Tag: camera

Back to the Future

I’m all out of new pictures. Downloaded a chip from the camera last weekend and out of 30-odd images, 2 struck me as blog-worthy. Also, I’m working on a cleanup of my keyword library (very slow going) and a revamp of my commercial web-site on Zenfolio, untouched for, lo, these many years. So for now, it’s back to the archive and this image from Christmas day in Times Square in obBLOGato’s first year, 2008 (excuse the watermark it was something I was doing back then). I think I posted it under the title Harlequin Man, an allusion to the character in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, re-imagined as a photojournalist in Apocalypse Now.

Times Square subway station, New York. December, 2008

Kodak DC280

Isolation, Upper West Side, New York

My first digital camera. Lovely, sleek design. Sometime in the late ’90s I decided digital had come of age and bought this 2MP beauty for something like $700 for family snapshots. That summer I had an epiphany with it on the beach at dawn, realizing how much better modern cameras with auto-focus were than my match-needle, fresnel-screen, manual-focus SLRs and soon I had switched to higher end digital cameras, sticking with Minolta (I had an srT101, an XE-7 and a couple of xD-11s) and getting the Dimage A1, a 5MP all-in-one that I loved, and then their first DSLR the 7D, now both long gone.

Ansco Viking

Isolation, Upper West Side, New York

I don’t remember where I picked this up but I actually used to shoot with it. In fact, in 7th grade, when I was 11 or 12, I shot pictures of Greenwich Village with it for a group school report. Entirely manual and un-metered and, probably with some minor holes in the bellows I got some nice big foggy, low-contrast negatives on Kodak 120 film with it.

The B-Side

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Lincoln Center, New York

Went to see The B-Side a couple of weeks ago, a documentary by Errol Morris about Elsa Dorfman’s photography (mostly) with the 20 x 24″ Polaroid camera, shown here with friend Woyman.