Just a little quick note, I’ve passed 25,000 hits on my blog. I’ve been blogging for one year, 10 months and 5 days. It’s been an interesting experience, I’ve made some friends from around the world, and had some really cool experiences (having conversations with the grandchildren/great-grandchildren of folks whose photos I posted from my collection).
Victorian Cross-Dressing and Circus Dogs
To take a break from the High Heel Race photos, here’s two new CDVs in the antique image collection.
This pair of women in men’s clothes are rather unusual for the time period (1860s-early 1870s). Without knowing any back-story behind the photo, it’s hard to tell if this was just a couple of friends on a lark dressing up like lads (the mustaches were added by the photographer, much as hand-coloring or gilding of jewelry would have been done, for an additional fee) or if this was a comic way of expressing a deeper relationship between these two women. Without knowing, I’m filing this in my collection under the category of “Performers”, because it certainly is a performance of gender and gender identity, and it COULD be a theatrical, like the Ike Partington photo I posted earlier. I don’t know if there was a comedic play of the time period that called for women to play men’s parts.
This is a CDV I bought from a vendor in Uruguay (on Ebay). These two photos kind-of go together in that the dog is wearing a ruff, so in some way he’s probably a circus performer. This is a heavily restored version of the CDV – the idiot seller shipped it basically in a plain envelope, with no protection, so it arrived with a MAJOR crack running across the CDV just above the dog’s head. I thought I’d at least preserve the image content and post it.
The DC High Heel Race 2012 – part 2
All shot with my Canon 5D, 24-105 L zoom lens and 580EX flash.
The DC High Heel Race 2012 – part 1
This is Cookie Buffet, the drag persona of Christopher Dyer, a long-time DC resident and sometimes politician –
Cookie Buffet, from Wikipedia
This is the first in a series – I’ll finish posting over the weekend, as I have over 200 shots to edit through.
All these were shot with my Canon 5D and the 24-105 L lens.
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood
Two shots of a former house turned liquor store turned redevelopment project on 14th Street.
A perspective study of the brickwork trim on the front garden retaining wall of some houses on 13th Street.
The front of the world-famous Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in Northwest DC. You can see the new mural in the alley that depicts Bill Cosby (and Dr. Martin Luther King, not visible in this photo) – one of the two people who can eat at Ben’s for free (the other ‘person’ being the Obama family).
I just liked the way the door caught the reflections in the glass as it was closing.
Just another one of those quotidian things we see every day and don’t pay much attention to.
The entrance to a new Japanese restaurant that is very much in keeping with the spirit of a real Izakaya in Japan – spartan in appearance and compact in size, but still welcoming. Rumor has it that the food is excellent – I will have to give it a try some day soon, although their menu is a bit seafood-intensive for me as I’m allergic to shellfish (shrimp, crab, lobster and scallops).
To close out the show, here’s a manhole cover that has been thoroughly inscribed with graffiti. I liked the contrast formed by the regular geometry of the manhole cover and the grid of the concrete with the organic shapes of the leaves, setting up a man-vs-nature conflict, only to be complicated by the man-made disorder of the graffiti.
More adventures in Rolleiflex-land for those who care about such things. All of these were shot on Fuji NPH 400.
Two More from Chinatown
This is looking West on G Street, across the street from the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum (they’re housed in the same building, the former US Patent Office, once the largest building in Washington, occupying an entire square block. Designed to be fireproof (although proven later due to budget cuts during construction to NOT be as fireproof as designed), it was home to Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Ball). If you saw photos of this street from 30 years ago you would barely recognize it – the entire neighborhood was in rough shape, and despite the museum’s presence, not a safe place to be. They wouldn’t let school groups wander beyond the museum – it was straight from the bus to the building, and back directly into the bus in those days. The whole neighborhood smelled of Eau de Homeless. Now, drinks at Zola are $10-15 each for bottom-shelf liquor, and dinner for two at Rosa Mexicano around the corner will routinely set you back $70-100.
As you can see, sitting on the steps of the Portrait Gallery is a popular pastime, although not as popular as it used to be amongst teenagers who used to congregate there in large numbers pretty much all year round. The downside was that they weren’t absorbing culture – they were there being teenagers, being rowdy and noisy, sometimes getting into fights, and other inappropriate behavior. So the museum installed speakers that play classical music. Beethoven, the ultimate teenager repellant!
More Chinatown at Night, Rolleiflex plus Fuji 800Z
More of my DC nightscapes- I was testing out the Fuji NPZ 800 that I had in my film inventory. A surprisingly good result from a film I’ve had sitting around again for the better part of a decade.
You can definitely see the grain in these images, but it’s nowhere near as pronounced as the grain in 400 speed 35mm film. It also handles mixed lighting pretty well, but it’s not Kodak Portra.
Oh, by the way, these were all hand-held. THAT’s why you shoot 800 speed film!
Great Article from Petapixel
What I’ve Learned About Photo Gear Over the Past 40 Years
Terrific summary and great dispelling of the constant upgrade myth. A great photographer can make great images with a pinhole or a Brownie box camera, in addition to a CaNikSonEikaBlad. A mediocre photographer gets caught up in an upgrade chase thinking gear is the solution to a skills problem. Don’t get me wrong, gear is fun, and its always nice to have the right tool for the job – there are photos you can take with a Canon 5D that you can’t take with a Hasselblad, and photos you can take with an 8×10 Sinar you can’t take with a Leica (the old “don’t use a hammer to do a screwdriver’s job” adage). But when it comes down to it, it’s far to easy to blame the tool when we don’t get what we were looking for (“I would have gotten the photo if only I had an xxxx”). This is part of why I’m fixating on my Rolleiflex. It’s just one camera, with just one lens – it’s forcing me to pay more attention to what I’m shooting and how I’m shooting it rather than running around with two or three bodies and half a dozen lenses in two or more formats. My Argentina trip of a few years ago was a prime example – I had the 5×7 with six (SIX!!!!) lenses, 13 film holders (13!!!!), and a tripod, along with my Contax G1 with 45mm and 28mm lenses. While I did take some wonderful photos in each format, I’m pretty sure both suffered as a result. Certainly, there were photos I could not have taken with one that I did with the other. My Recoleta cemetery photos would not have happened with the Contax, and my street scenes in San Telmo and La Boca would not have happened with the 5×7. But by dividing my attention between the two systems and two ways of thinking probably meant that I wasn’t fully in the mindset of either system and then tried (and failed) to make images with one that would have been better done with the other.
Rolleinar 1
If you’re familiar with twin-lens reflex cameras, you know that they have certain limitations (close-focus capability or lack thereof, parallax compensation required, non-interchangeable lenses) for the most part (the Mamiya C22/33/220/330 family being the notable exception to most of the above). My Rolleiflex certainly falls into that category. One thing Rollei did was they came up with a special close-focus auxiliary lens set, which they called Rolleinar. Rolleinars come in four strengths, with the #4 being a rarity, and the #3 uncommon to find today. They’re basically diopters, but with a twist – because parallax worsens the closer you get, they include a special diopter plus prism for the taking lens so you can still compose a frame with relative accuracy. I have a Rolleinar 1, and I’ve been playing around with it. It’s good for getting closer for tight head-and-shoulders portraits, and for doing simple macro-ish photos of flowers and textures and the like. Here are a couple of shots I took with it outside the florist’s by my office – as you can see, it will get you close-r, but it’s far from 1:1 reproduction. Both of these were shot at or near minimum focus for the camera. Film is that same expired Fuji NPS 160 that I’ve been shooting through.
Capitol Bikeshare Bicycles
Here are some semi-abstract shots of the bikes of Capitol BikeShare, docked in their parking docks at Farragut Square. I saw the bikes’ shadows and the repeated patterns of wheels, spokes, seats and handlebars caught my imagination.
More Rolleiflex 2.8E/terminally expired Fuji NPS 160 action.
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