I have a few extra minutes - finally - so I thought I’d keep my blog from getting sucked into a black hole of no updates. So, where to start?

Excuses

Working 25 hours a week while having a full course load essentially rules out having a social life (let alone a blogging- or photography life!) with the exception of Marianna and hanging out with friends once every week or two. I certainly don’t regret it and am glad I’m doing it, but Christ it’s a lot of work! And, uh, that’s why this thing isn’t ever updated. (Of course I say it apologetically like every other Blogger in the world does when they don’t update in a while, knowing full-well nobody really cares and it’s ultimately just self-indulgent to even make excuses, but I guess it’s a good segue).

New York

Subway Portrait #7

A couple weeks ago I was able to get up to New York to visit Mike at his place on the northern-most tip of Manhattan in Innwood. I finally got the opportunity to shoot some photos, the first serious shooting in literally months.

The plan was to visit an abandoned power plant in Yonkers, which we did, but my favorite photographs were from late at night in the subway on our way from Greenwich Village to Innwood. I decided to play a (tipsy) Walker Evans and secretly take people’s portraits while sitting in the subway car. What I did was setup the exposure to Aperture Priority, at around f/2.0 with a 30mm Sigma prime lens, and ISO 1600 (click on the photos for detailed information). No, I didn’t tell anybody I was taking their picture.

I placed the camera on my leg, resting one hand on top with a finger resting on the shutter. Then turned off the autofocus and manually focused on someone using Live View - this gave me pretty sharp focus on anyone sitting in the seat across the aisle from me and meant I didn’t have to worry about autofocus getting the focus wrong. Then, I rested my other hand over the hand on the shutter to hide the finger on the shutter button. The subway is loud enough that nobody can hear the picture being taken.

#7 was speaking German (or one of those Germanic-sounding Scandinavian languages), and if you click on his photo you can see a choker around his neck. I loved a few things about the scene and started shooting as a result of him in particular:

Rubber Necking

• The guy in particular — his hair, the choker, that he spoke German, the burgeoning middle aged-ness, etc.
• The sign above his head
• He’s looking up into a light
• The general light pattern goes from lightness at the top to darkness at the bottom

There were several really drunk girls on their way back from Halloween partying also on the train. They were loud and flirting with a bunch of other passengers on the train, and this guy (right) kept rubber necking around people to try to sneak a peak at them. He had an innocent looking smile that I thought was really touching - the rubber necking was just honest, innocent curiosity (see #4 below). There are some more out-takes of him below (in fact I think I like them more than the rubber necking one).

Towards the end of the ride, there was this creepy bearded guy taking pictures from me from across the aisle. I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to take my picture in public like that, without asking for my permission. Where did he get off? Check out the picture I snapped of him - it’s the first one under More Images.

More Images

Mike #2

Subway Portrait #4

Subway Portrait #8

Here’s another one from an abandoned Children’s Center. The folder actually says US Government Messenger Folder. The glasses were actually left in this room, although I’ll confess to moving them so they fit a little nicer into the frame of the picture.

This is an HDR merged in Photomatix, but it’s kept pretty mild because, well, there’s really no reason to make it intense. Other minor editing done in Lightroom 2.

First post since classes started back up. It’s been incredibly busy. I finally got some time to good shooting photos last weekend, though. Mike came down to visit from NYC and we went on two early morning photo shoots. The first, where this image came from, was to a place in the Baltimore suburbs; it’s a mostly abandoned mental asylum that has a few pretty interesting buildings. It’s the second time I was here, the first being when I took the picture in the last blog entry.

We also managed to get down to the DC suburbs for an abandoned Children’s Center. The first time I went here, in early January of this year, it was excruciatingly cold but I came away with several shots I was very happy with - one of my more fruitful ventures. This time around resulted in fewer keepers, mostly because I was groggy and cut myself on glass while looking through files in an old filing cabinet - I was a little freaked out until the small cut stopped bleeding, worrying that it’d get infected from something in these incredibly dirty buildings.

Anyway, back to this shot. It’s a bracketed 3 shot sequence, +/- 2 EV as usual, merged to HDR and tonemapped in Photomatix 3. One thing I almost always need to do after tonemapping is to increase the local contrast - there’s often a bit of a grayish haze around the photo after tonemapping, and Lightroom’s “Clarity” slider does a great job of removing it by increasing local contrast - although too much of it can cause halos around areas where light/dark meet. I also slightly boosted the saturation of red so accentuate this guy’s ears and bowtie. The rest was basic curves adjustments and sharpening.

Classes started this week, so I thought this appropriate material for a post. I’ll be a full-time student again for the first time since I finished my BS in Computer Science in 2003! Exciting times.

The shot — believe it or not — wasn’t posed. At least not completely, and not by me… I did move some distracting rubbish from under the chair and desk (old pipe insulation, a piece of wood, etc.), but the chair was sitting in front of the desk in its exact position before I got there.

Foreshadowing was taken in a high-ceiling basement of one of the buildings on this mostly-abandoned mental health facility in the Baltimore suburbs (there are still 2 active buildings out of maybe 10). The basement was actually a miniature gymnasium, with a small basketball court and drawings of people playing sports like swimming, baseball, basketball, football, etc. Fascinating stuff.

There was a lot of really good stuff in this building. One of the rooms was filled with probably 100 old wheelchairs. Another had a creepy 3-legged chair (which I’ll blog soon). Still another had a dessicated raccoon with its mouth wide open as if in pain. At the bottom of a stairwell was a turned over wheelchair, as if left behind after a patient had fallen down the stairs in the wheelchair. Great stuff, and a place I really want to revisit.

In terms of technical information, this is a pretty mildly tonemapped HDR photo from +/- 2 EV exposures auto-bracketed. I always manually focus my HDRs using the LiveView feature in the 40D, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but has actually become very crucial to my anal-retentive focusing. LiveView lets you see the photo you’ll take “live” — like a point and shoot does, only more accurate — plus allows you to zoom in 10x on the image. I do that and turn manual focusing on until the thing I want in focus is absolutely perfectly focused - something that was much, much harder to do before LiveView.

The tonemapping was done in Photomatix Pro 3. After that, I used Photoshop CS3 to mask over some hotspots on the chair and desk with the 0 EV exposure. Finally, I brought it into Lightroom where I converted it to black and white, did some local contrast adjustments, added some intensity to the overall contrast, and sharpened.

Ahh, back to good ol’ institutional decay. This was one of several solitary confinement rooms we found at Rosewood, an abandoned asylum in a suburb of Baltimore. The metal grid bed so low to the ground reminded me so much of political prisoner cells I’ve seen in concentration camps in Germany or the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. I don’t know the history of this place or what exactly the cells were for, but I can’t fathom how it would actually help the mental health of patients to be in here.

I exaggerated the feeling by using a 10mm wide angle lens and slightly tilting it about 6 1/2″ from the ground on a tripod. There are 5 exposures merged to HDR.using Photomatix. The window of the HDR is masked with one of the original exposures (the roughly -8EV exposure) in Photoshop CS3, a little curves, and sharpening and local contrast adjustments in Lightroom 2. And Bob’s your Uncle.