Lift that house

On Thursday 3 April 2014, as I turned onto Westminster Road, in Cedarhurst, I saw these trucks:

I thought back to when our house in Chichester had to be jacked up, to have the foundation fixed. Never saw that, just the before and after.

And yesterday, Thursday 10 April 2014, I saw this, the end result of the lifting; but, clearly, more remains to be done.

Mariposa

9/1/2012, 3.08pm  —Mountain Top Arboretum (mtarboretum.org‎)

County Road 23C

Tannersville, NY 12485

Subway an open book

Alongside subway commuters with noses buried in bodice-rippers, biographies and Bibles, Ourit Ben-Haim clutches her camera and waits for just the right shot. The free-lance photographer creates surreptitious portraits of the New York riders as they turn their book pages, publishing the results on her website. 

 In some cases, the subjects are in a reading reverie and never know they have been photographed. The 700 bookworms featured in photos she has published on Underground New York Public Library, the blog she launched in December, are identified only by the titles of their books.

 Someone, a PN patron, I think,  told me about that site.

Her blog approximates the sensation of reading over a stranger's shoulder. Ms. Ben-Haim acknowledges that the act of taking photographs of strangers without permission might make some people uneasy.

There is a question of ethics, indeed.

On her website, she writes that taking photographs of people without their permission is "not wrong" legally. Ms. Ben-Haim also says that she never hides her camera, answers questions from those who notice what she's doing and discards photos if she thinks the subject would find the results unflattering.

Life And Love On The New York City Subway

Following in the footsteps of Walker Evans, a young Stanley Kubrick, during his tenure as a staff photographer for Look magazine in the 1940s, captured New York City subway passengers on their daily commute in a series called "Life And Love On The New York City Subway." In an age before iPhone cameras filmed every subway brawl and busker, Kubrick shot his subjects from the hip, in unassuming black and white portraits.

Elbows

I am not sure how I came across this; I look at so much information throughout the day that unless I specifically tag something I lose track of where I saw it. Twitter might have led me to it in a roundabout way. The artist, Neil Goldberg, is featured in a very recent column by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times subtitled Neil Goldberg Exhibition at Museum of the City of New York. Perhaps a tweet by the Museum, which I do follow on Twitter, is the answer.

One thing I really like about this is that watching drivers's elbows is of to me. Not just of truck drivers, but all drivers, how people stick their arms out of the window of their vehicles interests and amuses me. Even in this photo it is visible that different drivers use different angles: the second from left on the bottom row has his elbow on the edge, while the leftmost on the top row has the elbow completely outside. Both the leftmost and rightmost on the bottom row have their arms on the window. I enjoy seeing the different ways people put their arms out, and it is almost exclusively men that do so, it occurs to me. Some do as these drivers, just sticking the elbow out, whilst others put their entire arm out, some even dangling it.

Chien-Chi Chang

A Magnum member. I received the Magnum email,and it featured this priceless photogrpah.

Trotting Course Lane

In the triangle bound by Trotting Course Lane (I sure would love to know the origin of that street name) and Alderton Street, I found Remsen Cemetery. Soldiers from the revolutionary War are buried there; the nearby plaque refers to Cooper Regiment.

The plaque is back there, beyond the chain bounding the burial ground itself.

Though the sun washes out the legend on the plaque, one can see statues of douhgboys keeping vigil over other graves. A couple of them were unreadable.


Then I proceeded up Alderton Street. Beautiful autumn colors this year, such as this small maple.

Intersection of Yellowstone Boulevard and Alderton. I am accustomed to seeing Yellowstone up by Queens Boulevard; this was something of a surprise, to encounter it here.

A beautiful Japanese maple in full regalia, as I proceeded up Alderton.

Dieterle Crescent was one of several semicircular streets that started and ended at Alderton.

This next one is a curiousity: the map does not show it, but clearly it is there. I believe I was on the eastern side of Alderton.

Where do these street names come from?

Asquith? The Asquith?

Walking along 64th Road, after bearing left (west), some more pretty autumn colors.

And, Fitchett?

Heading southeast on Wodhaven Boulevard, another named avenue.

A one-block long street, Goldington Court.

And Furmanvill, at the northern boundary of St. John's Cemetery.

World Trade Center memorial

Freedom Tower on the rise.

Music in the subways

Changing from the 6 to the N, we happened upon a musician playing the electric harp (a new one for me). Just as I took the shot, someone passed in front of me, dropped a coin into the open case, and tried to sneak past.

Occupy Wall Street ?

Watching their every move.

Lovely autumn colors.

 Watching all the time.

That flowing water

On Wednesday 2 November I got this shot of the water along Brookville Boulevard between Merrick Boulevard and 130th Avenue.

October snow

Intense October Storm Moves Into Northeast trumpets wUnderground.

wunderground Weather Underground: Record report: 1.3 inches of snow in NYC. "an inch of snowfall has never been recorded in the month of October" wxug.us/gf0d

Winter brings colors to weather maps, and it ain't even winter (on the calendar, though sure as anything it looks wintry outside).

At 1pm, it was a coating of slush. I was headed back inside after lunch.

By 3 pm it looked whiter. That's the parking lot of the Peninsula Public Library.





Nice selection of pictures in dailybeast.com

Wisteria on Murray Lane

Monday 9 May 2011, out for a bicycle ride; taken on Murray Lane, Flushing, NY

Same house, same wisteria, same bicycle, same camera, Tuesday 11 October 2011

Phoenicia flooded

Where are pictures taken?

Eric Fischer on Flickr

Tourists and locals share an uneasy detente at times on New York’s crowded streets. When it comes to photography, however, there’s evidence that these two tribes dwell in different cities. Eric Fischer, a 37-year-old computer programmer from Oakland, Calif., created a map using geotagging data on the photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa to plot the points in New York (and 71 other cities) captured by shutterbugs. He then devised an ingenious system for separating tourists from locals. A user with many shots of the same city taken over a wide range of dates is deemed to be a local, and marked on the map with blue dots. Tourists get a red dot. (Yellow dots could not be placed in either camp).


The results are quite revealing. Midtown, as expected, is aflame with tourist red, as is the area in Lower Manhattan where the Statue of Liberty can be seen. The East Village and Chinatown, however, are far more blue. Another split happens in two prime Manhattan green spaces: Central Park is heavily photographed by tourists, while the scenic stretch of Riverside Park along the Hudson on the Upper West Side is shot almost entirely by locals.
The map shows a few far-flung hot spots. The Meadowlands and Yankee Stadium are bright red, while Citi Field is purple. Beyond the sports stadiums, few locations in New Jersey, the Bronx or Queens register as photo fodder for either locals or tourists.
The iconic Brooklyn Bridge is completely covered by red dots. The nearby Manhattan Bridge, however, looks to be a purple-hued shared subject for tourists and locals, while the all-blue Williamsburg Bridge is predominantly shot by locals.
Brooklyn might be the most revealing borough of all. Unlike the Bronx and Queens, which show little evidence of geotagged photograph uploads, Brooklyn features plenty of photography, mainly by locals. One you leave the vicinity of the Brooklyn Bridge, there are few red dots to be seen.
And for those who want to avoid tourists all together this summer? Fischer’s New York map offers an inadvertent tip: go to Governors Island. The tourists, at least as indicated by Flickr photos, haven’t found there their way there yet.
As for Fischer, it turns out he’s fairly ordinary guy when he travels with a camera. “I have unfortunately only spent a few hours in New York City myself,” he explained in an email. ” It turns out that the pictures I took while I was there were pretty typical of what other tourists were taking.”

• Data,
• Flickr,
• Maps,
• NYCulture,
• Photography,
• Tourism,
• Urban Studies

June 8, 2010, 4:09 PM ET
Aaron Rutkoff: Data Shows Where Locals, Tourists Snap Shots of NYC

2nd Avenue subway

These are magnificent shots of the Second Avenue subway tunnel being built under New York streets.

The machine will run in three 24-hour shifts every week, said William Goodrich, program executive with the MTA. It will dig through to East 63rd Street by November of 2011 at which time crews will reassemble it to dig on the Eastern tunnel.

Crews will start work on the eastern side of the tunnel in November of 2011.

Western development

Smithsonian American Art Museum - The Pyramid Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, 1867.

Timothy O'Sullivan's American West

At the heart of darkness

Almost every eminent photographer over the past century has made at least a few memorable images at night. Technical hurdles to noctural picture-taking, once a lonesome specialty of astronomers, were overcome long ago with the advent of high-response films and the portable flash. It is odd, therefore, that so few photographers have produced major bodies of nighttime work, especially given the centrality of shadowy goings-on in film noir and other cinema genres. Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Weegee, Ted Croner, O. Winston Link, Henry Wessel and Larry Fink are very much exceptions.

 Robert Adams is another, and his series "Summer Nights, Walking," at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea through April 17, may rank as the subtlest investigation of the world after dark ever attempted. As an artistic endeavor that successfully joins black-and-white formal experiment to documentary essay, it is unique. 

 Many photographers have adopted the unheroic approach to landscape gleaned from the work of Mr. Adams and his colleagues in the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. This influence hasn't been altogether for the good. Too many of their younger imitators are cavalier to the point of indifference about what deserves to hang on a wall or appear in a book.