All Set and Ready To Go

New iMac is set up and I've been processing some photos to see about the performance with the new fusion drive. The whole week has been devoted to computer stuff, so I haven't been out to shoot at all. Hoping to get out on Saturday. For now I've been going back through my photos for the past year and processing images that I always thought I wanted to get to, and never did. It's a good thing to do periodically, and I really need to delve back into my film negative archive to review work I shot twenty years ago - more on that in the next blog entry.

I shot this on Ninth Avenue on my way back to Penn Station - part of my Men With Cigars series. Doing my usual processing took about one quarter of the time as on my older machine. the RAM (8g) and fusion drive really speed things along. I'm getting used to the wireless keyboard and mouse that came with the iMac. The keyboard feels a little small, and if I were writing another book it would definitely be restricting. The top of the mouse is actually a track pad, and that's really nice so that when I'm scrolling through material I don't have to move my hand back and forth.

The Manhattan Diaspora project is taking on a life of its own and expanding. Lots of work to do, and it's exciting. M(ore) T(o) C(ome).

Big News .... For Me, Anyway

Woo Hoo .... I'm spending the day tomorrow setting up my new iMac - 27" screen, fusion drive - it's going to seem blazing fast compared to my current six year old machine.

I've been hard at work on the Manhattan Diaspora 2013 project, and there's been quite a bit of interest in the community. It's nice to be able to invest myself in an effort that I know will be well received. That doesn't happen very often. More to come as things progress, but I think it should take about a year.

Even though it's very time consuming, I still try to get out for casual walks and some shooting fun. Last week after a meeting about the project I walked up Clinton Street to Houston Street to stop into Russ and Daughter for some potato latkes. Alas, I was way too late. They're usually sold out by noontime. So, on to Yona Schimmel's - same story, they were sold out also. I had to settle for a potato knish - poor me, eh?

Even though my thoughts were spinning with all the input from the meeting and my stomach was grumbling in anticipation of the latkes, I was still looking for an interesting street shot. How about this:

Kids Having Fun

The holiday of Sukkah is called a 'festival' because it is a time of rejoicing - for the bountiful fall harvest and for freedom from Egyptian slavery. During the holiday I went to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn which, although it is being gentrified, is a bastion of orthodox Jewery, especially of the intensely devout Satmar sect. At the direction of one of the people I photographed, I sought out a street fair that had everything any street fair in any town in America might have - kids' rides, games of chance, and food stands. And the kids were loving it.

Which reminds me, kids are blank slates. They just do what their biologically programmed to do - have fun. They grow into what we write on those slates. Some of us spend a good part of our lives trying to overcome what was written, and to getting back to having fun.

East Side Glatt

While walking around the Lower East Side, on several occasions I stopped into the East Side Glatt store on Grand Street. It's like focal point of the neighborhood that everyone stops at some time during their week. The first time I saw the store was in August on my first trip back to the neighborhood when I decided to revisit the work I had done of the community twenty years ago. I posted a blog entry about meeting 98 year old concentration camp survivor Max Davidowitz (with whom I hope to spend more time as the project unfolds). The owner of the store invited me to explore the back story (behind the double doors and down the stairs) and take whatever photos I wanted.

This is Baruch Weiss, proprietor of the establishment:

And the charming Eddie Brown, who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life:

And Raphael Estevez - he was kind enough to offer me some of those yummie looking potato latkes that he was cooking up:

But the highlight of any visit to the store is chatting with the social director (and ham - yes, yes, it's a kosher store) Nurit Bendavid, who would never forgive me if I didn't include a photo of her:

 

Season of Jewish Holidays

For the past week I've been loaded with work: photos to edit and process, events to photograph, and meetings about my current project about the Lower East Side. It's good to be busy with what I love to do, but it's kept me from writing on this blog about what I do. I need to write about it - to have some kind of perspective on the whole process.

The real meat of the project is in pursuing the threads of the work I produced twenty years ago when I first began to work on Manhattan Diaspora. After this week when the holidays are over, I'll be able to start in on that. But it seems that as I work along, new avenues open and need to be explored. Besides digging back into the original stream of work, which is centered on the dissolution of the long history of the Jewish Lower East Side, I've decided to explore where it has moved on to: Brooklyn, upstate New York, New Jersey. And as I reconnect with some past acquaintances from the previous work, I'm finding new people, which lead to new directions to explore and gets me deeper into the culture and community.

I hope to be able to eventually have a show of the project - the original photographs shot in 1993-94, and the current work - and hopefully a book to accompany it. I can always dream. Becoming once again deeply invested in a long term project is invigorating, but being invigorated now is quite a bit more taxing physically for me than it was twenty years ago.  Boo hoo .... poor me.

Last week I revisited my friend Sholom Halpert - the Henry Street bookbinder - and received an invitation to visit him in Monroe, NY and to see his Sukkat. I'm hoping to get up there in the next few days. I've heard from several sources that Monroe is rich in subject material. When I was at his shop, Mr. Halpert was repairing and recovering a Talmud (the compendium of Jewish written law) that had been printed in 1860.

I'm hoping to write several more blogposts this week to catch up on material I've been shooting. But then again, I have several more events to shoot this week, so who knows how exhausted I'll be.....

Tradition III

Third in the 'Tradition' series of images I recently shot at Rabbi Lichter's torah repair shop. He was explaining the layout of the handwritten script on the pages of parchment of the scrolls. There is a strict formality to the way the text is inked. The number of characters in each line, the paragraph breaks, and the spacing on each page is discussed in great detail in texts that give the scribe explicit instructions about how any repairs must be done to maintain the sanctity of the scroll.

Fuji Tele-zoom Lens and some Music Masters

I attended the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival this past Saturday which afforded me the opportunity to give my Fujinon 55-200mm f3.5-4.8 OIS lens a real test in extreme shooting conditions. Besides taking pictures, I had a blast meeting with some old friends who were performing as the Masters Of Bluegrass Band (back in June I heard this same band and wrote blog posts about that experience here and here)

First the photography business. I almost never shoot at the focal lengths of this lens. When I do, ninety-nine percent of the time it's performance photography. I need a lens that is razor sharp at the focus point, can open wide enough to afford a pleasingly soft background texture, and can nail colors so that I can easily manage the difficult lighting conditions that stage lights create. I've used this lens before for concerts, but not for outdoor night performances with all kinds of color lights with a mixture of color temperatures thrown in. I was quite pleased with the results. All the shots below were taken at an ISO of either 1600 or 3200, a focal length of 200mm or thereabouts, an aperture of f4.8 (wide open), and a 1/60th second shutter speed. That focal length - effectively 300mm on a full frame camera - and that shutter speed would have rendered the images totally useless without the Fuji optical image stabilization, which performed outstandingly well.

I am totally committed to my Fuji X system and have learned over the past year and a half to work with its idiosyncrasies. And Fuji is to be commended for the dedication they have shown in optimizing and updating the system with firmware updates - especially the focus issues that were manifest in early system development. But the shooting experience was not totally awesome. Probably because I'm not used to or adept at shooting at such a long focal length I found the focus time to be a tiny bit slower than I would have liked, which meant that I often missed catching an interesting facial expression. By the later part of the set, however, I'd worked out how to get the focus set and wait patiently (which, by the way, does not come naturally to me) for the shot I wanted. I was quite pleased with the results.

The second issue I had in shooting with the lens is that I normally always used the optical view finder. Understandably with this long a focal length, that would be impossible because the area of coverage would be a dot in the viewfinder, so using the electronic viewfinder is a necessity. My problem wasn't with the restricted area of view, but rather with the harshness and glare of the optical quality. I'm sure Fuji is improving this with each new camera release, so I'd expect that by the time the Fuji X-Pro 2 hits the market (no idea when that would be) this issue would be resolved.

Now for the really important stuff, about the band and the music. First I have to say, and I'm not making excuses for myself, that shooting performances like this are a bitch. It's impossible to get a good sight line where a microphone, cable or mic stand isn't in the way. Compounded with having to climb over and around people in the audience - who seem to get a real attitude about photographers getting in their way, imagine that!) and add all that to my aging body which does not want to cooperate and it's a tough experience.

The personnel is Del McCoury - guitar, Bobby Osborne - Mandolin, J.D. Crowe - banjo, Bobby Hicks - fiddle, Jerry McCoury - bass.When the emcee introduced the band she said it looked like Mt Rushmore. The two Bobby's are octogenarians, Del and J.D. are in their seventies, and Jerry is getting close to seventy. Each of them has been performing bluegrass professionally for close to 50 years. The performance was loose, to say the least. But that was part of the charm and fun of the performance. At one point Del introduced his next song as Blue Ridge Cabin Home - it's a standard and a classic in the genre. Bobby Hicks kicked the tune off on fiddle, and when Del started to sing the first verse was from an entirely different song - They Tell Me Your Love Is Like A Flower - which the band had never before performed. If Del hadn't laughed and joked with the audience about it, you'd have never known there was a mistake. Over two hundred years of performance experience sure does account for something.

I'm partial, I love all these guys. When I was learning my music and developing my chops to get ready to play with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, these guys were my idols, especially Bobby Hicks. His fiddle playing on the Bill Monroe classic recordings of the 1950's bore the distinctive stamp of someone with 'grass in his blood'. There were Saturday nights when I got into my car and drove to the top of a mountain close by my home (ok, a small hill -  but it was high) so I could try to catch a broadcast on WSM of the Grand Ole Opry and hear Flatt & Scruggs, Monroe, or Jim & Jesse McReynolds, or on the WWVA Jamboree from Wheeling, West Virginia to hear the Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Martin, or Earl Taylor. These are heady times for bluegrass music, when these artists leave the stage, I'm afraid it's going to be a downhill slide of generic cookie cutter bands.

Del McCoury

Bobby Osborne

Bobby Hicks

J.D. Crowe

Jerry McCoury