A cold and gloomy evening, the light fading fast just past sunset, frosty silence over the salt pond. The December light looks blue in the original image, but with my new software I feel that I have been given Tri-X and an orange filter again, and all is right.
Another black and white conversion using Silver Efex, needs more work, but already more interesting than the original color image that I put up in my post about Chelsea a month ago. A photographer named Willardt put some of his pictures up on a wall facing Eleventh Avenue and a shadow fell across this one in the late afternoon sun.
Carriages in a barn, Ellsworth, Maine
Here is another conversion of a color digital image that has been crying to appear in black and white, as I originally envisioned it. I loved the soft window light falling on these antique carriages in an old barn in Ellsworth, Maine and the cross in the background formed by the window panes. Still feeling my way through Silver Efex Pro.
“Saigon,” a homeless Vietnam veteran, on Second Avenue
The photographer can be seen in reflection in the background.
Furniture gallery striving for the retro look
Generally I keep quiet on this blog, supplying only a location and allowing the images to speak for themselves. I’m mindful of the verbose captions on the photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, so pretentious and overwritten that they could make you gag. But I do have a few things to say about today’s excursion to Chelsea, where after only three years’ absence I felt like Rip van Winkle, if not Woody Allen in Sleeper. There went the neighborhood even before the High Line opened three years ago and attracted throngs of tourists; expensive galleries line the 500 block of West 20th and West 21st Streets where loading docks and warehouses once clogged the streets with trucks. It’s like Soho at a certain point in its development, while it still had art galleries and before it became a tourist mall. No wonder the young artists moved to Williamsburg and Bushwick years ago.
Although the gallery with photographs I wanted to see was closed, serendipity led me to ET Modern at West 20th and 11th Avenue, a gallery and bookstore featuring the work of sculptor Edward Tufte. Most fascinating. He self-published four books on analytical design, for sale in the gallery; leafing through Beautiful Evidence, I thought at times that it was a goof, post-modern and ironic. Certainly the man has a terrific sense of humor, as evidenced by a photograph of a Soviet military parade in Red Square overlaid with a wicked sendup of Power Point. This is great fun.
DeborahShapiroPhotos 