Monthly Archives: July 2008

More NYC architecture

Carnegie Hall’s west elevation along Seventh Avenue always reminded me of what a steel mill might have looked like in that brilliant Scotsman’s era:


Carnegie Hall. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

1920s buildings are hard to improve upon:


Low-fifties, west side. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

Go back a few more decades and Tribeca has some lovely old iron warehouse buildings, now all converted to expensive lofts, with soaring ceilings and huge windows – the Carnegie mills probably provided much of the building materials for these:


Iron-framed building in Tribeca. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

If the politics of big buildings interest you, try Paul Goldeberger’s book Up from Zero which goes some way to explain why, seven years after 9/11, Manhattan has yet to see the first brick laid in rebuilding the World Trade Centers.

Lightroom 2

A feature comparison.

With the release of Lightroom 2, Adobe has published a useful feature comparison to Version 1 – click here.

I’m not upgrading right now, respecting my ‘Never Buy Version 1.0 of anything’ rule. Further, as I do not do a lot of image processing, the enhanced controls in v2 don’t do that much for me. 64 bit support? Meaningless to me from a practical perspective.

As for Lightroom 1.4.1, which is what I currently use, I couldn’t be happier. It’s fast, doesn’t lose images and printing is a dream. I’m beginning to wonder whether Aperture will be orphaned soon – a small user base (Mac only), a bog slow application unless you spend $$$ on hardware and very buggy implementation will not see me back with that flawed product.

Pictures from my Window

More on architectural photography.

Ruth Orkin was a Manhattan based photographer who just happened to live in an apartment in the Dakota at 72nd and Central Park West. From that location, overlooking Central Park, she took many pictures though the seasons, the whole glorious project being enshrined in her book:

The idea that a slice of Central Park constitutes “The World” is a uniquely New York kind of arrogance, but we can let it go. The photography is superb. It’s out of print at Amazon so try your favorite remaindered or used bookseller for this one.

Seeing as I lived at 56th and Eight when in Manhattan, my views were not as pastoral as Orkin’s but fascinating nonetheless. My windows faced south (you could see the Hudson and Sixth Avenue’s boxy skyscrapers) and East (where the money was).

The first thing you saw looking east was the Mutual of New York building, replete with multi-purpose meterological indicators. Between the digital display and the mutli-colored spire and the star on top you were meant to be able to divine temperature, humidity, rain, sun or snow and, needless to say, the thing was wrong 90% of the time. But it was lots of fun to look at and photograph.


MoNY in winter. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.


MoNY in the spring. Same data as above.

Architectural photography

An under-appreciated field.

While I cannot remember a time when I did not think about photography on a daily basis, an interest in architecture did not seriously take seed until the age of 29. That was the year I moved to New York City. While its inherent bias on the editorial pages sadly infects the news reporting in the New York Times, no such favoritism was evident in the writings of Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable. Their topic was architecture.

Before I knew it I was attending lectures by prominent architects, fascinated by the melding of big business, art and massive budgets with all the related logistical complexity which is what results when you try to build in New York. I mean, look at the realities. Those seeking to do you harm include the Mob (concrete to this day costs 20% more in NYC than anywhere else), the City of New York (relatively cheap to buy, after the Mob is accounted for), Albany, Washington and just about every other government apparatchik you can think of. The only difference between the Mob and the government is that the latter wrote the laws. If you can make a tall building in Manhattan you can make one with impunity anywhere.

Absorbing Huxtable’s and Goldberger’s teaching I cemented my relationship with architecture by visiting Chicago for the first time. Simply stated, Chicago’s finest buildings are to Manhattan what Ferrari is to GM. But New York’s winters were tough enough, thank you, so it wasn’t as if I was about to move there, much as I love the people of the mid-west. And those writers’ teachings made an indelible expression. Give me those charming moments of partial consciousness that define falling asleep and, likely as not, you will find my mind straying to New York City architecture.

You can say an awful lot about a building by measuring your desire to touch it. Not metaphysically. Walk up to it and touch it. And for me there were always three which made that distinguished cadre. The Flatiron Building. Philip Johnson’s AT&T. And Seagram. Johnson again.

So bad did this habit become that I made a point of walking past the last two on the way home just to be able to brush them with my fingertips. Maybe some of the magic would rub off?

No secret that I would make special efforts to entertain clients at lunch in the Four Seasons at the plaza level of Johnson’s Seagram masterpiece. From there I could gaze at the no less wonderful Lever House, airily perched on stilts on the west side of Park Avenue. It was my privilege to watch AT&T grow from my 40th floor office in the so-high-tech Citicorp Center, sloping roof for solar panels and all. Still not installed last I checked. Like the corporation, the architecture was crass, vulgar and ethically challenged. AT&T was so beautifully made that you just had to touch it. And they had that Apollo chap in the lobby, all gilded, with massive transatlantic cables draped about him.

As for the Flatiron, forget about all those schoolboy statistics about it being the tallest, the first with a steel frame, the first with elevators, etc. All you had to know was that Stieglitz had photographed it in 1903.

I was lucky to be reminded of all of this by the loan of a book on architectural photography from a friend. There, on page 113, Stieglitz’s masterpiece of the Flatiron is annotated thus:

Stieglitz’s ethereal view of the Flatiron, taken with a hand-held camera, typifies the Pictorialist approach to architecture.

That got my attention. I am of that school, after all. And here is that snap:

The book is Building with Light by Robert Elwall. American architecture is remarkably well represented (the author is the Curator of the British Architectural Library) with not a trace of condescension, and the whole 240 page tome is a breathtaking survey of architectural photography from the early nineteenth century through today. (Note: Architectural photography has not improved in the last 150 years).

Some of my favorite images are, unsurprisingly, from California residential architecture. Shulman and Neutra are amply represented as they adapt the new international style to a smaller scale. The photography changes too. What was once formal documentation is now pure pictorialism. It’s the effect of the building, not its technical detail, that fascinates.

Sieglitz would be proud.

All of which gives me two suggestions. First, get the book if buildings speak to you. Second, stay tuned for some of my architectural pictures ….

Photography podcasts

Choices are growing.

There are more and more photography related podcasts, all free, available in the iTunes store, for viewing on your computer, iPod or TV. I watch these on our TV using an AppleTV to download them. Some are in ‘enhanced’ mode, meaning you can see pictures as the sound track runs.

Simply go to iTunes->Podcasts and search for Photography as shown above. Quality is all over the place, but it’s easy to filter down to what you like after hearing an episode or two.

There are also more Photoshop podcasts than you can shake a stick at:

There is now so much material out there that whether you are seeking to learn a new application or simply looking for creative ideas, there is no shortage of choices.You can download a free copy of iTunes for either Macs or PCs from Apple.