Chinese New Year parade, Rockville, Maryland – Part 4 – People
Chinese New Year parade, Rockville, Maryland – Part 3 – Dragon Dancers
Chinese New Year parade, Rockville, Maryland – Part 2 – Lion Dancers
Here are the lion dancers preparing and at work.
Chinese New Year parade, Rockville, Maryland – Part 1
I went to ANOTHER Chinese New Year parade this past weekend, in Rockville, Maryland. Rockville is the county seat of Montgomery County, one of the most prosperous and most ethnically diverse counties in Maryland. They estimate that 17% of Montgomery County’s population is of East/South-East Asian origin, and growing. This is actually one of the new centers of the Asian community in the Washington DC metro area, along with Fairfax and Annandale in Northern Virginia. Although not gigantic, the parade in Rockville was several orders of magnitude larger than the one downtown DC in Chinatown (which is a pale shadow of its former self, now consisting of less than a dozen actual Chinese restaurants, perhaps a handful of other Chinese businesses, and a residential facility for the elderly, plus a bunch of other businesses like Fuddruckers, Comfort One Shoes, Legal Seafoods, a pair of Irish pubs, a Hooters(!!!) and a CVS pharmacy with Chinese-language signage trying to preserve the look of a real Chinatown). The parade was organized by the VisArts art center in Rockville, which is a terrific public/private partnership to make art accessible to the community. Here are a sampling of images from the parade and the crowds watching it.
Lighting toy – Gary Fong ‘universal’ Cloud diffuser for speedlights
Ok- I was a definite skeptic about this – after all, I’ve seen the examples and read the reviews but $50, for a piece of frosted tupperware? Proof is in the pudding, as they say. And with a particularly challenging subject – a white cat against a beige wall.
I’ll post some more examples that are better illustrations on more recognizable subjects (human portraits) in the near future. I’d say it’s worth it, but with one caveat – it fits just fine on virtually any shoe-mount speedlight type flash for most camera systems, film or digital. It does NOT fit on my big Metz 45-CL4 handle mount (potato-masher) flash. For that, I’ve improvised a piece of I want to say Rubbermaid or perhaps Ziploc re-useable food storage container with a hole cut through the lid and the interior buffed with sandpaper. Cost including the sandpaper? about $1. I’ll do a showdown between the two on the same subjects with the same lens and camera shortly to prove the value of the Gary Fong.
Chinese New Year Parade, Washington DC
All photos taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8E and a Metz 45 CL4 for fill-flash. That’s one of the great things about using a camera like a Rolleiflex – you can do fill-flash at any shutter speed so it works even in broad daylight. I’m very pleased with how well it worked – the Metz was new to me and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – in fact, it worked beautifully and gave a very nice quality to the light. Now I just need to come up with a diffuser for the flash to soften it even more, and give a bigger catchlight.
Two More Little People
Two more little people. This collecting of circus folk, specifically little people, makes me wonder if anyone has ever written about the Victorian fixation with little people. Compared to today there seems to be a veritable cornucopia of them in the Victorian era – today there’s the family on Little People, Big World (the reality TV show), Vern Troyer, Hornswoggle (part of the WWE cast), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones) and the lady who played E.T. That’s really about it. But in the 1860s-1890s, there was Tom Thumb, Commodore Nutt, Lavinia Warren, Minnie Warren, Admiral Dot, Major Atom, General Cardenas, The Magri brothers, Nellie Keeler, the Rice Family, Che Mah, Maj. S.E. Houghton, and Chas. Decker. And that’s just to name some of the better known ones whose images I’ve collected. I’ll even go out on a limb and include Waino and Plutano on that list although I think strictly speaking they weren’t midgets/dwarves. Perhaps it was a side effect of marginalization – in the Victorian era, if you were not an able-bodied white male, employment options were VERY limited for you. There may not have been any greater percent of the population born with disabilities/physical deviations in the last half of the 19th century, but perhaps we know of more of them because the only thing they could do to survive was go into show business.
I was particularly intrigued by Mr. Tower, by L.J. Hurd, because not only is he atypically large for a little person, and relatively proportionate, but the note on the back from the photographer caught my attention: “L.J. Hurd, Artist, Traveling Photograph Gallery. The Plate from which this was made will be preserved one month.” This is the first time I’ve seen anyone specify a lifespan for a negative – most of them have said something to the effect of “reprints available at any time”. It makes perfect sense to discard/recycle your glass plates every month if you’re an itinerant photographer. Glass is heavy and a pain to haul around. IF that was true of this image, in all probability this is unique or nearly so. Then again, if Mr. Tower was a well-known performer, this could be one of dozens if not hundreds that Mr. Hurd printed and sold, and he probably retained the negative beyond his stated month.
Orchid Show at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum
Here’s a few shots I took at the Latin American Orchid exhibit at the Smithsonian over the weekend.
All shots taken with a Rolleiflex 2.8E with a Rolleinar 2 close-focus adapter, Kodak Portra 400, and hand-held at 1/30th of a second between f2.8 and f4.5. I think I’ll go back another weekend and try again this time with a flash so I can get more depth of field. Don’t know if I’ll take the Metz or something smaller, as the Metz may be TOO powerful.
The Thumbs Keep Marching On….
Two more recent acquisitions. One is a solo of Minnie Warren, the sister of Lavinia Warren Stratton (aka Mrs. Tom Thumb). She played maid of honor at her sister’s wedding as a bookend to Commodore Nutt being Tom Thumb’s best man, helping set the stage for P.T. Barnum’s “Fairy Wedding”. This is another in the Brady grouping of photos related to the wedding. Note the E&HT Anthony embossed seal on the card.
Minnie Warren did marry, but not Commodore Nutt – she married yet another little person stage performer, Edmund Newell, aka General Grant Jr or Major Edmund Newell. Minnie died in childbirth in 1878. She is buried in Middleborough, Massachusetts. (What IS it with these ersatz military titles?)
Here is the first Tom Thumb Wedding photo I’ve seen NOT by Brady. This is by the Stereoscopic Company of London which despite its rather pedestrian and industrial name was in fact one of the premier photographic portrait parlors of its day. The Regent Street address if nothing else should be a clue to that.
I’m still trying to figure out who/what the monogram embossed into the verso of the card stands for – CWA? CAW? WAC? I also dig the American flag embossed as well – it appears to have only two rows of stars, which was probably as much artistic license taken trying to fit a readable symbol into the space as anything. I’m a little surprised at the need to mark the image as somehow American – the Thumbs were international superstars and virtually everyone would have known they were Yankees.
Mathew Brady’s Studio
Here is the skylight of Mathew Brady’s Washington studio. Today the space is occupied by the National Council of Negro Women. The studio itself today is nought but a storage room full of filing cabinets. But still being able to see the skylight Brady used to illuminate his subjects helps one imagine Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant sitting in that loft for the portraits we know them best by.
The skylight is on the top floor of the pink building at the left of the photo.
dcphotoartist 