New York City Noir

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.