Posts tagged brooklyn

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 the province of locavore hipsters from around the world, but now we also have formerly near-extinct birds of prey soaring over the chop shops and jerk chicken joints of Atlantic Avenue. Yes, in four years in this neighborhood we’ve also seen peregrine falcons, a lone and menacingly wide-winged turkey vulture, red-tailed hawks, a kestrel and even an osprey, but the bald eagle takes the cake.

Speaking of things that fly and the city we love, here’s what flying into it on a late spring night looks like, under a sliver of moon, while the sun sets. Technically it’s New Jersey, okay. La Guardia was still ten minutes away.  But I had to shoot before the light died.

Not so high but still high enough: a snap from the top floor terrace of a high-rise in Battery Park City, after a house concert by Carsie Blanton in the apartment of a Norwegian music producer. My first weeks in New York, I lived in this neighborhood, on the 23rd floor: utterly soulless, but the view! The view!   

Another soulless place but with killer views is East Midtown. This is the view from the office.

I wasn’t away from said office nearly enough last year: my job was way too much editing and too little traveling after stories, people, light. Sometimes, though, I managed to spend a couple of days on the road, notepad in my right jacket pocket and laptop in the backpack, feeling the old familiar terror of a looming deadline you can’t possibly make but will, followed by a night in a three-star chain hotel in Deep America. A true delight, and I’m not kidding. This is one of those trips. 

But the real American story of the year was right on our doorstep. Whether you’re for or against the Occupy movement, you’ve heard of them: and they are the most media-savvy protesters I’ve ever seen. I spent days trying to get a shot that would say to me “this is what they are about”, and I never caught one that conveyed enough message. In December, after they had been evicted from Zuccotti Park and had reconvened one cold afternoon in a square off Canal Street, I saw a group of protesters with signs that spelled OCCUPY WALL STREET, one letter each that they would flip to make other phrases. They did it for a couple of minutes for the benefit of dozens of photographers, who were lined up just like they would have been at the red carpet for a very un-revolutionary, very 1-percent event. The photogs called out to them just like to film stars, asking for another pose, another frame, another flurry of shutter clicks. Cannes or LA, but in cold and damp New York, at an Occupy protest. The disconnect was staggering. The only way to show it was to shoot from the opposite point of view from all the other photographers.

Bonfire, Thanksgiving. Shot with the  phenomenal Nikon D700, a new addition to our stable of cameras in 2011.

New camera, old lens: this is what the D700 does with the beautiful classic Nikkor 35-70 f/2.8 zoom from the mid-1990s, a perfect little brick of solid metal that feels just right in one’s hands. In 2011 it was reassigned mostly to portrait duty, but it will do so for many years still. And for once, Regan is on the other side of it.

And finally the story that was supposed to be but wasn’t: Hurricane Irene wipes out New York. In the city it didn’t wipe out anything more than a few trees and cars, but it left a spectacular sunset, with hopeful blue skies peeking through. 

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 wreaked havoc last summer. Hurricane schmurricane. Category zero, you big wimp. And there I was posting on Facebook photos of the war-zone gear Regan and I had assembled the night before the storm, ready to fight our way to whatever story might happen in the 100 mph winds.

So the next day, after we had slept soundly through the whole thing, I took one of the cameras and went out in shorts and flip-flops, expecting to see something. Apparently our neighbors were also ready for Doomsday…

… and the good people at the (just opened and highly recommended) Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe on Vanderbilt Avenue had gone so far as to tape up the entrance to their basement. 

Well, in fact something had actually happened in the neighborhood. A few downed branches, here…

… but not enough to deter the people of Prospect Heights from reclaiming a still half-deserted Flatbush Avenue.

At the spectacularly ugly Richard Meier building on Grand Army Plaza, they had sandbagged the revolving doors, but that turned out to be overkill too.

So, nothing at all? Well, these unlucky motorists did have something on their hands - a tree, in fact, the only downed tree I could see in the neighborhood. “Waiting for the Fire Department?” I innocently asked one of them. “No way, baby! I’m gonna back up out of it!” he said, and promptly went back to ripping the smaller branches away with his hands. Don’t know if he succeeded, but he made me smile: This is New York, where hurricanes just scratch our paint and people move downed trees with their bare hands. Dumb, but so like the spirit of the city. “Whaddaya think I am, some kind of lumberjack?”, he seemed to say - and see you in 75 years, for the next statistically occurring hurricane.

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 white balance, jpegs straight out of the camera.)

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 most around here. On the other hand, constant development and urban reinvention is fundamentally American.

While pondering the issue, I happened to be on the left side of the plane during a recent approach to La Guardia over Brooklyn, and took some pictures as we flew right over the construction site. So here’s the mid-May 2011 photographic update on the state of the works: pretty far advanced.

The future basketball arena is, of course, the big reddish/blue thing right under the skyscraper. To see it better, here’s a crop from the next frame:

A few seconds later we had a great view of downtown Manhattan. The big orange-red cube is the giant self-storage place in South Williamsburg; the Navy Yard dominates the center of the frame; and the Williamsburg Bridge anchors the picture to the right. 

For my fellow aviation geeks, it was a straight-in approach to runway 4 at LGA, in a USAirways Express Dash 8. A great way to end a brutal night of redeye cross-country flying, with a plane change and the screaming baby in row 25 that nowadays comes as standard issue with the price of your ticket, in lieu of the meal. But opening one’s eyes and seeing this, well - you’re instantly awake and happy to be floating back home, in the sky over New York City. 

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 some fun if you’re willing to walk away from the beaten paths. 

This forsythia bush was planning an early flourish. Let’s see in ten days or so how things are going - right now, not too well.

The temperature was around freezing, but it takes a lot worse than that to discourage a Brooklyn jogger.

The lower half of this tree’s trunk was stripped of its bark, and it looked reddish compared to its neighbors. I turned my white balance down towards red a little to emphasize it. (How much down? Auto -2, on a D200 with a Sigma 30 f/1.4 lens, for my fellow Nikon geeks.)   

This hyperkinetic puppy ran towards me when I called her. And of course the autofocus was set to single shot, not the continuous following that would have actually put her in focus. Well, it’s still a halfway decent picture.

.  

Just after I snapped the dog picture I heard the rhythmic clicking of a horse’s hooves. Wait… horse? Yes, horse. I’ve seen them around the park other times too. I had to run to catch this rider, and she smiled graciously when I asked if I could take a few shots. I overexposed intentionally to get the black horse right, and that blew out the snow in the background… (+1/3 stop, for the photo geeks.) 

On my way back, I saw a dad pulling his kid on a sled. I played funny faces with the kid for a bit, and then the dad said something in what sounded like Swedish. The kid answered in International Toddler Baa-Baa Language, sounding like he wanted to say “This is fun!”

Last September’s disastrous storm has left many scars in the park. This is one of them.

Under the bridge that leads back to the Brooklyn Library, this girl looked like she was texting, and conveniently held still for a while, giving me a fitting shot to end the morning. Black & whiteing done in Photoshop.