Month: February 2019

Perfect Pie

Hales Gallery, 20th St and Eleventh Avenue, New York

Last weekend we went down to the Zwirner Galleries to see Hilton Als’ exhibition on James Baldwin, long a hero of mine for The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It on The Mountain. Watching old YouTube videos of him in debates or on talk shows is another good way to see his rhetorical brilliance displayed and enjoy watching his white interlocutors squirm. Unfortunately we went down on the last afternoon and the place was packed (with old white people) making it almost impossible to appreciate the exhibit. In particular it was hard to get to the tiny explanatory placards here and there to understand the context, so we abandoned it and went into a number of other Chelsea galleries.

I confess to a certain Philistinism when it comes to this kind of work (Richard Slee’s Perfect Pie at Hales Gallery).

You Don’t Say?

I love street shooting at night. My technique, as discussed in a recent comment, is to set my shutter speed at 1/320th second and allow the camera to choose the aperture and ramp the ISO way up (to a max of 12,800). For there to be enough light at all I usually have to be in front of a brightly lit store or under a street lamp. Here are the effects of shooting this way:

  • at the high shutter speed, the motion blur is usually well controlled
  • the resulting low aperture typically means low depth of field, however
  • and the resulting high ISO means digital noise which I typically suppress in post-processing, adding some softness to the images that is only partially recovered with local sharpening
  • also, the low light often contributes to the camera not auto-focusing well or on the right point.

The combined effect of the above is to create smooth patches of color with an almost painterly effect, not always of the sharpest image quality. Looks great. Enjoy!

91st St and Columbus Avenue, New York