January 2012
5 posts
5 tags
American Desert
Wherever I go, the first thing I do is read the local news. On a January Monday in Detroit, where I’m covering the grand-sounding North American International Auto Show, the (not unexpected) news is that the city is running out of money. A panel of experts says funds will run out in May if spending isn’t curbed or taxes raised. The latter seems to be an especially far-fetched idea: Detroit is...
shannonpareil:
“Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law.”
—
Auberon Waugh, British author and journalist (1939 – 2001)
9 tags
Waiting for Air Force One
Barack Obama was in town for a fundraiser Thursday. Looking for an unusual angle, I decided to indulge my aviation geekery and went to the frigid Jamaica Bay, near JFK, to photograph Air Force One coming in. The first thing you notice (after freezing for an hour) is that it is really, really gleaming. The cleanest airplane I’ve ever seen. It landed in an eerie quiet: all other traffic is...
13 tags
The New King of Manhattan
Takeoff from LaGuardia, January 8. We’re over Rikers Island, looking at Manhattan. The Empire State Building still dominates the skyline, but One World Trade Center, just above the wingtip, is rising fast.
Seconds later, looking down at the East River snaking between Queens and Manhattan as the sun appears over New York Bay. Magic, every time.
(Nikon D700, Nikkor 50 f/1.8 AF-D...
15 tags
2011 Revisited
I think I’ll like 2012. As for 2011, it’s been a weird time, and a blast some days, and infuriatingly wrong some other days, but full of discoveries. Here are a few things I photographed along the way.
The most unexpected by far: a bald eagle over Prospect Heights, photographed (badly, but he was way high) from our roof. How’s that for the transformation of Brooklyn? Not only has the place become...
November 2011
1 post
7 tags
Bird Day
What does a New Yorker do on Thanksgiving Day when his wife is working in the morning and the big event isn’t scheduled until the next day? Easy: birds. Birds in the hundreds, birds in flocks and pairs and flights, birds everywhere but on one’s plate. Birds at Jamaica Bay, and most of all gulls. On a windy cold morning, there were some Canada geese and swans, a few cormorants, and even...
October 2011
1 post
10 tags
Egrets, Herons, and Unlucky Fish
The Jamaica Bay wildlife preserve is closer than most New Yorkers think - yet it could be on the moon. Most people I know in this city have never heard of it. Visitors, much less. But it’s really, really close: a hop on the A train to Rockaway Boulevard, then a few stops on a city bus, and you are there. 90 minutes from midtown Manhattan. In early fall, it’s a haven for migratory...
September 2011
1 post
7 tags
Meanwhile, Uptown...
I wasn’t assigned to cover the 9/11 memorial. And I was glad I wasn’t - I just wasn’t feeling it. I would not have been happy in the crowds, I would not have liked the mood, and I would have taken predictable shots, written a predictable story, ended up with an entirely forgettable day’s work. So we went to see an exhibition at Lincoln Center. Other than some firemen in...
August 2011
2 posts
4 tags
I Was in a Hurricane and All I Got Was This Lousy...
Not only were we in a hurricane, we were in a hurricane whose eye passed 250 feet from our house - corner of Washington Ave & St Marks Place in Brooklyn, according to the NOAA storm tracker. And what happened? A few downed branches. Lots of rain, that we slept through like babies, cat at our feet. And the next day, a neighborhood that looked far better than it did after the tornado that...
9 tags
A Storm Instead of a Sunset
The gods of light and weather in the American Northeast are an unpredictable lot. Prayers and sacrifices don’t really work with them. In August, they exercise their most sadistic side and blanket the entire seaboard in a hot humid haze that is the bane of photographers, and of pretty much anybody who needs to leave their air-conditioned apartment. But sometimes they surprise you with a...
July 2011
1 post
5 tags
Cheap but Nice
I learned photography from my father. He detests sunset shots - cheap attention-grabbers, he says, easy to pull off, and generally cheesy. I agree, mostly, but sometimes you find yourself on your rooftop in Brooklyn on a summer evening and you happen to have a camera in your hand and the sun is setting and it looks kinda interesting and whaddaya gotta do?
(Nikon D700, Nikkor 50/1.8D lens, Auto...
June 2011
2 posts
10 tags
Love Won
I was off work today, and I went with Regan to see the first NYC Pride after the passage of marriage equality in New York state - just 36 hours after it, in fact. I couldn’t help myself, took my digital recorder and a notepad just in case, and ended up writing a story about it. Day off or not, how many times in a journalist’s life do you get to be at the center of a great civil rights...
5 tags
Detroit, Nowhere
En route to covering a visit by president Obama to an auto plant in Toledo, Ohio, I stopped overnight in Detroit. Admission: I’d never seen the city, and I wouldn’t see it this time, either, opting instead for a night in exurbia and an early start in the morning. The images I had in my mind before getting there were no different from the usual coverage of Detroit and its fellow sad...
May 2011
1 post
4 tags
Atlantic Yards from the Air
I’m a Brooklynite and a resident of Prospect Heights - and as such, I’m ambivalent about my new neighbor, the gigantic development at Atlantic Yards. I tend to come down on the side of those who think it’s not a terribly great idea to plop a sports arena down in a pretty residential neighborhood, and I’m not sure that AY would bring jobs and money to those who need them...
March 2011
2 posts
Backstage at City Winery
It’s freezing outside, in the vicious wind of downtown Manhattan. Inside, at City Winery, it’s warm, and the Wood Brothers are playing two shows with Carsie Blanton. No better place to be in the whole big city on a cold Friday night.
Almost time for the 8pm gig. White shirt, dark brown bass, blonde bassist with blonde wife, under neon lights, and between yellow / acid-green walls: is...
8 tags
The Moon, an Island and the City
This weekend, the moon was the closest it has been to the Earth since 1993, and it won’t be this close until 2029. So I went to Shelter Island and photographed it away from light pollution. The ospreys I was chasing besides the moon didn’t show up: probably still south, wintering. But there’s until the fall to catch those. Shelter Island is ideal for them - unspoiled and full of...
February 2011
2 posts
ofelixculpa asked: Love these pictures! (I do the Prospect Park blog 'A Year in the Park,' and I've been neglecting the park, so you've taken up the banner beautifully!) Just one Q: I just joined Tumblr as an experiment, but even as a 'member' I can't figure out how your 2 commenters left their comments under your post. Am I missing something?
5 tags
One Last Gasp of Winter
I had great plans for Presidents’ Day. Get a zipcar and go explore the Far Rockaways, or find a new wildlife reserve upstate to go hiking, or at least shoot birds in Jamaica Bay. And then it snowed again overnight and the sky looked like a milky curtain, with a forecast for drizzle later. So, hiking plans got bagged, and out came my trusty Plan B: Prospect Park, where you can always find...
January 2011
2 posts
How to Save a Squirrel (Without Really Meaning To)
Bright sunlight glinting off the fresh snow: an ideal morning to go traipse around Prospect Park in the hope of finding something good to shoot. Today it didn’t take me long. I heard a call that I took to be a hawk’s and followed it in the untouched snow, loving my new Canadian boots with every step, till I saw him way up, looking down, very interested in something. Red-tail hawk, a...
7 tags
The Wood Brothers & Zac Brown Band, New Year's Eve...
My favorite band, The Wood Brothers, was opening for Zac Brown at Philips Arena in Atlanta on New Year’s Eve. So of course Regan and I were in the photo pit, passing one camera back and forth between us and wondering exactly what label to stick on the ZBB - country/jam band? Jimmy Buffett goes to Nashville by way of Georgia? And that was before they started dropping Bob Marley and Stevie...
December 2010
2 posts
8 tags
New York after the blizzard
Maybe it wasn’t the Snowpocalypse after all, but it was the worst a man I met on the street in Brooklyn this morning had seen. “You lived here all your life?” he asked, while we were both trying to navigate to the subway station amid snowdrifts that reached above our midsections. “Uh, no, just a couple of years,” I said, somewhat puzzled. “Well, I have,”...
8 tags
Sunday in the snow in Brooklyn
As the blizzard started dropping snow on Brooklyn, I put on snow pants and grabbed a camera for a walk to Prospect Park. The battery died one hour in, and I was reminded of one basic tenet of digital photography: always bring a spare if you’re shooting in the cold.
The lens was my old Sigma 30 f/1.4, a superfast little thing that has the added advantage, in driving snow, of not being a...
November 2010
1 post
6 tags
Peeking Around the 2010 New York Marathon
Woke up late and sick Sunday. But it was sunny, and the New York Marathon was going to start in minutes, and you only get one of those a year. So out Regan and I went, headed towards Columbus Circle, thinking we’d make it to the finish line at about the same time as the first runners. We did, and without press credentials that would let us get really close, we decided to focus on the...
October 2010
1 post
Friday Evening in Lower Manhattan
A late-October Friday evening in Lower Manhattan. Financial industry commuters rushing home, sunset over New Jersey, and the neighborhood closing down for the weekend — all under the gaze of One World Trade Center, now a building site, and soon the tallest skyscraper in the city.
Photographed over a couple of hours wandering around between the water and City Hall, with a really, really...