Manhattan on Manhattan

Photography

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?

  • HCB’s man jumping over the puddle
  • Anything by Norman Parkinson
  • Guy Bourdin’s outrageous fantasies
  • This month’s issue of Harper’s
  • Hoyningen-Heune’s stark compositions
  • Doisneau’s romantic Paris

More NYC architecture

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

Lightroom

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

Photographs

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.