Manhattan Bridge

Let's loosen up the sequence of color photos with an image from last year. See also here.

Watchtower

Not as old as the one from yesterday.

Grocery

An old one.

Bus

And while we're talking about buses, here's one taken from a bus window in Brooklyn last year.

Worker symbol

Symbols of the world, unite?

Park

One of the pictures that are more about what you can't see than what's on the photo.

Suit

Another one from the tailor's studio.

White line, too

A variant of this one, twelve years later. Did I make any progress since?

Dress form

In September, for the first time of my life, I had the chance to see the studio of a custom tailor from the inside. I was in awe because not only what they make is beautiful but also because everything about the tools and the materials had an air of dignity and pride. I very rarely wear suits, but I was really tempted to get me one.

I'll probably show a few more photos from the same venue later.

Bridges

The Manhattan Bridge seen from the Brooklyn Bridge.

And today's title is also the title of a Gil Scott-Heron LP from 1977.

Central Park

One of the horses that tour Central Park each and every day.

White line

Of course, there's always Robert Frank's magnificent white line which makes all others look like cheap rip-offs.

Jail

No, this is not a jail. But I always have to think of one when I look at it. It combines the fence category with the looking up category.

Miss

There you have it again. Every now and then a photo which technically is a failure ends up as one that I like because it manages to capture something the "correct" ones don't. This also happens to me with other photographer's pictures and I guess they feel the same because otherwise they wouldn't have published their "misses" in the first place. At the Fotobuchtage 2010 here in Hamburg I had the chance to ask Paolo Pellegrin how he deals with this and my understanding is that his views are the same: if a photo "feels" right then take it, no matter how blurry, skewed, underexposed, or grainy it might be.

As one might have guessed, you can't really fake this. You can of course go out and deliberately use wrong shutter speeds or aim your lens into the wrong direction - but that alone doesn't make a good shot.

Looking up

As part of my ongoing introspection into what and why I photograph, I've added a new category looking up to this blog - because I realized that a lot of my photos, and especially pretty recent ones I happen to like, are about looking up in one way or the other. This here belongs to this new category. It was taken in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York on March 13, 2010.

Which, BTW, was the same day I met Magdalena Solé, a photographer I admire for her color pictures. I recommend looking at her website.

Backyard ritual

After quite some time, a view out of a hotel window again. This time, it's the Ace hotel in New York, and the photo was taken exactly nine years after 9/11.

The title is the name of a song from Miles Davis' "Tutu" album, BTW.

Brooklyn Bridge

I've been on this bridge a couple of times already, but I never took a photo of it that I liked. This one, from last week, is the first one.

The cross

In Brooklyn, about a week ago.

Fire lane

I love this one for its tonal values although otherwise there probably isn't much to write home about.

Partly shorn

I always thought that I didn't know about Shaun the Sheep before 2007, but this photo proves that we briefly met in 1998 already.