the birds.

Back in 2007, while on a visit to the Cooper Hewitt Museum, I stumbled on a great exhibit by designer Ingo Maurer.  I’d never heard of him before, but I snapped a handful of photographs of his amazing lighting designs.   (One of the photos served as the header of my old blog.)  I hadn’t thought about him in a little while, but this morning while wandering around my Flickr page, I came across this photograph of one of his pieces, which I’d taken with my old Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim (which weirdly sounds like a cigarette).  The Vivitar UWS is known as the poor-man’s Lomo, since it costs something like $5 and is completely, hopelessly plastic and will break with great ease; my own Vivitar came apart last summer in Amsterdam, after a futile battle with a jammed rewind mechanism.  

In any event, I love this photo, because even with the plastic optics and poor-man’s exposure, it really brings out the beauty of Maurer’s work  – something that was evident in the exhibit, but nonetheless a bit muddled beneath the gallery lights.   Time Out had a nice write-up of the show here — and you can see the design in question over on the left hand side of the photograph.