The Guggenheim!

So this is what the inside of the Guggenheim museum looks like!  Astounding, right?  This is a six-story helical ramp that extends along the main gallery's walls.  It is one-quarter mile long and climbs steadily at a three degree incline.  Artworks are installed at an angle of one and one-half degrees which appears straight to the human eye.  The shape of the building is the inverse of a stepped pyramid, expanding up and out.  Wright described this form as an "optimistic ziggurat."  Obviously I am going to milk this visit and only show you one photograph a day...  :-)  Stay tuned.

 

FORTY YEARS!

Stan's wife Ann suggested that there was a really interesting show at the Guggenheim, so Stan and I decided to go see it today.  This is embarrassing beyone belief - I have not been to the Guggenheim in over forty years!  I am a member of the MET, and I go to the Museum of Modern Art a couple of times a year, and sometimes the Whitney in its new home downtown.  But I have not been here in ages!  Shame on me!

It is difficult to get just one photograph to stand for the whole building because it has so many parts.  This building is Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece!  It is a landmark work of 20th century architecture, and it drew controversy for the unusual shape of its display spaces and took 15 years to design and build.  It was completed in 1959.  Inside a six-story helical ramp extends along the main gallerery's perimeter, under a central ceiling skylight.

There is no other museum like this anywhere else.! I found that I enjoyed the exhibit, but I enjoyed even more getting reacquainted with the building itself. There are all kinds of amazing things to see, and I will be doing more posts after this one.  This photograph is taken from an upper floor and I thought it lent a slightly different sense of the building.

 

My Cosanti Bell

I think it was about 20 years ago I went to Arizona because Kathy was going to a week long seminar.  I wandered around photographing the landscape and Navajo ruins. One of the places I visited was Cosanti.  That is a gallery and studio of Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri where he lived and worked.  It is a foundry and studio and gallery.  They make and sell bronze and ceramic windbells and sculptures.  So I bought two different kinds of bells, and they both hang on the front porch to this day,  This is the bronze bell, and the triangle under it is thin metal, blown by the wind and that makes the bell ring.  I saw this from inside the living room today, and went outside and did this photograph. 

 

Phragmites

It feels like everything is a do-over these days!  Yesterday the wind was really howling - gusts to 40 MPH!  On my walk I stopped at Scudder's pond and saw these Phragmites blowing in the wind and took about 15 different photographs.  It was hard to get them just right because they were blowing back and forth in the wind.  So I went by the pond again today and they looked different - the difference was that their shape was more beautiful.  When the wind was howling, they were all clumped and distorted.  These are holding their natural shape in a gentle breeze.  They are beautiful in the late afternoon light, especially against the blue sky. Please click on this to see it larger, and to see to the delicate texture of the "feathered" parts.

 

A Solitary Figure

The other day I stopped to look at this scene with my camera because I love the perspective as the sidewalk and trees get smaller as they get closer to the vanishing point.  The person in the photograph on that day was smaller and walking away from me, and before I could get a shot they turned the corner and disappeared.  I took a picture after they were gone, and it wasn't interesting at all.  Then I realized that a small, solitary figure in a landscape can be so powerful and make such a huge difference.  Today this person was not as far away when I first saw them, and they were walking toward me.  Perfect!  So I took this shot and a few more as they got closer.  The first one when they were smaller was the best!

After I did that photograph I kept walking toward the person and realized that I wanted a comparison photograph, so I turned around and went back to near where I was, and did this photograph.  Look how empty the landscape seems without a small figure in it!  What a lesson all of this has been!  You can click on each one of these and see more detail, if you like.

 

Later Afternoon Sun

It started to warm up today and for the first time in about two weeks that it wasn't below freezing.  It was 37 degrees most of today.  So the snow was slowly melting.  So slowly melting that you couldn't tell that it was.  But the late afternoon sun was warm if you stood with it shining on you.  I love the low sun shining through all the trees, leaving shadows on the smooth snow.  Seems peaceful to me to look at.

 

The Monster Barge Crane

Last week when I was doing my walk there was some very light snow coming down occasionally and it was overcast and past sunset.  I see this giant barge crane every time I drive by or walk by.  It is a huge machine and you can see the twin booms from a long way off.  This crane is capable of lifting an entire sunken steel barge, like the ones that bring sand to the facility across the harbor.  This thing is so huge, that if you click on the photo and look carefully, you will see two small tug boats sitting on the deck of the barge, to the left of the white structure.  On the fence outside the  facility that owns this machine, there is a glass-covered bulletin board and there are photographs of this crane lifting a barge that had sunk.  The interesting thing is that this machine is used so infrequently, but when it is needed, there is nothing else around that can match its lifting power.  So this is the long view, and the photograph below is a close up of the machine.  

You can see how large this is, based on the small "control tower" partially visible behind the left-hand boom.  What is amazing to me is that this machine sits there in salt water month after month, where storms blow salt water all over it, and the sheaves and cables.  I would think the cables would rust through.  And what about the engines that run it?  Do they go out every once in a while and start up the diesel engines to keep them lubricated?  Imagine not running an engine for a year or two and then you expect that they will start when you need them?  Boggles my mind!

 

Blue Sky, Blue Water

With all the clear, cold weather these days, the sky has been so blue, because there is no dust or water vapor in the air to reduce the richness of the color.  And when the sky is blue, the water will be blue because, as an artist explained to me years and years ago, the water ends up being the same color as the sky because the water reflects the sky.  So when I saw this scene, I just had to photograph this scene and this tree yet another time.  I sure do love the richness of these blue colors.

 

Snow Caps

I looked out the bedroom window over at the side garden and saw these dried out flower stalks.  I was interested in the darker shadows behind the stalks to see if there was an interesting  pattern that would make a good shot.  You're going to love this - I went in the other room and grabbed my 200 - 600mm lens and photographed this scene from the bedroom window!  But that was the best angle.  What finally made me decide to shoot this was the little caps of snow on the tops of many of the dried stalks.  That's what made this interesting. 

 

The Master Speaks

Today was a fun day.  Stan came out to visit and talk photography and look at some photographic books I have that I wanted to show him.  Then I made my Mediterranean salmon dish for dinner that he loves, then we headed out to the astronomy meeting where he was the featured speaker for the evening.  His  talk about what astronomical photographs he did this year in various parts of the country, including New York City.  He talked about the comet seen and photographed from Hawaii and a partial solar eclipse and a total eclipse and the planets!  It was a huge hit!  We had 26 people in person and 16 other people at home on Zoom.  What a great turnout!

This is a view of the presentation taking place in the lobby of the Vanderbilt Planetarium. What a great night!

 

Zig Zag

Tuesday with Dunkin' at the beach.  I happened to notice the pattern of the drift fences because of all the snow on the ground..  I saw it as a zig-zag pagtern as the fences went back and forth.  So I thought I would do an abstract photograph of just the fences.  This is that shot.

But then I backed off just a bit, to photograph the whole scene.  I think I like this better.  It feels less confined, and also that there is more information about the place.  I love seeing the huge crane on a barge way off in the distance.  But you tell me, which do you find more interesting?  

 

A Warm House in a Snowstorm

It started snowing last night after supper.  It was a light snow and went on until about midnight.  When it stopped I grabbed my camera and a wide angle lens and went out into the snow to see what I could find.  The house looked beautiful with the golden glow of my new electric candles in each window.  In the snow, it looks like a warm and cozy house to be in.

 

My Orange Dinner

And now for somethiung completely different!  Once a week I grill a piece of salmon for dinner and I usually have broccoli with it, but sometimes I have carrots.  I would rather have carrots but I think broccoli is better for me!  Anyhow the other night I chose carrots and after steaming them, I add a bit of butter while they are still hot in the pan, and then put them on the plate with the salmon.  As I was carrying the plate into the dining room, I looked down and had to laugh - orange salmon and orange carrots?  They would never serve that in a restaurant!  But it was delicious!

 

Another View...

Normally, if I do two different views of the same subject, I am most likely to post them both at the same time and ask you which you prefer.  This was the first photograph I took when I saw the sky and the trees illuminated by the setting sun.  Then I went on to do more photographs as I walked along the harbor.  I selected yesterday's post as my favorite but then today I looked at the others and I really like this one a lot.  It has a completely different feeling to it, I think because we can see the individual trees and they look so spare.  What do you think?

 

Somedays, a Gift...

Every once in a while, I get a gift.  From nature.  As I began my walk today I noticed really dark gray skies to the north.  Then I looked at nearby trees that were side lit by the sun.  So I hurried along in my walk to get down here to my favorite view of the sycamore trees along the harbor.  And here you go, one of my bet photographs of all that I have taken of this scene.  I love gifts.  Oh, please click on this, I posted an extra large version!

 

The Tower Crane

There is a lot in this photograph. And you might not guess that the subject is the delicate vertical structure alongside the building to the right of center, in the far distance.  That delicate structure is a "tower crane" and they are everywhere in the world where construction is going on,  Here's the part that will give you the "willies" - there is a man in the cab at the top of the crane, where the angled piece, called the "jib"  joins the vertical piece, called the "mast," at the cab.  Both the crane and the building start out on the ground, and the crane helps build the building.  And as the building rises, so does the crane!  It is called "Jumping the crane" and the top of of the crane is jacked up by itself with a frame around the mast, and then a new section of mast is inserted under the cab!  It is too difficult to explain in words, so here is a link to an animation showing how the process works. I think you will find this interesting Jumping a Crane

Color me stupid, but when I did the first photograph with the wide angle lens on my camera, it never occurred to me to zoom in and do a closer photograph.  Fortunately, the image is so large from my SONY a7 that I could just crop out this part of the original photograph and post it as a separate image.  You should know that the operator has to climb the mast from the bottom each day, and then they climb back down at the end of their day.  Good exercise.  Scary place to work!

 

Man, Waiting...

Stan was headed to the men's room so I thought I would sit on this bench to rest for a few moments.  This man was on the other end of the bench, and, as is my way, I was kind of looking around, out of the corner of my eye.  I thought that because he was hunched over, his body made an interesting shape.  So, I had my camera in my hands and there is a screen on the back of the camera that can be folded out at a right angle to the back, so I can look down on the camera and see what it sees.  Then I turned the camera toward him to see what the scene looked like and I liked the dark shape of him in silhouette, and the long white hall going into the distance.  I snapped a couple of photographs, and while still looking noticed this woman coming from the rest rooms.  That made the photograph so much more interesting!  So I kept clicking until she got closer and then I stopped and put my camera away.  She kept walking right over to this guy! When I looked at all the photographs, it was obvious that she saw my camera, but didn't say anything.  Whew!

 

Frauenkopf (Woman’s Head)

I am not sure what attracted me to this sculpture of a woman's head.  It is much larger than normal size, for one. The other thing might be that I am looking at her in profile.  But I have no idea what it means.  For the last hour I have been looking up and reading reviews of exhibits by Thomas Schutte, and the meaning of much of his work is elusive, not only to me, but to professional curators.  This is the third piece I have photographed from the MoMA show.  I will give you these quotes:  "Thomas Schutte is one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Schütte’s real and invented forms, often distorted and unsettling, explore themes of cultural memory, existential struggle, and human striving for an impossible utopian ideal."  And this:  "The German artist Thomas Schütte is arguably the finest figurative artist now working in Europe."  And I love this quote: “What’s so great about the work is that there’s a lot I still don’t understand about it,” said Paulina Pobocha, the curator of Schütte’s MoMA survey. "That includes struggling to comprehend how such a range of art can come from one artist."  So I will leave this as a mystery for you and that's OK because there are so many things in life we will never know.  PLEASE click to enlarge this to full size and your sense of the piece will definitely change!

 

The Occultation of Mars by the Moon!

Today was a big day for amateur astronomers, because the Moon was going to occult (which means to hide) the planet Mars!  In this photograph, Mars is the tiny orange dot near the lower left of the Moon.  The bummer was the forecast was for overcast skies.  We had great good fortune and the skies cleared before the occultation happened.  When the Moon rose tonight the planet Mars was about 2 degrees below it.  You could see Mars with your naked eye.  I watched the Moon keep moving closer and closer to Mars over several hours.  I photographed it until this point then took the camera off and put in an eyepiece so that I could watch the event with my eye as the Moon covered Mars.

About an hour and 15 minutes later Mars emerged from behind the Moon and it was so cool to watch a tiny orange "bump" appear on the edge of the Moon and then keep coming untl the whole disk of Mars emerged and slowly drifted away.  What a thrill to see this.  It only happens about every 14 years, more or less.  Please be sure to click on each photograph!

 

Vater Staat (Father State)

This is the sculpture that you see when entering the first gallery of the Thomas Schütte exhibit.  It is a monumental bronze sculpture that is twice the size of a normal person.  This sculpture is about how nation states have used monumental figurative sculpture to convey authority, stability, glory and heroism, thus giving status to ruling parties. In "Vater Staat,"  Schutte critiques both authoritarian state power and the role that art has played in reinforcing it.  This towering demagogue is severe, but also vulnerably frail - he is bound by his garments in a way that suggests that he may have no body at all.  I was stunned when I entered this room and stood looking at this.

 

Lager (Storage)

Thomas Schütte is a German contemporary artist. He sculpts, creates architectural designs, and draws. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.  At MoMA there is a major retrospective of his work and the variety of the work is stunning.  I believe the exhibit occupies an entire floor in MoMA with many galleries full of his work.  This sculpture or arrangement is called, in German "Lager" which apparently means "storage" in english.  There is a beautiful simplicity to the brightly painted boards or canvases stacked one in front of another and from left to right.  But it grabbed my intention right away, and won't let go.  I can't explain it but it makes me feel really good - it seems uplifting to me - and yet I can't tell you why. But that's ok. I think it has to do with all the colors.   We all get feelings from works of art, and that's not the same as being able to explain those feelings with words.

 

A Day in the City 4

As part of the exhibit "Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern" that I talked about yesterday, this famous painting was also in the exhibit!  "The Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh, painted in 1889!  I guess is has to be one of the most famous paintings out there.  I remember buying a poster of this painting when I was in college.  So the area in front of the painting was mobbed, and of course looking at the painting doesn't count.  You need a selfie of yourself in front of it to prove you were there.  Sigh...

                               

I wasn't expecting to see this painting so it was a complete surprise to suddenly come upon it.  I did have a minute or two when the painting wasn't mobbed to study it, and it is a powerful feeling to find yourself face to face with the real thing!  I think I want to go back to MoMA again, before this exhibit closes so I can spend more time just looking at it.

A Day in the City 3

MODERN ART

 

So this is an astounding story!  This painting done in about 1885 by Paul Cezanne, is titled "The Bather" and was purchased by an American woman named Lillie P. Bliss.  She is one of the women who began The Museum of Modern Art.  The story is told in this book which I saw at MoMA: "Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art."  Profiles of fourteen women who transformed the country's foremost modern art museum in its fledgling years. Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art owes much of its early success to a number of remarkable women who shaped the future of the institution in its first decades.  Wow, what a story.  So we take modern art for granted, but not so much in 1885.  She loaned this painting to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because MoMA did not exist at the time.  Please read the text, below about this painting and how it was received. Please click on the photo of the text to make it easier to read.

 

A Day in the City 2

Riding the Subway, one of my favorite things.  I caught the uptown E train to get up to 53rd Street and the Museum of Modern Art.  I was astounded to see this end of the subway car so brightly decorated!  Wow!  I have no idea what is going on, but what a brilliant idea and it brightened the whole car to see these colors.

But then I looked across the way and saw this woman trying to sleep on the hard seat of the subway car.  And I was so mindful that the temps were about 28 degrees yesterday and so riding the subway was a good way to keep warm.  Something about thinking of the cold, I thought I should give her some money, and not just a dollar.  I was thinking of $10 but I wasn't sure that I should wake her up.  Yeah, I know, stupid.  So, sadly, at my stop ,I left the car without giving her some money for food.  Not a good feeling for me.

 

A Day in the City 1

I finally feel all better so I took the train to the city to see some shows at MoMA with Stan.  So my day begins with taking the train from Sea Cliff, to Jamaica, where we all change to a different train to take us to Manhattan.  It is always a good time to look for photographs because of all the passengers standing around waiting for the second train to arrive.  This young woman looked cold.  And the sky was a clear blue and there was snow on the tracks.  Since there was a giant sign that said "Track 1" I thought that would give me a central focus, with all the other elements around it.  I used my iPhone for this, instead of my camera which was in my backpack.  I also look less like a photographer when using a phone, thereby attracting less interest, instead of when I use my my professional looking SONY camera. You will notice that the title of this is "A Day in the City 1" so because of the number in the title, you can figure that this is going to be "A Day in the City Week!"  Please stay tuned!  Please click on this for a larger size - the picture is more interesting when you can see more detail.

 

Ancient History

It's too cold to go outside to shoot today!  Just kidding, I spent the day running around doing errands.  This is from our visit to LACMA.  This is an exhibit called "Digital Witness" about the revolution in design and photography and film, which of course I was part of in my work when we switched to first, scanning our negatives for some years, and then when we got our first digital cameras.

This was on display in a case.  It is the Macintosh 128K, the original Macintosh personal computer from Apple.  It is the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse, from 1984.  I didn't get involved in computers until 1993 when I bought my first Mac Quadra 605.  But my buddy Chuck sent me one of these years later, which I still have, so I could experience computing in the early days.  Mine still runs!

And these are two Adobe applications that made publishing and digital photography possible.  I never used "Adobe Illustrator" at all, but my life depended on Photoshop.  I can't believe the huge size of these boxes!  I forget exactly, but I think these boxes are about 8" x 10" x 5" in size.  And inside, for Photoshop, there are maybe a dozen small floppy disks.  When Newsday upgraded to a newer version than 3.0 I got to bring home the 3.0 disks and put Photoshop on my computer at home. I was stunned at the size of the boxes.  Just a bit of ancient history to share with everyone.

 

The Moons of Jupiter

Two months ago a young couple showed up at one of our meetings with their 4 year old son, and one set of parents.  Turned out that they are from Sea Cliff!  So I told them when we got a clear night, I would set up my telescope in the park, and show them the first quarter moon.  So tonight there were six of us and we had a small observing session and they got to see the Moon, Saturn, Venus, Mars and Jupiter!  When I first saw Jupiter and it's four moons  through my telescope I was stunned.  Normally there are a couple of moons on each side of Jupiter, but tonight I saw this jumble, and I have never seen the moons arranged like this before!  An hour later when I got home I took another look and then decided it was so unusual I would try and take a photo with my iPhone.  I can't believe I got this!  It is not a great photo but it is a photo of what I saw.

So I used the astronomy program on my computer to show what the moons actually looked like when we observed them.  Isn't it interesting how the moons moved so much in an hour and a half.  It was a stunning sight.

So this is another image from my astronomy program so you can see what Jupiter's moons look like, some times.  See how organized they are and basically their orbits put them in a straight line.  Now you can see why the jumble in the first photograph was so surprising to me!  End of my astronomy lesson, class dismissed!   :-)

 

The Fading Light of Day

I am better but still a bit under the weather with my cold.  I looked out the window of the back room and saw this scene.  I grabbed my camera and thought I could shoot from indoors, and then thought better of it, so I bundled up and went outside to take this photograph.  I wish I could show it to you in a really large size so you could see all the delicate branches, sharp against the sky.  It is so incredibly beautiful, as the light of day fades.

And forgive me for repeating myself by showing you the Moon again, but it was crystal clear tonight so I could shoot the moon in amongst the trees without clouds in the way.  Too bad it was not this clear when I was shooting the Moon with Venus yesterday.  There is some feeling I can't quite put my finger on about the moon at dusk in amongst all the other trees.  Anybody care to guess at the feeling I am getting from this?

 

The Moon and Venus Together

The Moon and Venus were unusually close this evening shortly after sunset which is always a joy to see. They have been closer at times, but tonight they were 3 degrees from each other.  I thought they looked closer in this wider view.  I'm not sure which photograph expressed this best, so as an experiment, I cropped the photo above much tighter in hopes they might seem closer, and the image is below.  In which image do they seem closer?

The two were relatively low on the horizon, and we are surrounded by trees here, so I tried to photograph them in the trees.  The problem is that they are so bright, that if I expose for the Moon, you won't even see the tree branches.  So I overexposed the moon and it is larger and blurry, but you can see all the branches around the two in the photograph below.

I moved over into the far side of the side yard and was able to get both clear of the trees, but there were clouds so both the Moon and Venus have halos around them.  And they are overexposed so that we can see the details in the branches.  So even though the Moon and Venus are not sharp, I think that the photograph still has some value.

 

The Electric Hedge

I was on the phone this afternoon with my friend Sam in Florida.  Just as we sere finishing up, I looked out one of the west windows in the back room.  I saw some bright yellow sparkling lights and I was puzzled.  I thought the sun had already set.  When I stood up, I could see that the sun was just above the horizon, just enough for the last light to illuminate some of the leaves on the hedge!  I jumped up, knowing that the sun moves so quiclky, and grabbed my camera from the dining room and ran out the door.  I was just in time to get the last light on the leaves.  Lovely and subtle, isnt it?

 

Catching Up

I had coffee with Jessica today at a Starbucks.  She and her husband had driven up from Florida where they now live to visit both their families for Christmas.  I have written about her before but the short story is that she came to our astronomy club at age 14 when she was in High School and said she wanted to build a telescope!  She went on to college here on Long Island, at Stony Brook University where she got a Bachelors and a Masters, and then worked for a few years at a high tech science center.  Then off to the University of Arizona for her PhD in Astrophysics, which she completed recently, and which I celebrated here on the blog.  She is now doing her Post Doc work at a university in Florida.  So we had a lot to talk about and probably spent three hours catching up!  She is holding her note book where she keeps all kinds of notes, and when I asked her a question about some NASA sounding rocket that she hopes to use to lift a telescope up above the atmosphere to study a particular type of star, she went to her notebook for her answer!  I was thinking we had known each other for about 16 years, and that somehow didn't seem like that long, until she said: "Ken, I have known you for half my life!"  Wow!  What a wonderful afternoon catching up!