March 18, 2007
NAME THAT STREET, BUILDING , SLIP, AND/OR MONUMENT, NO MATTER HOW LONG AGO IT VANISHED
Almost exactly a year ago––perhaps a few days before––I went to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY. Hop on a MetroNorth train and get off one stop after Marble Hill and you're there. Cars are for suckers: just walk across the platform and some playing fields and you find yourself at the Hudson River Museum front door.
Inside the museum, one will find an interesting (alright, it depends on what your threshold for interesting is) overview of the entire course of the Hudson River. Other floors of the museum have some great displays on advertising and sublime 1950's marketing trends, including kitchen hardware. One of the best things about the Hudson River Museum is its planetarium. If you feel the computer-generated effects and real-time synchronized movement of the heavens was too overwhelming when you were at the Rose Center on CPW and 85th St., only the Andrus Planetarium can manage to pass off a filmstrip projected on the ceiling while simultaneously begging for funding and pitching b-day parties at the planetarium. It might have been the most interesting planetarium experience I've had in a while.
Anchoring the Hudson River Museum is the Glenview Mansion, one of dozens of family Hudson River manses surrendered to the State when the age of Robber Barons drew to a close. For as many of these examples I've been in, The Glenview Mansion is one of the better ones: full access, a working pool table, accessible art galleries upstairs, and some kickass curatorial commentary posted along the way.
One of the more interesting parts was the annex between the Hudson River Museum and the Glenview Mansion. It included a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Manhattan waterfront that I took a picture of in stages. Just yesterday, I stitched those pictures together; the above image is an excerpt. 19th Century photographers loved to architecturally conflate their images by cutting and pasting. I thought I was relatively familiar with NYC's architectural history, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting a bead on many of these larger late-19th Century buildings.
Drop a note if you can ID some landmarks. Check Flickr here for the largest versions available of the composite picture.
Super Bonus Points: What is that obelisk to the southwest of the Manhattan-side Brooklyn Bridge Tower? It looks like it has windows. Perspective would seem to place it further south than City Hall Park. What the hell is that thing?
Posted by Lexiphane at 3:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 6, 2007
SEEING THE LIGHTROOM
The pictures of a good portion of amateur photographers--and I'm thinking of everyone from the birthday party point-and-shooter to the more serious photographer who doesn't derive an income from his work, but who practices as a hobbyist--eventually wind up in shoeboxes: unorganized, uncared for, and impossible to retrieve when necessary. This is moreso the case in the age of digital photography. Thousands of photos either accrue on multi-gigabyte memory cards or are occasionally dumped onto computer hard drives with only the slightest thought given to organization. Even worse, once deposited in a huge digital pile, most photos never reach their full potential because the simplest steps to make good photos extraordinary and marginal photos acceptable aren't taken. And then there is the final hurdle. Even when sorted and improved, hundreds or even thousands of photos wind up languishing in the privacy of your computer instead of being openly shared with friends, family or the public.
There are a number of solutions to all of these challenges, both sotware programs and online services. I've recently been using a program that's only been available for a few weeks called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom; a screenshot of the application is pictured above. For the record, I consider myself an earnest point-and-shoot hobbyist street photographer. I use a fairly simple sub-compact digital camera that's several years old and only 3.2 megapixels, and I'm not sure one can even purchase 3.2 megapixel cameras anymore. Nonetheless, I carry it with me almost always, take a lot of pictures, and with some careful digital processing manage to get the occasional nice piece of work that has been chosen for people's Christmas cards or featured on well-trafficked online sites. Having used Lightroom for a few days, I'm giving it a huge thumbs up. I think an amateur photographer of any level is going to find it extremely useful. More experienced photographers will find it indespensible in managing their photos and getting the most yield out of their digital crop. I can't imagine a professional photographer would want to proceed much longer in his work without Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom is currently priced at $200--a price many might balk at. But after paying $300-$500 for the latest point-and-shoot camera or well over $1,000 for most digital SLRs, wouldn't you like to be able to actually save and share most of the pictures you will eventually take?
There are some incredibly salient features in Lightroom (LR), like its non-destructive editing processes that leave your original image files intact and not degraded, that for the purposes of this review are too technical and beyond the scope of my limited understanding of digital photography. Those with a greater understanding of the nuts and bolts issues behind the medium should certainly look into the advantages of LR, because it's my understanding that they are significant.
The five modules above control every aspect of LR. Library is a total content management system for your photos. Develop is where one can make light, color, and cropping adjustments to photos. Slideshow allows the formation of slideshows that can be shown in LR or exported for display elsewhere. Print gives a wide array of formats and configurations for those who are paper printing themselves. Web enables the design of Internet-ready galleries in Flash or Html that can be exported directly to a group or individual's site.
The LR screen is divided into four primary sections: left and right panels, the center viewing area, and a filmstrip along the bottom. The left panel is essentially the home of the your photo management system. When importing pictures into LR, one can place them into a folder of your creation or choosing. If more than one person will be using LR, this is a good way to segregate users' photos. Or if a single user wanted to separate personal and work photos, he could do that.
Once photos are imported, many steps can be taken to categorize your photos. MetaData, like the creator, camera, lens, file type, and date of each photo, is automatically sorted here and one can search photos under any of those criteria. Or one can assign Keyword Tags to individual or groups of photos. If one just imported a bunch of photos from a birthday, you could create a Keyword Tag "Jen's Birthday" and assign it in one stroke to every photo in that batch. In the future, these photos would be returned if one did a keyword search of either "jen" or "birthday". Or one could pick an individual photo from this collection and assign the following tags depending on what you notice about the picture: jen, birthday, cake, balloons, clown, party, kids, presents. The Collections function allows you to create your own specific groups of photos that you may want to later shape into a gallery or slideshow.
The center panel is where one can view the photos that one has currently selected in any of the modules. Below the viewing area are buttons that allow you to choose how you want to see your photos. From left to right there is the Grid View, Loupe View (individual picture), Compare View, and Survey View. All four of these views are configurable to a great degree. Immediately to the right of these buttons is the sorting function that lets you arrange your photos in a sequential fashion based on a number of different criteria.
The right panel pictured here shows what is available in the Library module. In the Develop module, this is where one could adjust light, color, and a number of other meters that would be reflected in the histogram pictured at the top of the panel. Although too detailed to go into here, few users would find the controls available insufficient in order to get the best looking picture they could out of their original photo. Of course, the features found in the left and right panels change depending on which module you are in. And users can make these panels appear and disappear at will as it suits their purposes.
Running along the bottom of the page is a the Filmstrip. It is a navigable row of photos featuring all the pictures that the user currently has selected. It could be every photo in the Library, every photo responding to a keyword search, or one of the user's collections. Selected photos in the Filmstrip will show up as selected in the Grid View in the center panel.
I've barely scratched the surface in describing all of the LR features that I'm aware of and I've only been using the program a few days. Adobe has an FAQ page for the program here. A video tour of features and tutorials can be seen here.
If you think this is something you might be interested in, I have to recommend just going ahead and downloading the whole program from Adobe for a 30-day trial. Play around with it for a month. The worst thing that happens is that you create some really great stuff with your photos before the program disables.
Full Disclosure: My brother works for Adobe and is the product manager for LightRoom. If you think this taints my thoughts on the program indelibly, there's nothing I can do about that. Regardless, Adobe LR is now my preferred system for photo management and photo-work, based on the merits of the program alone.
Posted by Lexiphane at 6:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 3, 2007
ARCHITECTURAL ORPHAN
Not every block featuring notable buildings can be landmarked an entire historic areas. Sometimes buildings have to fend for themselves when developers come knocking down. Occasionally this will result in a single building weathering the storm; then it must stand alone, simultaneously out of place and remarkable. Pictured to the right is an example. On the southern border of Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood, at 207 East 32nd St., is a building worth stopping and examining for a few minutes.
It's hard to miss because it's an incredible Beaux Arts rowhouse rich in architectural detail that has lost its row-neighbors. According to the AIA Guide to New York City, the building was built ca. 1910 with no known architect listed. Its original purpose was to serve as The Tammany Central Association Clubhouse. Even 30 years after Boss Tweed's death, Tammany Hall was still a powerful political machine. Under the leadership of 'Silent' Charlie Murphy, Al Smith--a man who grew up watching the Brooklyn Bridge being constructed outside his childhood home near the Fulton Fish Market--would be elected Governor of New York in 1918. Tammany Hall's power began to wane significantly with the election of FDR to the Presidency and the New Dealer's funneling of patronage money away from the organization. I could not identify when 207 E32nd St. left Tammany hands.
The building features three rows of identical-sized windows that are nonetheless widely divergent in styles and ornamentation. There's a mansard roof crowned with twin chimneys and two lion heads appear to serve as rain spouts at the top of the facade. More details about the building's features can be found here.
Somewhere along the line, 207's neighboring row houses were razed and it now has no abutting neighbors, but rather stands alone as an ornate architectural sliver of 32nd Street's past. To its west on the corner of 32nd St. and 3rd Ave. now stands an enormous and charmless highrise, whose only salient feature is a column of identical balconies, the likes of which I would probably have to jump from if I ever found myself living in such a building. To 207's east, is an asphalt playground for a neighboring school. The flatness of the lots to the east only accentuate the crushing overshadowing to the west. It's an interesting sight.
Currently, 207 East 32nd is the home of Milton Glaser's design studio. "Art Is Work" is painted on the transom above the building's main entrance. New York is nothing if not continuous history. Glaser is the man who designed the "I ♥ NY" logo in 1977.
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January 20, 2007
A GRACIOUS GESTURE
The other week I was interested in a gallery show about a preeminent urban photographer, Philip Trager. The photographer is well reputed for his work with large format cameras and pictures of NYC, although that's not nearly his entire range. So I wrote a piece in anticipation and then wrote another after I'd actually visited the gallery.
A couple of weeks after that last post, I will admit that I was shocked/flattered/gratified when Mr. Trager [or his assistant?] sent me an email expressing his thanks for my interest in his show and the fact that I enjoyed myself viewing his prints. Yesterday, I received his latest book, titled simply Philip Trager
Objectively speaking, the book is gorgeous: photographs from Connecticut to Italy, with not a few pages of NYC architecture that could leave one reeling. If one is a fan of photography or architecture, I would have to recommend this volume as essential. If one is a phillistine rube with a big empty spot on your coffee table, go ahead and get it; trust me.
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January 14, 2007
FOTOFOX
As a person with a more-than-casual interest in working on the Internet and managing my online photos through flickr, I'm always looking to speed up any processes I'm regularly required to do. I almost exclusively use Mozilla's FireFox browser after switching from Internet Explorer a few years ago under a barrage of pop-up ads that made being online unbearable.
FotoFox is an approved extension for FireFox that allows users to easily upload their photos to a number of image management sites, including Tabblo, Flickr, Marela, 23, and SmugMug. To be honest, I've never heard of any of those services except for flickr, but they seem reasonable. Installing Fotofox in your browser is a one-click operation and then involves picking your image service and then confirming its compatability with FotoFox. The end result is a camera button in your Navigation Toolbar. Click on it and the FotoFox sidebar opens in your browser and automatically logs you into your photo-sharing site. Then it's as easy as dragging and dropping your images into the upload space and sending them to your site when ready. One can add titles and tags before uploading as well as placing pictures in assigned folders and determining the permission status of who gets to see your photos. If one is uploading a photo already appearing in your browser, simply right-click over the image and "Upload the Image With Fotofox".
To download this cool extension, visit the Mozilla site here.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 3:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 11, 2006
BLOCK BEAUTIFUL
A few weeks ago I wrote about a building I'd come across [see MIDTOWN STUCCO, 11/29/06] that featured some very ornate stucco relief designs on its outer walls. I learned that it used to be the home and office of Frederick J. Sterner, who designed the structure. Sterner was a turn of the century architect who pioneered the "Block Beautiful" movement that sought to beautify the city by breaking the uniformity of row after row of brownstones. The movement's best example is reputed to be the block where it originated and the one-time home of Sterner: 19th St. between Irving and 3rd Ave.
I took a trip down to 19th St. early one morning and managed to snap some pictures that are generally representative of what one can hope to see between Irving and 3rd Ave. To see my whole Block Beautiful set of photos, check out my Flickr site here.
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November 29, 2006
HERDING CATS
(They're fun by any name)
The other day K expressed interest in adopting a cat. I steered her to the PETCO across the street from where she works, which always has a number of pets available for adoption. They all looked pretty good, but K instantly fell pretty hard for two male siblings curled up against each other like a feline yin and yang symbol. She didn't have the heart to break the pair up so she took them both Monday night. Names haven't been decided yet, but she keeps bringing up Stalin and Lenin as possibilities. I normally don't equate cute kittens with inhumane megalomaniacal butchering mass murderers, but that's just me. Why not Pol Pot and Hitler if one is going to go in that direction? For more pictures of the yet-to-be-named duo, check out The Cat Set at my flickr site.
(Eddie and I in a staredown contest)
This past weekend I came back Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving to cat-sit for my friends M & C. Their cat Eddie is a 13-year-old female who's nonetheless pretty spry. Eddie normally is hiding someplace whenever I come over because she doesn't seem to care for more than three people in the apartment at one time. One-on-one though, we got to spend some quality time together this weekend. Eddie loves leftover turkey, but stuffing . . . not so much.
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July 22, 2006
NOT MANUFACTURER RECOMMENDED
Above is a picture taken Thursday afternoon on 35th St. and between 2nd and 3rd Aves. While it looks like these two child seats are mounted on the bed-cover of this pickup truck, the owners were actually just placing them there while they changed a tire and got ready to get back on the road. I asked them if I could take a picture because I knew that it looked ridiculous, but seemed really funny and, because they were southern and gracious, they said "go ahead."
The crazy thing is, I think the kid sitting in the cab of the pickup seemed pretty psyched that he might actually get to ride in the back of the truck. Who wouldn't?!
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 14, 2006
BLIZZARD '06
Over a two day snowfall, NYC set a record for blizzards in Central Park, with nearly 27" of the white stuff, although other parts of the city received significantly smaller amounts. Walking home from a friend's place Saturday night I can characterize the storm as fierce. It wasn't just a heavy snowfall, it was howling wind driving the snow sideways and leaving people covered in a head-to-toe veneer of snow. Sunday was a good day for hiding out as most of the sidewalks were still barely passable and the snow continued through the afternoon.
Monday, however, was gorgeous. The thermometer said 25 degrees, but bright sunlight made it seem warm enough mid-afternoon to safely take off one's gloves to snap some pictures. It looked like a lot of kids were playing hooky from school in Prospect Park as dozens ran their sleds down the hill near the Tennis House. Things were quieter on the eastern side of the park, but people were still showing up around 5:30, trying to squeeze in a few sledding runs before sunset.
I have a few pictures up from Sunday evening and Monday afternoon up on my flickr site. Check them out. The one above is statuary flanking the steps of the old U.S. Customs House, just below Bowling Green at the foot of Broadway in southern Manhattan. The Customs House was designed by Cass Gilbert and constructed between 1902 and 1907. It now houses the National Museum of the American Indian.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 1:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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- NAME THAT STREET, BUILDING , SLIP, AND/OR MONUMENT, NO MATTER HOW LONG AGO IT VANISHED
- SEEING THE LIGHTROOM
- ARCHITECTURAL ORPHAN
- A GRACIOUS GESTURE
- FOTOFOX
- BLOCK BEAUTIFUL
- HERDING CATS
- NOT MANUFACTURER RECOMMENDED
- BLIZZARD '06
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