boston, and other news

can i just say, i love my new camera. it's so compact and user-friendly. that might sound weird considering it's size, but compared to my old camera, this one is a real champ.

anyhow, last may (sorry i'm a little behind on my posts) we went to boston to see my brother-in-law - and the city - before they moved away. just before we got boston we stopped in at the vine lake cemetery in medfield, massachusetts. my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great (that's 9 greats) grandfather, james allen, is buried there. he was the first of my allen ancestors to come to america - somewhere around 1637. he was also one of the original 13 founders of medfield. it was a pretty cool experience to learn a bit about him and then see his gravesite.

i brought my large format camera and took some shots of james allen's headstone.

here i am, about to photograph acorn street in boston. i'm not quite sure how the picture will turn out because of the crazy light - an overcast day would have been better but hey, you can't really schedule that when you're just visiting.

we also stopped by the sacred grove in palmyra, new york on the way home.

and now for the first bit of news, i got a new (used) lens!

this piece of work is the calumet caltar 90mm f/8 lens (woohoo!). i sold my other camera and was able to get this wide angle lens with the proceeds.

it's not the top of the line lens, and f/8 is a little slow for this type of lens, but it is a good lens and also an enormous improvement on what i was using before.

and as for my website... it's coming. i hate to promise but hopefully it will be up by this weekend. cross your fingers.

cambridge, mass.

two and a half years ago, my family and i moved into a subleased two bedroom apartment just off of western ave. on memorial drive in cambridge, massachusetts. it was our first time venturing out and away from our families.

we immediately fell in love with boston and its surrounding areas. what we found when we arrived was a warmth and richness of life that was almost tangible. we only had 3 months to enjoy it so we made sure that we took advantage of all the time that we had there.

about a week before moving i finally found and purchased a large format camera in my price range. i was ready to take the dive and cambridge was a great place to dive into.

i would pass by this building every day as i walked to the “t”, boston’s subway, to go to work. this poor building looked like it was just plain tired of standing up straight – like it needed something more sturdy to lean on (like the building next to it). i also discovered what happens when you don’t check the corners of the ground glass carefully after raising the lens. the passing car was an unexpected bonus.




not too far away was this building on the corner of river street and pleasant street. i love this building - it's made of that dark red brick that you see so often in boston and the windows are framed by copper that has been streaked by years of green patina.




i only wish that i had more time to explore boston and cambridge with my view camera. i guess that's all the more reason for me to go back some day. i'll put it on the list...

all content, no context

i find that some of my favorite pictures are those of subjects that don't have a pre-formulated meaning in my mind (or others' minds for that matter). they are subjects that when i see them i just think "this is a nice scene, i think i'll try to capture what i'm feeling here". the spontaneity of photographing like this can be exhilarating.



this is looking south from battery park - the southern tip of manhattan. at first i considered framing this picture with the statue of liberty in the background but then decided against it.

if i had done that it would have become a picture of the statue of liberty with a boat in the foreground and once you looked at it you would have labeled it a picture of the statue of liberty and that would have brought up thoughts of what pictures of the statue of liberty should be. by excluding it you are forced to make your own conclusions about what the picture is saying.

here's another example.



this is in the harvard square station of the boston subway. the picture was taken with my holga camera set on the ground with my keys under the lens to point it up slightly.

there's nothing in the picture that says boston or harvard or even subway. it's just a set of stairs and a couple of escalators in some type of concrete structure. without any context you have to look at the content to appreciate the picture - the strong lines, the blurred people moving on the escalators - all the action swirling around the empty stairs.

you're free to see what you see without any preconceived notions about the subject.

scenes from the boston subway

did you ever see castaway? you know how a friendship grows between tom hanks and wilson, the volleyball? well, while we were in boston i made a friend kind of like wilson; he was hand drawn (with what i think was a light colored lip stick) on a tile wall of the alewife station of the boston subway (the "t"). i would pass this little guy every day when i would get off the subway on my way to work.

i first noticed him because of his simple shape - an arc, a straight line, a squiggle for teeth and two eyes. i thought it was pretty clever. i also liked how it was someone else's addition to the "established art" that already existed on the wall - the painted tiles (which i assume were placed there to break up the monotony of the brownish red tile-covered wall).



i also love how the tiles are all a little uneven - it gives the wall more texture.

i've included this detail from the picture just to give you an idea of how awesome the resolution is on 4x5 film.



there was just something nice about the porter square t station. i loved the big arching wall and the big pipes sticking out on the side. the next best thing about this t stop has got to be the absurdly long escalator. i swear it must go up like 5 stories. don't look down if you have trouble with heights!



edit: i just discovered that the escalator goes about 143 feet from bottom to top. and at an angle somewhere between 25 and 30 degrees that would put it at a total of 60 to 70 feet vertical rise (thanks pythagoras!). so i guess i wasn't too far off when i said it went up 5 stories!

he-man, army guys, and ducklings

one of the great things about the holga is that its lens suffers from a bad case of astigmatism (among other optical "defects"). this means that the further away the object is from the center of the image (towards the edges of the frame), the more out of focus it will be in the picture. although most people would find this to be a problem, it actually adds to the aesthetic of the pictures it takes.

one way to take advantage of this feature is to center the subject in the picture. this isolates the subject and makes it stand out more in the picture.

here's fisto from masters of the universe hanging from my rear view mirror with some onlooking army men.

and here are jack, kack, lack, mack, nack, ouack, pack, and quack following their mom, mrs. mallard, on their way to the boston public garden.

the holga

"Did you think your eyes were open?"

"I'm afraid to say that until this very moment they have been closed. The unassuming Holga is here to save you from a future of digital pixels and images shared on small screens on cameras or phones. We have all become numbed with photography, there is no denying it, but a chunky camera made almost entirely of plastic has been put on this Earth to save us. It will reawaken your vision, fill you with joy, make you see beauty when you thought it had disappeared forever, and bring out sunshine on a cloudy day."

- www.lomography.com/holga/

the holga is a cheap, plastic medium format camera (it uses film that is about 2 1/4" wide) - and it only costs about 30 bones.

the beauty of this camera is that it really makes you rethink the way you take photographs. the process is as follows: after estimating the focus of the camera, choosing one of the two aperture options, pointing it in the direction of the subject (the squinty viewfinder is only somewhat effective in framing the shot), and tripping the single-speed shutter you hope that the picture turns out alright. in the end you will be amazed by what this camera can accomplish given it's extremely rudimentary design.

i took the following photographs with my holga when we lived in cambridge massachusetts last summer.

central square, cambridge massachusetts

harvard square t station