hong-an tran

barcelona.

22 Feb 2012

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Barcelona is an incredible city. How to do it justice, photographically? To start: show how much everyone else loves the place too.

Here’s the best of the six rolls I shot on the Hasselblad. I must return imminently.

(Don’t even get me started on the gloriousness of the food. I should plan a trip devoted entirely to jamon iberico.)
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After a restorative lunch of soup dumplings at Nan Xiang in Flushing on Sunday afternoon, we headed back into the city and ducked into the Met for a couple of hours to see their new Islamic Art wing. An interesting space, filled to the gills with incredible art and archaelogical finds. (Bonus: I’d forgotten that, with the exception of a few galleries, non-flash photography is permitted at the Met, so the Hasselblad and I shot away; it was most unfortunate, however, that the lab did some wonky things on the processing end, to give everything a dull, streaky gloss — which thankfully you can only really see on the images taken in the darker gallery spaces. But still — argh!)

Also, when did this start, this phenomenon of not taking photographs of the art, but of oneself next to said artwork? In addition to the digital camera aficionados wandering around the galleries taking snaps of their favorite pieces, I noticed quite a few people getting their pictures taken alongside the art itself, posing ever so suggestively. Most curious.

The Met being the Met — ie, we couldn’t handle more than one wing in an afternoon — we headed downtown in the fading weekend light to find some hot beverages to warm us up. On 32nd street, I trailed a man with a most excellent fur hat for the better part of the block, trying desperately to get the camera in focus. No luck. (It is not easy to get a behemoth to focus while walking down the street and trying not to run into anyone!) But still, I managed to snap a photograph of what I was told was, from a third party perspective, a pretty hilarious mise en scene.

It was a particularly lovely Sunday, as far as Sundays go.
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the new rolleiflex.

1 Feb 2012

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For my birthday, my friend Fred gave me his old Rolleiflex 2.8 — quite a gift! — which he hadn’t used in quite some time, and which he wanted to give to someone who could make better use of it. This past weekend, my (very obliging) friend Jeremy and I took it out for a spin, to test the optics and exposure.
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First impressions: pretty darn great. Focusing is a wee bit tricky, mostly because the viewfinder is a little unwieldy and a touch uncooperative (based on the serial number, this model is from the original Rolleflex 2.8a, which puts it around 1949-51 (!)); all this basically means is that I’m sometimes going to get photos like the one right above, which is wonky, yes, but still lovely in its own imperfect way. Metering is a tiny bit of a crapshoot, since there’s no internal meter (I used my lightmeter app on the iPhone) and the oldskool shutter speeds don’t seem to correspond to numbers I’m used to. Based on the photos from this test roll, I’m just going to have to get used to shooting at higher shutter speeds, so as to not overexpose everything.

But no matter. In the end, it’s a great camera, and a really wonderful gift. Thanks, Fred! (And hmmm – I’m gonna need a name for it.) It’s also infinitely lighter than the Hasselblad, which means I’m probably going to take it with me (in lieu of the Hasselblad) when I head off to Europe next week. Oh! That’s right — Europe in 9 days! More on that to come.
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north brooklyn walkabout.

31 Jan 2012

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This past Sunday, my pal Nick Solares and I ventured over to Williamsburg and Brooklyn to snap some late afternoon photographs. Here’s what we saw. (Nick’s photographs, taken with his deep-envy-inducing Leica M9 + 50/1.4 lens, are over here.)
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ten years ago.

26 Jan 2012

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December 2001: I had the opportunity to house sit for my old college advisor over New Year’s, out near my old alma mater. I said yes. I’d just been dumped a bit unceremoniously by someone up where I was pursuing my doctorate, and I’d just been home for the holidays — never an easy place to navigate when all you want to do is hide under the covers and watch Law and Order marathons on cable — and the idea of being holed up in an entirely different, and emptied out, collegetown for a week seemed ideal. So armed with a camera, five rolls of film, and two bottles of state-run-liquor-store-stock white wine, I decided to cheer myself up via a three-day photo shoot with the Nikon and its self timer function. Around midnight on December 31, 2001, I toasted to new leaves, the end of dating, and all the things one toasts to when one is faraway from the madding crowd.
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Also, the house had cable TV, and wouldn’t you know it: on New Year’s Day I woke up to an all-day Law and Order marathon.
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Goodness me: Look at those bangs! What the heck was that hat I was so enamoured with?! Such sad faces! I’m like a bizarre cross between Amelie and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo woman (dude, look at my arms! I used to have guns). Memory Lane is very, very surreal.

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saturday morning.

24 Jan 2012

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For all of my recent Consumption With Reckless Abandon I’m So Sorry Cholesterol I Promise I’ll Be Good This Week, it was the simpler moments that I enjoyed the most. With the snow falling quietly outside this past Saturday morning, we curled up in our dining chairs and enjoyed some buttery pastries from the shop down the street. The Everton-Blackburn match buzzed at a low volume on the tv behind us. The city seemed ever so still, not quite yet awake, not quite ready to get out from under the (snow) covers. Thoroughly lovely, all around.
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recent gluttony.

23 Jan 2012

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Duck lunch at Momofuku Ssam Bar: rotisserie duck over rice and fried duck dumplings. It’s only available at lunchtime, and the duck over rice is only available for weekday lunch so uh … call in sick. Or take a personal day. Well worth it. You’ll need the whole day since you’ll spend the afternoon in a mild food coma.
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Brunch at Maialino. Order the eggs amatriciana and the scrambled eggs cacio e pepe. Get a random starter (they’re all good) — this time around we got the crispy potato skins with pecorino & pepper; last time it was the suppli al’telefono. Also not pictured, but ordered and consumed with aplomb: two toffee glazed brioches. Like Cinnabon, only infinitely better.
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Dinner at Txikito. Nothing at Txikito is bad, but very little of it is extraordinary, which is a shame, since we all need more Basque food in our lives. That said, if you go, get the octopus carpaccio (at left in the photo), the kroketas (in the center), and the squid ribbons (not pictured). I also hear their lunchtime cheeseburger is amazing, but I’ll have to um, find myself very very sick one weekday and unable to go to work to find out for myself. (Note: this is where I uncharacteristically ran out of film.)
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This says less about Txikito than about the quality of the food and dining experience at Co. Pizza but: halfway through our meal at Txikito, Mark and I decided that it would more enjoyable if we finished our meal at Co., a few doors down. So we paid our bill, walked up to the bar at Co., and ordered their boscaiola pie, full of mushrooms and sausage and chili flakes. Later, the barkeep gave us a slice of banofee pie, just for the heck of it. See what I mean? I love this place. (More on that very shortly.)
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The following night: a belated birthday meal at The Breslin. Pictured: the terrine plate. At the center bottom of the photo is the guinea fowl terrine; it is amazing. Also good but not pictured: the scotch egg (yes!) and the blood sausage with fried quail egg. This place is over the top, but if you don’t make a habit of it, I think it’s worth the occasional insanity (food- and crowd-wise).
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Remember that thing I said about how I much I loved Co.? Here is proof: two days after that last (half) meal there, I was back on Saturday afternoon for a post-gallery lunch. Chilled by that morning’s snowfall, we warmed ourselves on squash soup, veal meatballs (oh my goodness, so very very good), and a margherita pie. There may have also been some wine consumed. A very lazy, very languorous, very lovely meal.
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Sunday brunch at Char No.4 with Mike. There was whiskey. There was wine. There were A LOT of poached eggs and cheesy grits. We also quite happily discovered that Char’s breakfast ham is quite possibly the best ham ever. This will no doubt require further research. (“research”)
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Last night’s proceedings at Kunjip. So. Much. Food. Hot soups to invigorate on a chilly night, with bonus steamed egg dish (I love you, Kunjip) that was at once restorative, delicious, and quite Proustian in its comforts.

Yeah, I ate a lot recently. And weirdly didn’t have any 35mm camera on me to record the second half of the week’s meals (not so easy to take food photos with a Hasselblad, as an upcoming post will demonstrate). But no matter — the company and the food more than easily made up for the absence of proper photographic equipment. I’m also pretty sure that said company was pleased to not have a slow-focusing Leica interrupt the proceedings.

I’m going to attempt to have a much more austere week, mealwise. We’ll see how that goes.

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islay 1997.

19 Jan 2012

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I have a fancy-ish new scanner, an Epson V700, which can do a decent job with black and white negatives — my old Canon flatbed scanner was something of a willful child when it came to b&w film — so I’ve been going through my old negatives to see if there was stuff that I missed the first time around because I didn’t want to deal with the wonkiness of the Canoscan 8800. Sure enough, there was a sheet of film from my trip to Islay that I didn’t even attempt to scan before. These are from the second half of my trip to the island; the first half you can see here.

Most of these were taken on a single afternoon, on a bike ride around the tiny town of Port Charlotte, in the southwestern part of the island. The doll above was an antique, the photo taken at the Museum of Islay Life, a tiny little historical museum full of great odds and ends. And somewhere in here is an attempt at a self-portrait — I shudder a bit, now, at my late-90s wardrobe, all terribly ill-fitting. Dear me!

The final shot, however, was taken while in the capital city of Bowmore; the very nice fishmonger, nearing the end of his market day, kindly let me take his photograph *and* gave me a whole smoked mackerel, on the house. He was pretty great.

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birthday food fest.

17 Jan 2012

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I ate like a madwoman last week. How else to distract myself from the aging process?

Thanks to everyone who made it out to one meal or another, to help me ring in a new year in appropriately gluttonous style.

I should probably also note that these photos were from only four of the ten ridiculously wonderful meals I had. Maialino brunch and Momofuku duck lunch photos to come; everything else I tore into before I had the wherewithal to take the camera out. No matter! All delicious!
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