in fact missing/uninstalled, and not intentionally empty) add a geometric counterpoint.
It’s nice to see that DC is finally getting some real architectural gems, and is not just filled with Classical-revival, Victorian, and Modern Industrial glass boxes. On a certain level it’s too bad the Corcoran was not able to get their financial act together several years ago and build the Frank Gehry addition to the school they wanted, as that would have been quite a striking change to the streetscape.
Although not strictly architectural, I thought the geometric forms of the crane against the solid blue sky made for a nice abstract and fit well with the overall theme; after all, it is a construction crane.
Far be it for me to accuse George Washington University of being architecturally avant-garde; most of their buildings blend in to the DC streetscape with an ennui-inducing banality. But their 1970s and 1980s brown-brick boxes do have some worthwhile details that break the monotony and catch the eye. Take this stairwell, for instance – the walls are blue, which pops out against the brown brick facade and dark bronze-color window trimming. And easily overlooked, the blue stairwell provides some continuity by breaking the space between the facades, each of which has a different styling for their windows. Without the stairwell, the contrast would be in high relief, and we’d think something went wrong during construction and/or they ran out of money and had to switch styles when they turned the corner.
This glass tower thrusts into the sky like the prow of an ocean liner, cleaving the plane of the facade like an Arctic icebreaker clearing the channel into Archangelsk through a wall of sea ice (ok, I’m being a tad dramatic but I wanted SOMETHING to say about it).
I often go on walkabouts on my way home from work with the Rollei in tow. I’m always impressed by the array of graffiti that’s been put up, and how it is becoming an accepted art form, with entire murals done in “graffiti style”. Here are some finds, most of them in a single alley off 14th Street.
I’m particularly taken with this segment of the mural, because of the optical illusion. If you de-focus just a little bit so you lose the texture of the stucco, it really looks like someone has made a GIANT tag on top of an actual apartment building.
I forget exactly where the two-headed Llama is located, but it’s near the alley mural. Very different texture and style, obviously not the same artist (the Llamas are a stencil, whereas the mural is almost entirely freehand). But Llamas are always cute.
I don’t know if the stencil is an add-on to the mural by the artist, or if someone else came along and tagged it on top of the mural. But the statement is both enigmatic and profound: “What you risk reveals what you value”.
Another M.C. Escher-esque optical illusion in the mural- when you first look at it you see a redhead with long, flaming hair streaming behind. Then you realize it’s a head with a chicken next to it. But it’s hard to keep seeing the chicken, and easy to go back to seeing the redhead alone.
Another pairing of iPhone vs. Rollei in the battle of “the best camera is the camera you have”:
I was lucky that I got back around with the Rollei to take this shot because within a week of my return with the Rollei, construction crews had started work on the building and Mother Mary of the Takeout Passthru, the not-so-baby Jesus and the One-Eyed Wonder beneath them had been removed and replaced by a fresh sheet of plywood. Gone was the shrine to the blessed deli, replaced by the altar of rapid gentrification.
A while back I posted an item about sometimes the best camera is the camera you have with you at the time you need to take a picture. Certainly, there may be other cameras that are better suited to the task at hand, but they don’t do you any good if you don’t have them with you. To whit, the first image. I came upon this bit of graffiti in an alley between two buildings. It’s almost as if it were an art installation in itself, the way it’s situated. When I first saw it, the camera I had on hand was my iPhone. It certainly did a good job of capturing the scene.
I promised to come back with my Rolleiflex to photograph it again, to see how different the two cameras’ visions were, and how they rendered the scene differently.
It’s not really a fair comparison, given that the sensor for the iPhone is the size of a Q-tip, if that, and the film in my Rolleiflex is 2 1/4 inches square, or about 300 times the size. Also, the lens has a different field of view- the iPhone is somewhere between a 28mm and 35mm lens’ field of view (moderately wide-angle), translated into 35mm equivalent, whereas the lens on my Rollei is a “normal” (50mm equivalent). The two cameras give very different renderings of the scene – the iPhone gives you much more of a sense of the space, whereas the Rollei makes the graffiti the star of the show.
Here is the locked gateway to the space where the graffiti is. Now you can get a sense of the drama of it – it’s hidden behind a locked gate, guarded like some treasure on display at more than an arm’s distance.
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