My First Camera

Sounds like something from Playskool! But it was actually my Dad's Kodak Retina I, a little Stuttgart-made 35mm folder with a decent Schneider lens.

Along with a 1948 GE light meter, a gift from my friend Roger Wesalo, I was in business. With a camera as basic as this one, I had to learn all the basics. I even had to get good at estimating distances (in meters) because there was no rangefinder - just scale focusing. So that lead me quickly to understand depth-of-field.

My college friend Ed Hollingshead took this in NYC in Central Park sometime in the fall of 1967, our freshman year at Stevens Tech in Hoboken. I used to poke fun of Ed because of his left-handed, East German Exacta SLR. Little did I realize then that years later, I'd be a collector of Commie Cameras!

Central Park Lamppost

You can find these lampposts throughout Central Park. Not only are they attractive, they can help you figure out approximately where you are. Look for a small metal tag near the base with four numbers, for example "7624". The first two numbers signify the street (in this case 76th) that is directly outside the park to the east or west of your position. The second two numbers seem to be arbitrary, but are unique to each lamppost along that east-west axis.

If you ever find yourself in an emergency in the park, you can call the police and give them the 4-digit number of the nearest lamppost; they'll know within a few dozen feet where you are.

The blossoms just beyond the lamppost in this photo are cherry trees in full bloom in mid-April. I used Channel Mixer in Photoshop CS3 with the red filter preset to convert the image to black-and-white and bring out the blossoms.

Ramble Arch

The Obligatory Group Photo of our gang from Shutterbug Excursions at our photo meetup in Central Park last weekend.

As I led them through the Ramble, I found Ramble Arch, the narrowest arch in the Park and a great favorite of mine. I knew I had to get a photo of the group in the archway.

I'm Only Sleeping

Please don't wake me, no
don't shake me
Leave me where I am
I'm only sleeping

That's exactly what came to mind as I saw this fellow sleeping, only a few feet from the Imagine mosaic, a memorial to John Lennon in Central Park.

Beatles fans will recognize those lines as the end of the first verse of I'm Only Sleeping, which is track 3 on the Revolver album.

It's a strange and wonderful Lennon composition, featuring beautifully oxymornic lyrics ("Close my eyse, float upstream...") and a transfixing backwards-guitar solo. If you're musically inclined, you'll find these notes by Alan W. Pollack interesting.

So Many Rosenbachs, So Little Time

Our cousins from Strasbourg visited New York City the week before last, which gave us all the opportunity to meet each other for the very first time. Sandy and I drove to NYC and spent a marvelous day with our wonderful cousins, Patrick and Muriel Rosenbach, and their daughter. That was three-fifths of the family, as sons Dan and Benjamin (yes, another Ben Rosenbach!) weren't able to join them on this trip.

Muriel made a picnic lunch which we ate in Central Park on the grass at Strawberry Fields, after which we went to Bethesda Terrace, walked through the Ramble, and saw Belvedere Castle and Shakespeare Garden.

With any luck, we'll be able to see them again in the not-to-distant future by traveling to Strasbourg.


My cousins Patrick and Muriel Rosenbach and daughter

Daughter and mother

Sandy

Her smile undampened by the Friday afternoon rain, Sandy and I take shelter in the lakeside pavilion at West Drive boat landing in Central Park (taken 9/12/2008).

Imagine: The Case Against John Lennon

Just so I don't give you the wrong idea, let me say it up front: I'm a huge fan of the Beatles and of John Lennon in particular.

But this one song, Imagine, bugs me. And it bugs me that many people think of this song when they think of Lennon, despite the fact that he wrote so many other songs, great songs.

It's not the music, which is pretty enough, but the words that bother me. The ideas in those words.

No religion. No countries. Nothing to live or die for. Yeah, we've seen that before. It was called the Soviet Union. We see it now in "Old Europe." And we continue to see it in the politically and socially dysfunctional petty tyrannies of the Middle East.

In an insightful Wall Street Journal opinion piece last June, Bret Stephens expresses former Prisoner of Conscience Natan Sharansky's take on the Imagine concept:

Mr. Sharansky's argument is that man's quest for identity – for the human and communal particulars that set him apart from others – cannot be separated from his quest for freedom – the universal set of values to which he and everyone else lay an equal claim. He argues that a freedom that "does not include the freedom to be significantly different" is no freedom at all. And he believes that while a politics that expresses itself purely through identity is bound to be tyrannical, a democracy that ignores its own identity – or attempts to suppress the various identities within it – betrays its deepest principles and puts its long-term survival at risk.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono created conceptual country, Nutopia, a notional nation that was founded on the principles of the song, Imagine.  That was there solution.

But as John himself wrote, "You say you got a real solution, well, we'd all love to see the plan."

Strawberry Fields in Central Park

Ok,  my Grinch-like detour to politics and philosophy is over, now back to photography. I took the photo above this past weekend in the section of New York's Central Park called Strawberry Fields, a tear-shaped, 2.5 acre plot dedicated to John Lennon.

The handsome mosaic is a reproduction (except for the "Imagine" inscription) of one uncovered in Pompeii, a gift of the city of Naples, Italy. A fellow has taken it on himself to arrange flowers in and around the mosaic every day since 1993.

All this combined with people gathered around the mosaic or sitting on the benches that encircle it make for a good photo opportunity.

Tech Tuesday: Better B&W From Digital

OK, I'll let you in on a secret - much of what I've learned about Photoshop Elements is from Scott Kelby's excellent books - I think he's written one for each version so far - I'm a little behind the times right now, so I'm still using The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers.

One of the things I know very little about is how to get a decent B&W image from a color digital photo... but yep, Scott goes into that, too.


Here's the general outline to how he says to do it:

• Open the color image in Photoshop Elements.


• Make sure the foreground color is Black and the background color is White (or as Scott says, just press the "D" key - this will set your foreground and background colors exactly this way.)


• Go to the Layers palette and choose Levels from the Create Adjustment Layer drop-down menu (it's the half-black, half-white circle icon.) Once the Levels dialog comes up, just click OK.


• Now again, from the Layers palette, chose Gradient Map from the drop-down menu and just click OK on the Gradient Map dialog. This will give you a B&W image, and you should notice that it already looks better than just using the standard commands to create a grayscale image (Image/Mode/Grayscale, or Enhance/Adjust Color/Remove Color.)


• Here's where you can tweak the B&W tones a bit. First, in the Layers palette, double-click right on the Levels thumbnail to bring up the Levels dialog. Select Red from the Channel drop-down list, and then play a bit with the black-point slider to the right to increase shadows until you see what you like.


• Without clicking OK, select Green from the Channel drop-down list, and this time try dragging the white point slider to the left to increase highlights.


• Again, don't click OK yet - now pick Blue from the Channel drop-down list and try playing with the highlights (quite a bit) and the shadows (just a little.)


• You can go back and forth between the 3 channels, tweaking away - just stop when you're happy with the look, then finally click OK in the Levels dialog.

At this point, mush the layers you created into one layer with the Layers/Flatten menu. The file still has color information in it - if you want to save file space, you can turn it into a grayscale file with Image/Mode/Grayscale.

For this photo, once I got to this point, I applied local contrast sharpening as I usually do (see this post for how to do that) and then final sharpening. You can see the results in the second image - compare that one to the standard remove-the-color version at top. To paraphrase those laundry soap commercials - whiter whites, blacker blacks, and just nicer overall tonality.

Amazingly, I even got an excellent B&W print of this second image on my 3-1/2-year-old Canon i850 printer. I would have expected some tinting, at least in some areas of the photo, but this print looks like an old-fashioned paper-and-developer B&W print (I doubt that this will work out so well for every image - normally you need an inkjet printer that's designed to do B&W, such as some of the higher-end Epsons.)

If you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, check out Scott Kelby's books - he packs them with excellent practical how-to advice.