walton (1).
Shannon, Bernard, and I headed up to the sleepy little village of Walton, NY, this weekend, where Bernard has a lovely country house. After breakfast at Tilly’s in Monticello, we made our way to Walton, where we stopped in at the village library. We even got to poke around the library’s attic space, where old newspapers and local yearbooks abounded. From there it was off to the supermarket to get supplies for the main event: the eating and the lazing around. And oh how we excelled in our holidaying! Our mid-afternoon lunch was an appropriate mix of high and lowbrow, a most wonderful way to spend a fully autumnal afternoon with friends.
On a technical note: almost all of these shots were taken with slide film — Kodak Elitechrome 100, to be exact. I love the crispness of slide images; everything just pops a bit more, especially in sunlight. If Kodak Portra 160nc weren’t such a great film for my aesthetic purposes, I’d probably use slide film all the time.
portrait of the artist getting a haircut.
There were some shenanigans up in Walton this past weekend. I’ll post more on the ins and outs of our trip as soon as the rest of the slide film negatives get scanned into the computer, but for now, feast your eyes on what happens when you start drinking wine at 3 in the afternoon. I decided around 9pm that I needed a haircut, and started hacking away; Shannon swooped in to trim the parts I couldn’t see all that well. Then, grabbing the hair on the back of her own head, Shannon decided she needed minor shearing as well. I put down the camera and took control of the scissors. Pseudo-mullets be gone! Bernard stood back, slighly aghast but mostly amused.
yours truly. (!)
Donny over at Great Food Photos interviewed me recently – you can check out the piece, and the accompanying photographs, over here. Donny’s also got a photoblog, filled with all sort of awesome camera’ed New Yorkness; head over there as well, won’t you?
11:08:20
Shannon, coffee, and the end of breakfast at Tilly’s Diner in Monticello, NY, on our way up to Walton with Bernard this past weekend. This might be my favorite photograph of 2010.
the latter day.
My pal A was in town last week to accept the prestigious Whiting Writers Award. The night before the awards ceremony, we headed to our old standby, New Yeah Shanghai Deluxe, for soup dumplings. NYSD has moved down the street and become Old Yeah Shanghai, and in the old NYSD space is a shop called Old Sichuan. Confusing, yes, but we decided to get our Shanghai dumpling fix at Old Sichuan anyway. Still pretty good! Afterwards, there was requisite whiskey and merriment at the local, where we were joined by Jonas, A’s pal from Berlin. The awards ceremony on Wednesday night was pretty hilarious, with much wine, whooping and cheering from the peanut gallery, and later some good old fashioned pub grub from the White Horse Tavern. A lovely, albeit much too brief, 36 hour visit from a friend I really ought to see much more often.
Oh yeah, the title of the post: A and I once had a band called The Latter Day. We were awesome.
housekeeping.
HT here. Because of new web restrictions at work (which allow me to look at Facebook and some rather morally questionable sites, yet prevent me from going to wordpress, typepad, blogspot, or any sort of blogging platform), my mostly-daily posting schedule will be out of whack for a few days. Bear with me, won’t you? In the meanwhile, wander around the site a bit; check out the archives; or, perhaps even better: go outside! It’s finally autumn, which hopefully means that your cheeks will start to get as rosy as mine do.
Back soon, with lots of photographs in tow.
Update: Weirdly, my web access has returned. I have no idea if this (no firewall) is an anomaly, or if the firewall this morning was. The photo above: taken with a Polaroid 340 a few years back, when autumn was just starting around its normally scheduled time (aka, early October) and not all the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window had already been shed from their branches, as they did this year after that freak tornado hit Brooklyn last month. (Here’s the view of the same tree, same autumn, only on a slightly overcast day, and with 35mm slide film.) I love the crispness in the air today, but man, I really miss waking up to this deep yellow curtain of foliage just feet from my bed.
walton, early spring.
This past April, Daniel, Shannon, and I went upstate to our friend Bernard’s weekend home in Walton. Nestled in the Catskills about two and a half hours from the city, the house has a kitchen the size of a Manhattan apartment, a pool table, fireplace, a gazillion bedrooms, and its own little bar. We did little more that weekend than eat, nap, play 7-inches from Bernard’s vast vinyl collection, drink, nap some more, eat some more, and sleep. Somewhere in there we managed to hit the local library book sale, where Shannon picked up a copy of Dolly Parton’s autobiography for a dollar. Score!
Shannon, Bernard, and I are heading back up to Walton this coming weekend. I’m hoping the leaves will be awash in their full autumn colors, and that it’ll actually start to feel properly, well, autumnal. (It’s been freakishly warm in NYC this week!) Bernard and I were hoping to relax in front of the tv with a Phillies-Yankees World Series, but we’ll have to make do with the Giants-Rangers. And I think this time around I’ll bring some black and white film to load into the Yashica (I’ve got Kodachrome in the Spotmatic and Portra 160nc in the Nikon), and see what transpires (other than the eating and sleeping, of course).
lupe, from the archives.
Lupe, late December 2000, in her flat in New Cross Gate, London. She’s probably wondering why that last sentence had so many commas. 
I really quite love these two photos of her. They feel like stills from a film that ought to have subtitles.
nyc, underexposed (1).
If you walk into Central Park from the 59th and 6th Avenue entrance, and bear right/northeast, you’ll eventually come to an opening in the trees, right near a bridge, where you’re suddenly face to face with a view of the buildings that overlook the southeast corner of the park. It’s a spectacular view, in great part because you’ve emerged from this thicket of trees and all at once there’s this broad swath of sky and New York City again. You’ll be compelled to take a photo, as I did, and as a New Yorker, you’ll find yourself a little bit embarrassed when, after you take your shot, you turn around and see a dozen other people doing the same exact thing. You are, for a brief instant, a tourist in your own town.
So then you might turn back around, towards the opening and the sky and the buildings, and throw the focus on your lens way off, just to skew that perfect view a bit, perhaps make it a bit more like what might come out of a pinhole camera. That’ll show the accidental tourist in you!
But after you get your roll of Portra 160nc developed, what becomes even more striking than the view, or its blurry sister, are the tones of the final print. These were taken around 5:30pm, about an hour before nightfall, when the light was still a muted, cloudy yellow. Where did these blue tones come from? Is this what happens when you underexpose 160nc by a couple of stops? If so: awesome. Look for more underexposure experiments in the coming months.
sunday afternoon with the slice gang.
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Yesterday afternoon, after fighting off the post-biscuits and gravy food coma from Char No.4, I headed into the city to DBA, to meet up with the various contributors, commenters, and fellow travelers of Slice, the wonderful pizza blog that’s now under the Serious Eats umbrella. It was great to finally put faces to names, and to try a few new pies from places I’d never heard of before (Rizzo’s at the very top, was absolutely phenomenal, and even after being carried all the way from Astoria). Thanks, Adam, for organizing a lovely afternoon. It should surprise no one that afterwards I met up with a friend and proceeded to consume even more pizza.
At one point Nick Solares and I traded lenses on our Nikons (his D300 D700 and my manual FE) — hopefully once this next roll of film gets developed I can see what sorts of magic my dear NoName can do with a f/1.2 aperture opening at its disposal. I’m crossing my fingers, but also half-hoping the photos turn out terribly — there are waaaaay too many lenses I already covet, and I’m not sure it’s healthy to add another one to the list…
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hong-an tran 