Rounding out the Manhattan thing.
Here are some snaps of New York architecture, taken over the years.
A fine primer on architectural style is How to Read Buildings – if you want to regale friends with the differences between an architrave and a muntin, this one is for you.
Here’s another worth checking out if Art Deco is your thing:
If you enjoy fine architecture and beautiful photography, you can enjoy one stop shopping in Woody Allen’s superb movie, Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of America’s greatest film maker and his cinematographer Gordon Willis. George Gershwin’s music rounds out this masterpiece. Here are some stills:
For once, monochrome – a usually pretentious and tired medium used as an excuse for mediocrity – works well here.
And, when you are done, contemplate Things That Really Matter, while on the couch:
My list for photographers?
Here are some screen shots from the movie Hannah and Her Sisters.
Take America’s greatest movie maker, add music and fabulous photography, and you have an architectural and photographic tour of this great city like no other:
If you like still photography, get this movie.
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:
1920s buildings are hard to improve upon:
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:
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.
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.