New York City Noir

Customer Service at B&H Photo

Any photographer located in NYC -- or planning a visit -- should be aware of a potential problem while shopping in store at B&H. As far as I know, all items listed as "in stock" on the store's website are, in fact, in stock at the huge warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The problem is that many are not available at the store's 9th Avenue location.  To find out actual store availability, it's necessary to check back day after day and each time navigate one tedious multi-choice voice menu after another

This might not sound like such a big deal.  But photographers working in Manhattan have traditonally relied on a variety of immediate resources if supplies or replacements -- whether it be extra batteries or a new lens -- were needed during a shoot or shortly in advance. 

My own story was that I wanted a Nikon 50mm 1.4 prime lens which is often back ordered everywhere.  If I didn't buy it as soon as it became available,I'd be out of luck again.  On the other hand, I wanted to be able to go in a store and actually hold the lens in my hand before buying it.  Hey, I'm only a short subway ride away.  And there's no point paying shipping charges when I'm already on Manhattan's West Side.

B&H did email me as soon as the product became "available," but I had to call back two days running to find out if it was in the store.  It wasn't.  On the third day, I asked to speak to a manager.  The man didn't call me back until the next day, but he was a gentleman and told me on a voice mail that not only was the lens in stock at the store but also that he had reserved one in my name. I thought that, at least, was excellent customer service.

B&H is probably the most professionally run business I've ever encountered.  Everyone I've ever dealt with there has been honest, courteous and helpful.  I realize its web based business must be immensely profitable.  But I would suggest that B&H remember its in store customers at least to the extent of updating its website to show availability at Ninth Avenue as well as on the web.  I think we derserve that much.  I've shopped at B&H since the 1970's when they were still located on Worth Street downtown and have spent many thousands of dollars there over the years.

Western Skies

The quality of light is much different in the West than East.  The above photograph was actually taken in the late afternoon in sunny hazy skies from an overlook in Santa Fe, and that was pretty much how it appeared on the contact sheet.  Leaving Santa Fe a couple of days later, though, I saw from the highway a thunderstorm over a mountaintop that looked almost exactly like the pic above.  By burning in the image for twice the normal exposure, I was able to transform the sunny afternoon into something more menacing that more closely resembled the scene I had seen from the highway.  It was the detail in the cloud structure that enabled me to do this.

Nikon 50mm 1.4 lens

I picked up a prime lens -- a Nikon 50mm 1.4 -- at B&H last week.  Like many Nikon lenses, this one is only intermittently in stock at the store and I had to wait a couple of months for it to arrive. 

The main advantage to the lens is that it should be considerably sharper than the zoom lenses I have used almost exclusively for the past several years.  At least, I'm hoping that this will be the case.  In any event, the lens was comparatively cheap (about $300), and I should have fun experimenting with it when doing street photography.  The 1.4 aperture should also provide me with enough speed to shoot at night on 1600 ISO film without flash.

Returned from Santa Fe

Santa Fe is a rich people's town (I entered one store off the Plaza and asked the price of a particularly beautiful belt on display with several others.  "Oh, the ones on that rack begin at $600," the saleswoman said).  It's a lot like the Hamptons on Long Island, but with adobe archictecture and no beach.  Santa Fe'ans are genuinely friendly, though, and try to be helpful.  During the time I spent walking the town's streets, I neve witnessed any rudeness.

All around the Plaza, there are plenty of good art and photography galleries.  Edward Curtis and Georgia O'Keefe are exhibited side by side.  I saw a really good exhibit of Eddie Adams' photos while browsing a few last galleries before leaving on the shuttle van back to Albuquerque.  There was the famous shot of the South Vietnamese general shooting a suspected spy in the head at point blank range. 

There are also a lot of old hippies, some of them homeless, hanging around the Plaza.  One wore a fake wolf' headress over his head  Another carved spiral shaped canes he claimed he was allowed to sell but never display.   

There really wasn't anything I was going to find to photograph on a first visit to Santa Fe that hadn't been seen a thousand times before.  I shot Tri-X , for once without a yellow contrast filter, on a Nikon N90.  I was just shooting a record of what interested me most.  Once I've printed the negatives, then toned and scanned the prints themselves, I'll update this post

I've set up a new travel page on my website to show some of the b&w photos I shot on last month's trip to Tokyo.  All the photos are scans of sepia-toned silver bromide prints made in a wet darkroom.  Hopy you enjoy looking at them.

Riverside Park

The day after I returned from Japan, I did a shoot here in NYC with Jasmine, who was visiting from Boston.  On Jasmine's suggestion, we did a shoot in Riverside Park where the trees were just going into bloom.  I got some great photos using the spring foliage as a background.

In processing the pics afterward, I made the lighting more dramatic through the use of third-party Photoshop plug-in filters (see below).  On the other hand, in the pic above, I created a composite effect by selecting the model's face and figure (which had been greatly underexposed) and making a number of lighting changes to the selection while leaving the background, which had been correctly exposed, intact.

The coolest club in the world. Really, it is.

No question about it, whether you're a fan of hip hop or not, if you want to go to a club that rocks from midnight till 8:00 a.m. and has hippest sound, the coolest decor and best people, then the best place in the world is Oath in Tokyo.  It's not like the sleazy NYC clubs where everyone has an attitude and where people only go to coke up and get laid.  Instead, everyone at at this tiny place is totally into the music and good friends with one another.  Going there gave me a glimpse of the real Japan and its people.  I came away with a lot more insight into Japanese culture than I could have gotten from traveling to a dozen tourist spots.

Other advantages include: no cover/no minimum and incredibly inexpensive drinks (only $5 US).  And the bartender is Chiemi, a good friend and great model who has got to be the most beautiful woman ever to stand in back of a bar. 

I strongly recommend Oath.  Check its website for more information.

 

Travel Plans

I will be traveling to Tokyo from April 11 through April 18 and am hoping to do a shoot with Chiemi while I am there.  From May 18 through May 22 I will be traveling to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico.

Brooklyn Photoshoot

On Friday evening, I did a photoshoot in the Bushwick and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn with model Jasmine.

Brooklyn offers what Manhattan no longer does -- great location backdrops.  In particular, there are murals on the walls that have not yet been painted over by developers and worn graffiti-coverered industrial backgrounds on the walls and doorways of warehouses not yet coverted to condos.

"Vintage Prints"

The concept of the "vintage print," as used in the sale of fine arts photography, is artificial; it's a gimmick, if you will, intended to boost the value of a photographer's oeuvre.  It was formulated by the galleries back in the 1970's when the sales of photographic artwork began to take off.  At the time, the problem getting high prices for photography was that printing was viewed as a mechanical process in which photos could be uniformly reproduced endlessly from any negative.  This in contrast to the one-of-a-kind painting, or even an engraving whose plates would begin to detoriate after the twentieth or so impression.

In response, the vintage print is defined as one printed by the photographer withing six months of the date he/she took the photograph.  That sounds great, but -- as any photographer will tell you -- it's too problematic to be really useful.  I, for one, recall George Tice telling a class at Parsons how long he had taken to realize that one of his most famous images was best printed by deeply burning in both the right and left sides of the vertical format.

In my own work, I've come back often to negatives I shot years ago and have seen in them new detail, or else realized a given photo would be much more dramatic if cropped more closely.

The artistry in b&w printing lies in the ability to extract from the negative sufficient information to form an image pleasing to the photographer's own aesthetic. 

Nevertheless, having said all that, I intend to begin selling vintage prints from my website.  These traditionally processed silver cholorbromide prints will be limited editions in the sense that, in most cases, only four or five have been printed within a six month period of the dates on which the images were created.  I feel that traditional b&w prints processed in a wet darkroom will only increase in value as the materials and supplies necessary to their production grow ever more scarce in a digital era.