Sigma 30mm 1.4

State College in Black and White (Post 7)

 
Black and white. A person wearing a messenger bag and riding a bicycle. In the frame, they're riding from right to left, beneath a ONE WAY sign pointing in the same direction.

One Way
September 20, 2022
South Allen Street and West Calder Way
Ricoh GR II

From behind a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window at the end of a hallway. A person below at a sidewalk intersection on a college campus. Dappled light through the trees on the hallway floor.

Framed from Burrowes
September 20, 2022
From the Burrowes Building, facing the library mall
Ricoh GR II

Black and white. A closed storefront on the first floor of a brick building. Paper covers the large glass windows. Hand-painted on the paper are the words "Thank You State College."

Thank You State College
January 5, 2022
Saint's Cafe
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4

Wide angle, high contrast black and white image. Roofs of buildings and a parking garage. A large apartment building in the distance. Thick clouds overhead.

Cloudy Sky
September 22, 2022
From atop one of the downtown parking garages.
Ricoh GR II

Black and white. An old wooden door in a brick wall. Thin, short vines trail down over the top third of the door.

Door
October 10, 2022
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4

Click here for all photos in this project thus far.

Fall 2022

 
Bell tower of a central college campus building appears between trees with bright orange and red leaves.

Old Main
October 18, 2022
Penn State, University Park
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM

Sackett Building
October 18, 2022
Penn State, University Park
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM

October 24, 2022
Penn State, University Park
Ricoh GR II

Birch tree with golden and green leaves. Background: partly cloudy sky. To the right: Maple tree branches with green leaves.

October 16, 2022
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM

A campus mall, tree-lined. Fallen leaves on green grass, and golden and green leaves in the trees above.

October 18, 2022
Penn State, University Park
iPhone 12 Mini

Tree with golden and yellow leaves, framed by the window opening of a parking deck.

Framing Fall
October 26, 2022
Nittany Parking Deck
Penn State, University Park
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM

Blue and Yellow
October 26, 2022
Penn State, University Park
iPhone 12 Mini

April 19 to June 9, 2022: Spring, Self-Portraits, and a Chair in the Stairwell

While social media platforms have their uses, I don't love the notion of them being the only repository for those odds and ends photos that I take and feel the impulse to share. So, here's a compilation of my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter photo posts from April through June, on my own little corner of the open web.

Close-up of blooming magenta azaleas. Snow falling in the background.

Hello, Spring.
April 19, 2022
iPhone 12 mini

Black and white, college campus. A blossoming tree on the left, brightly lit by the sun. A sidewalk on the right.

Springtime
April 29, 2022
Penn State University Park

Photo of double doors. Left door: reflection of left half of photographer facing glass. Right door: large window decal of a lion’s face.

Self portrait (50% actual, 50% aspirational)
May 4, 2022
State College, PA
iPhone 12 mini

Busy casual restaurant dining room in black and white. Back of a patron to the left, full tables and family at center.

Tarrytown, NY
May 7, 2022
iPhone 12 mini

Headshot photo of 38-year-old Asian male. Brown eyes and black hair with gray streaks. Blue blazer and blue shirt.

Took a portrait for this particularly fussy and meddlesome client.
May 10, 2022
Burrowes Building, Penn State University Park
Canon 60D | Canon 85 mm F/1.8 USM

Headshot photo I took of myself for work. If in early May you spotted someone outside the Burrowes Building setting up a camera, hitting the timer, jumping in front of it, then frowning at the results and doing it over and over again for about forty minutes, that was me.

Interior of a train dining car. Green countertop, bright orange seat. Light from platform passing through the car's venetian blinds. Platform and another train outside.

Throwback Thursday: May 10, 2013
Parade of Trains, Grand Central Terminal
New York City
Canon 60D | Sigma 30 mm F/1.4

black and white photo taken through a window. Row of city homes, framed by windowpane frame lines.

Windowpane Frame
March 19, 2022
From the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA
Canon 60D | Sigma 30mm F/1.4

Back of a film camera. A slot in the back contains a cut out side of a film carton for Ilford Delta 400 film.

May 29, 2022
iPhone 12 Mini

Looking forward to seeing how this roll comes out. I’ve shot with HP5 before, and it came out a little grainier than I’d like, so I thought I’d try this. Also mis-cut this box end.

Black and white. Small park building (restrooms) on a sunny day. Three surrounding trees cast harsh shadows on the pavement.

May 30, 2022
Tudek Memorial Park
State College, PA | iPhone 12 Mini

Stairwell, trimmed with metal, glass, and wood. Bank of windows to the left. Wooden commemorative chair at center on the stair landing.

June 9, 2022
The Chair
Burrowes Building, Penn State University Park
iPhone 12 Mini

I do have more blog posts and social media series in the pipeline. These include, among others, various sets of COVID-19 signage, a collection of photos of control panels and buttons that I'm pretty excited about, and photos from our France 2018 trip that I'm still slowly editing.

What keeps this held up is that I've made a concerted effort to keep up with editing the photos that I take. This includes iPhone photos, so that means that every night or two I'm churning through a batch of new pics, and there's precious little time to put together other content into a form that's worth sharing.

Still, I want to eventually get to sharing these other projects, it may just be a few weeks or months until I get there.

Throwback Thursday: September 23, 2011 at Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd Street

 
Black and white. A person in glasses holds a takeout order under their plastic poncho in the rain.

These two photos are from four years into my ten-year stint as a an office manager. At that time, I frequently ate lunch while standing in the old taxi stand outside of Grand Central Terminal at Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd street. This was largely a matter of efficiency: in addition to my full-time job, I was usually working on some sort of theater, film, or writing project, so my typical lunch break included running to the deli across the street, grabbing a premade sandwich, and then eating it in the taxi stand as quickly as possible before jetting over to the FedEx née Kinkos to get some work done.

A Manhattan street in the rain. A person holding an umbrella walks across the crosswalk, from left to right in the frame.

It feels kind of surreal to now have a photo archive deep enough that, for a Throwback Thursday post, I can throw back to a decade ago. (Though I’m sure to more seasoned photographers this sounds like the realization of a total newbie.)

More surreal, perhaps, is looking at a photo that feels to me like it was taken yesterday, but simultaneously knowing that this particular bit of urban landscape has since gone through a good bit of change. In the above scene, for instance, we’re looking across a street into a crosswalk, and on the left, there’s an office building with a T.G.I.Friday’s on the ground floor. But both street and office building no longer exist. The street (the one perpendicular to what appears in this photo) has been converted into a pedestrian plaza. The office building was torn down and replaced with the massive One Vanderbilt office tower.

Sometimes all the years spent post-college feel like they’re one large temporal mass that makes up “the present,” but I too easily forget how much has changed within that span of time, in terms of various historic events and cataclysms, as well as the more gradual changes that creep their way in over the passing of time.