New York City | 2023

An October visit to Manhattan has become an annual ritual for me (pandemic lockdowns notwithstanding). It’s the perfect time of year to spend a few days in one of the richest street photography environments in the world, visit some of my favorite museums, catch up with a few old friends, soak up a city vibe unlike any other.

This year, while I took pictures every day, I only really had one day dedicated to being in the streets with the camera. I was rained out on Saturday, but Friday was perfect — the sun was shining, the weather was typical NYC Fall plus 10 degrees, and the streets of midtown were full of tourists and locals, shoppers, protesters, and general hangers-out.

Starting at Bryant Park — there were a ton of photographers there, I’ve never seen so many other people out doing what I’m doing in such high concentration — I shot for a while around 42nd, then walked down and around Broadway to Madison Square, Union Square, and finally to Washington Square Park, lingering when the scenes called for it, moving on when I needed a fresh perspective. I suspect that route is a fairly standard trail for photographers shooting street in NYC. There’s a lot happening in that corridor of the city.

About half the photos in this set are from that day, the rest were shot in various other locations around the city — Central Park, Hells Kitchen, West Village,  Chelsea. All these photos were taken with a Leica MP and a 50mm f/2 Summicron. I shot a couple of rolls of Portra (one 400 and one 800) that Friday, which were processed at Underdog in West Oakland, and shot Tri-X 400 the rest of time, which I processed home, where I scanned it all.

New York City | October, 2022

On a clear day in Manhattan the natural light is downright dynamic. As the sun moves across the sky, the light floods passages through narrow streets lined with tall buildings, and intersects main thoroughfares creating deep valleys of stark contrast in light and shade. When I’m holding a camera, this is the kind of environment that I see in black and white.

For a visit this past October — my first trip back to NYC since October, 2019 — I stayed at a hipster dive boutique hotel in Chelsea, in what’s known as the city’s Flower District, a single block of plant and flower stores on 28th Street between 6th and 7th Aves that service the bulk of the city’s floral and horticultural needs. The sheer amount of flora & foliage that hits the street first thing in the morning is impressive. It turns the sidewalks on either side of the busy one-way, single-lane street into a jungle of plants, trees and flowers that encroach on walking space, fill the environment with lush life, and cast wild shadows that divide visibility into into high contrast zones of light and shade.

The block starts bustling around 5am, several of the stores close mid-day, but many are open until late afternoon, so I managed to take advantage of the light and the action in the street most days, whether I was coming or going. In the morning I’d grab a coffee at a spot around the corner and move up the block east to west; if I was back on the block later in the day, I tried to roll up from the other direction, west to east. In both cases, I kept the sun at my back, giving me some cover and lighting up the subjects in front of me.

This strategy framed most of my travels throughout the city over six days. Whether I was headed to a museum in midtown, meeting some friends in the Village, or on my way to hit up a record store in the LES, whenever I moved through the city, I traveled mostly on foot and tried to roughly map out routes that let me take advantage of where the sun was going to be, in areas where I knew the foot traffic was likely to be busy. I tried to leave enough time to get to where I was going so I could stop and post up in spots where the light was especially good.

And even if it didn’t work out as planned and the sun was squarely overhead flooding the streets with light… New York still the most bustling and interesting city in North America, a target-rich photo environment regardless of the lighting particulars.

This collection of images contains both digital and 35mm film photographs. The digital images, which make up most of the batch, were taken with a Fuji X-Pro3 and an XF27mm f/2.8 lens (equivalent of 40mm on the Fuji’s APSC sensor); the film was shot using a Rollei 35S (also a 40mm f/2.8 lens) with Kodak Tri-X 400 35mm black & white film. A few of these shots are pretty decent, but they’re all passable enough to share publicly. (I might throw some outtakes into the next edition of One For The Road… just sayin’ .) Enjoy…

Weekly Photoset: March 17, 2019

Time flies when you’re working your ass off.

i‘ve been taking photographs every chance I get recently but, per usual, haven’t had much time to circle back around to review, edit and post what I’ve been shooting. But I’m still making that effort to get it in when I can, so this week’s set contains scenes from the few weeks. In that time, I spent four days in Anaheim, CA for work, and traversed the Bay between Oakland and San Francisco on the usual paths.

I’ve been thinking a lot about photographic style — my opportunistic approach, no matter the setting — and have been sort of longing for the time required to post up in busy places, make myself invisible, and capture the traffic of life as it goes by. But right now I have no time for plotting careful approaches, or lying in wait, so shooting on the move’s gonna have to continue to be the M.O…

Weekly Photoset: February 25, 2019

Back to routine, scenes from daily local travels…

Weekly Photoset: February 18, 2019

I’ve spent a lot of time recently playing catch up (work, life, creative pursuits, etc.), so this week’s photoset includes images I’ve made over the last few weeks (the recent LA trip notwithstanding).

Lately, photographically speaking, I’ve been trying to see past the drudgery of the every-day (my life is fairly routine when I’m not traveling) and find beauty in the normal average spaces and places around me. Spaces devoid of people are easier for me, though the perennial challenge of photographing people is a part of this — and something I still struggle with. Ultimately, regardless of the subject, I’m trying to employ the (often [mis]quoted) wisdom of California photographer Morley Baer: “Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.”

At any rate, here are some ordinary objects I’ve photographed recently (all shot with the FujiFilm x100f, and edited as minimally as possible in Adobe Lightroom). The beauty is, I suppose, entirely subjective…

Photoset: Los Angeles, CA | January 2019

I’ve been beyond busy for the last month, as well as sick (twice), and generally preoccupied — so much so that I haven’t even thought about posting photos. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been taking photographs, I just haven’t had much time to review, edit or share.

So in an attempt to get back into the swing of the complete process, here’s a gallery of street photos from a recent quick weekend trip to LA, where I attended the women’s march with friends, and wandered the streets of Echo Park, DTLA, and the Arts District.

Electric Wizard

This is English stoner doom band Electric Wizard, live at The Warfield in San Francisco (April 30, 2018), complete with crushingly high volume and seizure inducing video accompaniment comprised of flashing, brightly colored psychedelic artwork superimposed over biker movies and Satan worshiping smut films from the 1960s. It all worked really well together.

These three photos were taken with Lightroom Mobile on an iPhone 8 from the back of the lower floor of the theater. They were edited in Lightroom Mobile and then finished in VSCO. They're super grainy, and shot from to far away, but I think they still deliver.

And just because I was interested in how wel the Squaresapce mobile app worked, I wrote and published this post on my phone as well. Nifty. (Update: I had to go back in via the computer and make some tweaks to the post. The mobile editor's not that hot.)

Familiar Paths, New Angles

I tend to traverse the same paths. My commute between home and work, the errands I run around town, and the tracks of my life are generally through streets that I'm very familiar with because I'm on them with such frequency. The trick is keeping my eyes open — a trick I'm still practicing most days — because even though they look like the same streets, that's not always the case.

With that in mind, I've been carrying a little digital point-and-shooter more often lately, and shooting as I go. The results have been mixed, but here's a recent collection of passable photos I've snapped in the streets as I've made my way through my various routines...

Four Days in Los Angeles [a photo set]

I went to LA for a few days in July on a sort of mini vacation, to catch up with friends, eat, drink, wander around... pretty much find the sweet spot between vacation levels of lazy, and still doing cool stuff.

That weekend was really hot, like 100 degrees, in absolutely dead air, where I was staying — with friends in Echo Park for a couple of nights, and then in Downtown LA, where I spent a couple nights at The Ace. 

I jumped on a train and went out to Santa Monica and Venice to spend a day in the coastal breeze (what little of it there was), then spent a few more days eating, drinking, and making photos around DTLA, and soaking up the air conditioning at various museums — LACMA, MOCA (& MOCA Geffen), and The Petersen.

It was a good way to spend a long weekend...

Two Houses on Carmel Point

I spent a few days down the coast a couple weekends back, during that time I did some morning hiking through the streets and around the perimeter of Carmel Point. At the outermost edge of the Point, on Scenic Drive right in the middle of Carmel Bay, these two houses face out to the Pacific, sitting perched on low cliffs at opposite ends of a curved stretch of rocky beach.

Both houses have been here since I was a kid, at least 40+ years ― and I always knew they were baller status residences ― but I'd never really seen them in this light. 

Edward Weston Early Works at Monterey Art

I snapped this photo with my iPhone, and it doesn't do a shred of justice to the real things.

I snapped this photo with my iPhone, and it doesn't do a shred of justice to the real things.

I was in Monterey, CA last weekend and took some time to hit up the Monterey Museum of Art to see this show — Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist.

As an amateur photographer, a fan of Weston’s work, and a native of California’s Central Coast, I am well aware of Weston’s landscape photography from that region — some of my favorite Weston photographs were made at Point Lobos, where I spent a lot of time as a young man — and this show contains a good sampling of that work and the later era that produced it (between the late 1930s and mid ‘40s).

However, this show focuses largely on Weston's earlier work, photos he made in the early 1900s through early ‘30s, much of which I’m not very familiar with, which is why I was so excited to see it.

This period was obviously highly developmental, revealing the beginnings of themes and techniques that Weston pursued throughout his career, showcasing some of his earliest landscape and structure studies, but more notably his approach to using singular subjects as studies of light and form — objects like bell peppers and nautilus shells, as well as nude figures. What struck me with a lot of these photos is the way he was able to convey the similarity with which he viewed and captured these subjects, and the museum did a particularly good job of showcasing that relationship.

This show is up though April 10, and it's well worth a day trip from the Bay Area to Monterey to check out.