Sigma 30mm 1.4
State College in Black and White (Post 7)
Fall 2022
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.