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!