May 2011
Kids Puppet Show (Park Slope)
Park Slope Parents celebrated the arrival of warm weather with its annual Spring Fling at the Old Stone House. In addition to face painting and hot dogs and music, the Puppeteers’ Cooperative put on a kid-friendly musical of entertaining eco-propaganda.
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Night Clouds (Harlem)
Cloud over midtown and Times Square (left center), as seen from a rooftop on 116th Street. Below, a cloud over the Hudson.
Tripod Setup
03.05.11 | 13:26 • Filed in: Tech:Photography
I recently upgraded (reverted?) from a ballhead to 3-way pan-tilt head. Above is the hardware I use to photograph artwork. Manfrotto’s 410 head with micro-adjustable 3-axis adjustment. On top of the head is Chris Hejnar’s elegant, custom arca-swiss adapter with clamp for the 410/405. And on top of that are some Really Right Stuff rails, clamps, and their pano adapter mounted vertically. All this hardware allows me to reposition the camera in small increments without having to touch the tripod’s legs--very convenient if you’re shooting a lot of work of similar sizes and you want to maximize the usable pixels of your capture.
Cosplay (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
Cosplay seems to get bigger every year in New York. The Japanese art of dressing up like your favorite manga or animé character is most popular among teens and early twenty-somethings. Fantasy, gender-bending, and getting lots of attention seem to be a big part of the appeal. They definitely gave the cherry blossoms some big competition.
Sakura Matsuri (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
The Botanical Garden held its annual Cherry Blossom Festival, celebrating the blooming of its many cherries and all things Japanese from taiko drumming, to dance, to bentos, to Butoh, and manga and animé with a fair amount of cosplay (see next posting). It was packed and all in attendance did a great job pretending they were Japanese by relentlessly photographing the blossoms and acquiring endless gigabytes of digital memories.
