Pipes

As amazing as the D800 is, I still really like film. There's room for both…

(The digital photos from this stack of pipes are here.)

Dockside Shed

This is roughly what my computer feels like right now – a somewhat dilapidated warehouse. Time to get back to work…

RAW+JPEG

This past weekend was my second time photographing Coney Island's summer-starting parade, and it's going to take a while to sort through and see what I have to show from it. My quick take is that there should be a few interesting sets that can come out of it, but time will tell.

The score was 1375 photos taken with my D800, of which 1101 were of the parade and taken with my 85/1.8D, and 274 were with my 50/1.4G, which was used for everything else. The Canon S100 took 104 photos, and I used my XA to shoot one roll of black and white and about ten frames in colour.

Once all the dust has settled I'll see what the numbers are for my best and/or favourite photos – it's always interesting to see the differences between what gets used and what works.

But until then, I still have a few photos that haven't made it to these pages yet, so at least there's a few more updates to go before I need to have more Coney photos ready. This one is just quick jpeg from the D800 – simply importing the raw photos is going to be quite the task.

Worn Metal

Backtracking again, this is the black and white film version of the first photo from my "worn metal" post from three weeks ago.

… I'm not going to pick a favourite.

Twenty Ton (Two)

I previously speculated that this crane would look better in black and white, and I think I was right.

(But of course I would say that.)

Cinder Blocks

The week after taking the 'Staso' photos I went back to the Spit. I was happy with the photos I had, but went back 'for fun' this time, and I had this outlandish idea that perhaps I could find the Staso brick and bring it home.

The photo above is what I found on my return. This is the same beach as in the Staso/Grey photo, looking in the opposite direction, but in the week between the photos the trucks and bulldozers had been doing their work. The old beach with all of its small, smooth stones is being layered over with new rubble. I took a number of photos of the new terrain, looked around a bit, and then moved on to other areas.

In completing my 2011 series, I had decided that I wanted to apply what I had learned from creating this project to a new one. About bricks. From the Spit. But this time I'm going to have more control over the lighting, equipment, and environment. In photography the little things are critical, but big ones are profound. For example, when I was working on the photos last summer, I was using a convenient concrete block as a shooting table. It wasn't quite level, so not only did all of my subjects need to stand on their own, they needed to do it against a slope. This non-photographic requirement fundamentally changed the project, but it won't be an issue this time around.

So for this trip to the Spit I was gathering raw material in the most literal way. I spent the day taking photos and inspecting bricks, picking out some interesting ones to bring home. It was a successful day all around.

And on the way back home I found my brick.

Staso / Grey

I like this brick. How could I not? It's named after my favourite colour.

I took two different photos of it – involving fifteen or twenty attempts – and the other one is a little more whimsical. I took them at the end of yet another trip to the Leslie Street Spit, and I was hoping that this one would finally do what I wanted.

After looking through my photos of the bricks on white, I knew that I needed one outlier to show the environment that they were from. Those contextless Lakefill photos needed something to tie them back to the place, to explain how they could be so different and why those differences were important. I had made three previous trips to the Spit to find that kind of an image and none of them worked. By the time I made this fourth trip I was seriously considering finding someone in the nearby marinas who could take me out to photograph this shoreline from the water.

I don't really think that idea would have worked, either.

This photo – see it bigger – sums it up perfectly for me. It's a brick with words, including the name of my favourite colour, and it's exactly what I would have included in the project if I had found it last summer. It was lying less than fifty meters from where I took the Lakefill photos, and the photo shows one of the two beaches that I pulled material from. The pretty one, naturally, without all of the ugly rebar tangled around, but that's not dishonest. I took my fifteen or twenty photos, put away the camera, and headed home.

I never did bother asking about chartering a boat – but I did go back one more time.