A warm November day

Took a walk to Downtown Flushing, to do some shopping. First stop, X'ian Famous Foods, for a lamb burger: that is a spicy cumin lamb burger, served in a bun that looks more a pita than a white-bread bun, with a slice of jalapeño and red onion. Three bucks. Can't beat that. Bought a cup of coffee for a buck at a bakery down the block, and managed to get it without sugar (not an easy task).

On the walk back, I passed this thing on 38th Avenue; I suppose it's a tree. Or was. But why is it there?

On Bowne Street I caught this Smart car parked between the stop line and the crosswalk lines. Now, that is a parking space no other car could possibly get.

On 38th Avenue, near 147th Street, there is an old house wedged in between the parking lot of an immense nursing and rehabilitation home and rows of attached houses. Consider the ivy covering the face of the house; yet there are vehicles in its driveway.

going to New Jersey

At the Brick Church stop on the New Jersey Transit train, I took a picture of the eponymous church.

At the front door of an Italian restuarant in South Orange, I caught sight of a squirrel chewing through the bottom of a paper bag containing the day's bread delivery. I could not get closer without disturbing it, and, alas, my phone camera does not have a zoom.

And on the eastbound train platform, on the way home, I got a shot of the South Orange Fire Department building.

New York photographs

In an H-Mart in Linden Hill, a warning.

Sunday afternoon, 2 October, driving through St. Albans, on the way home to Flushing, I came upon this: BusOmove, a bus that provides entertainment: a party bus, a movie bus. Ingenious.

On the way back to my vehicle, from getting lunch at Fishnet Jamaican Restaurant, I came upon this part of a brick on 190th Street, just south of Linden Boulevard – across the street from where New York Shoes (as I titled the picture of shoes I took a month earlier, and, yes, the shoes were still there, in the same spot).

New York Shoes.

Now that it has snowed for the first time in October in New York City, this picture seems especially incongruous. It's a house in Bayside, and the climbing vine contrasts with the still-green bush, 6 days before the snow.

 A vehicle in Flushing, this morning, showed a small amount of snow, but in October, any snow is weird.

The intersection of Brookville Boulevard and 135th Avenue showed traces of snow.

And I was at that intersection in my quest to find the waterway that makes its way to Conselyeas Pond, Brookville Park, and hence to the swampy area near JFK. I can not tell if the water makes its way to Jamaica Bay, but I guess that it does.

What fascinates me is this obscured waterway wending its way through the concrete of southern Queens.

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

Autumn leaves

In the neighborhood bounded by Farmers and Springfield, on 183rd Street.

Along Rockaway Boulevard, looking south, headed east.

Across Rockaway, on the north side, one of many businesses located near JFK Airport.

A picture of my taking a picture of autumn leaves behind me, using the side-view mirror.

Further down on 183rd Street, apprioaching 144th Avenue.

Street names

On 71st Street, near Union Turnpike, across and up one block from Forest Park.

Just visible: Sybilla Street.

Lives in photography

Edward Steichen : lives in photography

Amateur photography

,

 Oops, car post in way: looking at car port on corner of 196th Street and 116th Road, St. Albans. (Here is an older shot of same scene that looks far better)

 Oops, same car post; looking at Baptist church on 196th and 119th, St Albans.

The zig-zag intersection at 196th and 120th Avenue (and reflection of dasboard on windshield).

122nd Avenue ahead.

Nashville Boulevard and 197th Street, 9 October, noontime, on my way to Hewlett.

 One of those interesting houses on 224th Street (where they are on east side, only; on 225th they are on both sides, and on 226th they are only on the west side).

Funky little house on 224th and 133rd Avenue. Nice shadow effect on stop sign.

Brush has been cut back, quite recently; it used to spill over onto the east-bound lane on 149th Road, near 262nd Street.

Red painted on bushes outside HWPL. That's the Children's room, behind the school district parking lot.

86,060 miles on Rocinante.

This is a structure between 22nd and 223rd Streets, south of Merrick Boulevard; I can not figure out what it is (my guess is a gas tank, but that's a pure guess).

Another look at it. Both shots are from my ride home, after 5pm.










One of many pretty houses I pass by, in St Albans, along 196th Street.

Riding along a very narrow street, 190th, approaching Hillside Avenue. The angle of the light poles intrigues me.

A picture is worth ...

Photographs of Chris Hondros

From Foreign Policy:



On April 20, war photojournalist Chris Hondros was killed, apparently by a rocket-propelled grenade, while covering the front lines of Libya's civil war in the besieged rebel outpost of Misrata. For the staff of Foreign Policy, Chris was far more than a credit line under a photo, though he was certainly that: His name appears on countless FP stories, from a devil's grab bag of locations -- Liberia, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt's Tahrir Square, and most recently, Libya.

But we didn't merely rely on Chris's ability to vividly capture the most extreme moments of human existence -- from the immediacy of close-quarters combat in ravaged Libyan apartment blocks to a quake-injured Haitian child looking for solace in a makeshift balloon. We also considered him a friend. His humanism, courage, and artistic brilliance will be sorely missed in this office as well as in many, many other parts of the world. In celebration of Chris's life and work, we present a selection of our favorite photos.

Black and White Photography

Recommended by HW patron

Koudelka

Featured photographer in the email newsletter I received from Magnum Photos yesterday: Josef Koudelka. On a whim I looked up his name in the Nassau County OPAC, and found two entries under his name:

Exiles: photographs by Josef Koudelka; essays by Czeslaw Milosz, from 1988 (call no. Q 7792. K)

Gypsies: photographs, 1975 (Q 779.2 Koudelk)

Great day in Harlem

Numerous sites have this famous photograph by Art Kane

Alec Soth

An interesting composition, and interesting subjects (to say the least).

Phoenicia flooded

“I’m good, baby.”

A photographer working for the New York Times was severely injured by a bomb in Afghanistan.



This slide show is taken from the memory card that was in Joao Silva’s camera on Oct. 23 when he stepped on an antipersonnel mine at Checkpoint 16, near the village of Deh-e-Kuchay, Afghanistan. Mr. Silva, a contract photographer for The New York Times, and Carlotta Gall, a Times correspondent, were on patrol with a squad of 10 or 15 American soldiers and a unit of Afghan soldiers and police officers. Mr. Silva lost both his legs in the explosion and suffered internal injuries. He is recovering at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Joao Silva’s damaged equipment.

Donovan Wylie

From a periodic email from Magnum Photos, saw his work.

Adriana Zehbrauskas

A story in the New York Times on 3 November, about the Day of the Dead celebrated in Ciudad Juárez,is accompanied by a photograph by Ms. Zehbrauskas. Googling her name returns numerous links, including her portfolio in the Polaris Images website. She's Brazilian.

Carl Van Vechten

Reading In search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line, by George Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Van Vetchen figures very prominently in the book, as an important figure in her life: mentor, friend, sponsor. A look at his Wikipedia entry does not even mention her.

Van Vechten was a complex man, in many ways. One of his pursuits was photography. The Library of Congress has a collection of his photographic works: Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten at the Library of Congress features a searchable database of photographs taken by Van Vechten.

Another one is Carl Van Vechten's Portraits from the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University features a searchable database of over 9,000 black and white prints.

Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million

Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million
By Alan Duke, CNN - July 27, 2010 9:01 p.m. EDT

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Rick Norsigian kept two boxes he bought at a garage sale under his pool table for four years before realizing they may be too valuable to store at home. The Fresno, California, commercial painter learned this week that what was in those boxes he paid $45 dollars for a decade ago could be worth more than $200 million. "When I heard that $200 million, I got a little weak," Norsigian said at a Beverly Hills art gallery Tuesday.

Art, forensic, handwriting and weather experts teamed up to conclude the 65 glass plates in the boxes were photographic negatives created more than 80 years ago by Ansel Adams, the iconic American photographer whose images of the West inspired the country.

Adams heirs skeptical about lost negatives claim

Photographing America

Interesting.

Photographing America, 1929-1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans  [curator, Agnès Sire].
London : Thames & Hudson, 2009.

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.