very simple

I had mentioned a few weeks ago a long simmering thought for a photography project, involving shooting all of the stations in the new york city subway system. it’s a daunting task, as there are over 400 stations and hundreds of miles of tracks. But I would not be daunted. I decided to start mapping out a plan, involving doing very small pieces at a time, and only at my leisure. The first bit of business was to switch from a pay-per-ride to an unlimited metrocard, which I was able to do the other day. Today, I picked a train and a direction, taking the 1 train from my neighborhood down to the end of the line at South Ferry, hopping off at every stop to take pictures of the platform, the mosaics, the tracks, and whatever else was of interest. There were a few stations I had to skip thanks to the vagaries of “weekend work” by the MTA (the train was running express from 14th to Chambers today), but it was a good start. I’m going to be posting separate entries for each station, and I’m going to be doing it relatively slowly so that there’s no great influx of posts, but I thought I’d start with where I started, at the West 72nd Street 1/2/3 station.

It’s your typical Saturday holiday weekend tourist crowd, with buskers, idiots pretending to jump on the tracks, and people who don’t understand how to wait for others to get off the train first before they try to board. I’ve always thought the mosaics in this station were relatively abstract, and everything I can find online about them simply refers to them as “mosaic tapestries”, but as I look at them, they start to remind me of the 91st street garden in Riverside Park, with it’s squared off garden in the middle surrounded by a walkway. In any event, that could all be in my head.

Station opened: October 27, 1904 (renovated, including new control house, 2002)
Original system: IRT
Trains: 1/2/3
Source: Wikipedia

april appears to have largely been about meals. But I have also been inspired to finally start a project that I had been thinking about for a while. I want to photograph every subway station in the new york city subway system. It requires some planning in order to not end up repeating myself over and over again, and also switching to an unlimited metrocard. I’ve been organizing myself, putting together a comprehensive list of all of the stations in the system (which there doesn’t seem to be a good one available anywhere?!) and the trains that run through them, and once I start I’m going to try to be methodological and target small sections at a time so that I’m not biting off more than I can chew – I figure If I pick a section of a line to tackle on any particular day when i’ve got no other plans, that’s probably the most sensible way to do it. I like the idea of this project in particular because it’s something that I can choose to do on a day here or there when I’ve got no other plans, and I can put it down and pick it up again depending on how busy I am with other things. But I’m determined to start.

Not a lot of photos in March, due largely to the fact that it was still bitterly cold and unpleasant around these parts. I was also dreading the inevitable update apple was launching that would finally depreciate Aperture and foist Photos onto all of us, which happened this weekend. It’s pretty terrible. I was willing to deal with the “less functionality” aspects, given that it was really an iPhoto replacement and not an Aperture replacement (although they chose to discontinue Aperture with the launch as well), but the number of things that got broken either as a result of the upgrade/installation or just don’t work as said is kind of ridiculous. I’ve had to tell my parents to hold off on upgrading their computers, because I fear the repercussions of having the less tech savvy members of my family deal with issues that have been giving me agita for the past several days. In no particular order…

– Even though every piece of written material about Photos indicated that it would copy your existing photo library and leave your iPhoto or Aperture library where it was, my Aperture library disappeared after the migration – when I opened Aperture, or when I tried to access the Aperture library from iTunes or the finder, it was as if it didn’t exist and I had zero photos. I finally found it this evening after a day and a half of searching, and had to essentially manually reconnect it to Aperture to get my photos available again in that application.
– I refuse to use iCloud for photo storage for a variety of reasons (first, I have too many photos and don’t want to pay for storage, second, there’s no option to selectively upload or to selectively hold back photos, and I have stuff i don’t want in the Cloud), so I continue to rely on iTunes syncing to keep my photos in sync across devices. It took a dozen syncs to get my entire library back on my phone. It would sync part of the library, behave as if it was done, and when I checked my phone, only a portion of my pics had transferred.
– I understand not having the full panoply of Aperture editing tools, but it doesn’t have any ability (yet, at least) to link to third-party editing software. If you want to edit, you have to cumbersome-ly export, edit, and then reimport.
– You can no longer add watermarks when exporting photos – this was an extremely handy feature in Aperture, where you could save a preset export setting, that would save a preferred size as well as watermarking options, so I could hit export and it would automatically format the 20 or 50 or 200 photos I wanted to upload to my website in the right size and include my copyright bug embedded in the bottom corner automatically. For the photos below, I had to download a separate piece of software, export the photos, and then add the copyright bug separately. Again, significantly more time consuming and cumbersome.
– Simple functionality things like not being able to change the sort order of photos, or to view with the most recent photos at the top rather than at the bottom (there seems to be a menu option, but it’s always greyed out).
– photos on a white background with no ability to change it to grey or black, or to add a border to add contrast (I have a white screen on this site, but I very intentionally use a black border on my pics because it causes additional color contrast).
– and on and on and on…

I’m sure people will come up with workarounds and whatnot for all of these things, but I’m seriously contemplating reverting to Aperture (now that I’ve finally found my library!) for the time being. My biggest concern on that front is that I know, at some point, that Apple will push out some supposedly innocuous security update that will irretrievably break that far superior software now that it’s been end-of-lifed.

So – march photos.

more cats and coffee. of course. and a few other miscellaneous things. but mostly cats and coffee.

Visit my instagram page to see everything.

For 2015, I decided to finally get on board the instagram wagon. I’ve been a holdout because I’ve had issues with their user terms, but at a certain point, when everyone else in the world is using the service, and my photography has fallen off a cliff because I’m not using the same sharing service as everyone else…well… So January was a slow start, a bit of testing the waters. I’ve set things up so that my pics get cross-posted to twitter and Facebook and flickr already, but I thought it would be good to do a monthly roundup of what I’ve posted back here on ye old blogging platform, just to keep this space going. I joked the other day that I should just rename my website “cats and coffee” (my friend Adam appended “and customer complaints”, which I thought was pretty spot on).

Visit my instagram page to see everything

It was somewhat of an impulse vacation, when I realized that if I didn’t take some time off soon, I wasn’t going to get a break until the end of the year because of the way some work projects were shaking out, so I put in for some time and decided, rather impassively based on some good deal opportunities on Expedia, to go to Venice for the week. I got back last weekend, but with the jet lag and the catching up with work and other stuff, I finally got to sit down and sort through photos this weekend.

The way the trip worked out, I really only spent four full days in Venice. I landed on Sunday mid-day, and flew out again on Friday afternoon, leaving Monday through Thursday as the days to truly wander around and soak in the atmosphere. I largely avoided the whole Clooney wedding kerfuffle (arriving after the main event, and yes, I planned my trip before that whole mess was even announced), but the tourist crowds in general were not avoidable.

By day then… (if you click on the thumbnails, you can click through all of the photos from the trip without having to exit)

Sunday and Monday: Some arrival shots, my hotel was situated right on the Grand Canal on the Dorsoduro side across from San Marco, so you could sit in the front lounge/bar and just drink cocktails and soak in the view. I did this a lot. On Monday, my original plan was to go to the architecture biennale, but apparently it’s closed on Mondays, so I recalculated and spent Monday at San Marco, visiting the museums (Museo Correr and the Doge’s Palace) and generally wandering around the area.

Tuesday: Second and more successful attempt to head over to the architecture biennale, curated by Rem Koolhas and held at the Venice Arsenale. It was mostly video installations, which doesn’t really lend itself to photography, and I didn’t spend a lot of time in the country pavilions at the end, choosing instead to grab some lunch and then head up the grand canal via vaporetto (where I got a coveted seat on the back deck of the boat) to the jewish ghetto for a late afternoon tour of the synagogues – again, no pictures allowed inside, but the tiny synagogues built secretly into the top floors of the houses here are a marked contrast from the luxury of San Marco. A definite must-see if you’re ever in Venice. The word “ghetto” actually derives from this tiny island, which was originally an italian “gheto”, or foundry, and which is where the original jews of venice were segregated because they could be walled off and locked in at night during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Wednesday: it was pouring rain on Wednesday, so I decided to make this my lazy day. I slept in and then headed over to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which was near my hotel. Not a lot of pictures, because I generally don’t think photographs of art do any justice to the art itself.

Thursday: My last full day, which was beautiful again, I decided to just take a lengthy walk, starting in San Marco and heading back up towards and past the Rialto Bridge, wandering in and out of side streets and canals and basically getting lost (although you can never get really lost in venice, because you’re never that far from the Grand Canal). Made my way back for a late afternoon lunch near L’Accademia Bridge, the “other” bridge that crosses the Grand Canal, and then finally went back to San Marco for the ultimate in tourist trap dinners, but had a total blast listening to the band and just generally enjoying the piazza, wine, and atmosphere.

I’ve been a bit down lately about my status as a second class citizen since the recent Supreme Court decisions, and have been thinking about tangible things I can do to at least make myself feel like I’m doing something, even if it amounts to spitting in the wind.

In the meantime though, my family is celebrating a very rain-sodden July 4th in the Berkshires and our barbecue got waylaid by the incessant rain. So…flag, and and barbecue trimmings being cooked in the kitchen.

The weekend before Memorial Day was my law school reunion. 15 years (gasp!). It was tons of fun, and compared to last time, much less anxiety-inducing (I had gotten laid off from my job only three months before my 10-year reunion, so the “what are you doing now” questions were a little awkward). I didn’t take many pictures of the festivities, because I was having too much fun in the enjoyment of them, but Saturday morning I walked up to the new Barnes Foundation and took a few shots.

Today is officially the last day of my winter vacation. Sure, there’s still the weekend, but I (almost) always get the weekend off, so it doesn’t really feel like it counts in the same way. This last day of leisure coincided quite well with this year’s giant snowstorm. I refuse to call it Hercules, because naming snowstorms is stupid. My week-and-a-half off consisted of cleaning out my closets, long-scheduled doctor’s appointments, discovering that my fridge died (with the consequent throwing out all my food, spending an entire day waiting for the repair guy, and buying all new food), and finding out that our family’s beloved jack russell terrier, Ollie, passed away.

But I got to sleep late, so that’s…something. In any event, common sense lost the battle this morning and I headed over to central park and bethesda fountain for some picture taking. I don’t know if I was too early or too late (or the kids had more common sense than me), but there was a distinct lack of sledding kids compared to years past. I’m still working the chill out of my face and hands.

I still have a few hours, but my plan to not leave my apartment (except for maybe CPW fireworks) again this year will probably mitigate any attempt to top the stupid idea I had this morning, namely, to take a photo walk down broadway. on new year’s eve. needless to say, my plan got a bit stymied by the fact that I basically walked into the developing morass that is times square. It was still pretty early in the day, so instead of times square being filled with people, the side streets were filled with people who were waiting on line for hours in order to be corralled into the actual times square at what the police deemed to be the appropriate moment. In any event, here are a few final pics for the year. Side note: It was really freaking cold out today.