Dennis, an old classmate of mine from practically a million years ago (well, grade school) shot me a nice note the other day. "I found myself on your Flickr page last night," he wrote. "Your black and white pictures of the city actually make me think twice about living in L.A. Thanks for posting the link on Flaming Pablum."
I thought that was jolly nice of him.
I shot an awful lot of film in the 90s and early 2000's, and some of it -- if I do say so myself -- actually ain't that bad (you can see the pics Dennis was talking about, I believe, by clicking right here). I'd bought myself a lovely Maxxum 400si and had gone about acquiring a series of second-hand lenses like a Sigma AF 14mm (freaky wide angle), a Sigma Zoom (quasi-freaky at 21mm) and a righteous Tamrom tele-macro 100-300mm. Armed with same, I'd routinely hit the streets looking for noteworthy subject matter. Downtown, especially, it seemed there was never a shortage of suitable material -- crumbling facades, vanishing landmarks, arresting street art, cryptic graffiti, abandoned storefronts. All of it was prime fodder for me. I'd shoot roll after roll and then excitedly rush them off to my favorite photo lab, Spectra, and await the results. There were few things I enjoyed more than picking up my film and rifling through the prints. Sometimes it was anticlimactic. Other times, it was like striking oil. Even if only one or two shots out of a series of twelve were worth keeping, I considered that a wild success.
Times change, though. As I detailed in this weepy post of a couple of years back, I switched to a simpler, more compact digital camera around the time of the birth of our first child. It wasn't bulky, it took perfect pictures, it could fit easily in your pocket, it gave you immediate results and -- in the long run -- conceivably saved me piles of money I'd otherwise have spent on developing. I'm sure I wasn't alone in that respect. As such, photo labs like Spectra started going the same route as my favorite record stores and have now all but vanished entirely from the New York City map.
As the years have gone on, though, I've often felt somewhat limited by my little Elph camera. Sure, it's taken perfectly respectable pictures --- and I've continued to document my urban wanderings with it over the years -- but it still lacks the versatility of my old camera. I missed the ability to experiment with other lenses. Sure, I could manipulate the pictures on iPhoto once I'd uploaded them, but the end results of that always feel a bit forced and lack the artful mystique of taking photographs with legitimate wide angles lenses.
This past Christmas, my lovely, thoughtful wife's present to me was a brand new camera, specifically the somewhat embarrassingly-named Canon "Rebel" T1i. While, as far as I know, it isn't compatible with my old lenses (is there maybe an adapter I could get?), it's still a much more versatile apparatus than I've had access to in years.
This afternoon, after running some errands, I was let off my dad leash for a little bit while the kids had some playmates over, and I decided to break in my new camera. I instinctively headed to the East Village, a neck of the woods that's rarely failed me in the past in terms of sporting myriad things to photograph. Maybe I'm just out of practice or perhaps lazily projecting, but I can't say I found much to catch my eye. Blah Blog Blah's Jill and regular-reader James Taylor (not that one) commented recently in a post about an ancient picture of Gem Spa I'd unearthed that they're both routinely disappointed to realize that New York City doesn't really look like New York City anymore. I have to say I agree with them. Sure, there are still isolated little pockets of grit, history and character hidden between some of the new glassy behemoths that now blight the streets, but the overall scene is so different. Or maybe I'm just old and cynical.
Regardless, I can't say I came home with a bevy of compelling images. But maybe next time.
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