It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Actually it was not that great of a time. I wasn’t even sure pay phones still existed anymore until I saw a guy talking on the one on the right in May. I got one photo of the guy with his back to me, and then I saw police nearby so I tried to act natural. When I was sure they weren’t interested in me, I took this shot of the phone by itself. I remembered a photo I took last year in Clarendon - the one on the left. The phone seemed so forlorn that day - the receiver off the hook, the abandoned storefronts all along the block, and the chilly wind ripping at my bare hands… Oh, sorry - I almost forgot that it was the middle of July. I better wrap this up before my laptop catches fire or something.
Posted in telecom, DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:41:00 GMT
These images are a good indication of how I photograph. I like to find the viewpoints that elude others.
Posted in photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:57:00 GMT
These photos make me wish for a tilt-shift. Of course with a Nikon Coolpix 5600, this is completely absurd. All the distortion tricks I know in Photoshop are annoying to work with: I used to know how to do all the ‘free transform’ options, but the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it right: I was going to take some up-pointing photos of gridded windows on a building and pull them back into plumb - but it wasn’t as easy as I remembered it. I might have to go back to the manual for this. And the pinch settings are very hit-or miss: I have to widen the canvas and move the image into place for the pinch to land in the right spot - but finding that place is a matter of trial and error. Maybe I’d be better off abandoning the wide setting on the zoom (if only I could have it start up in a medium zoom position).
These are my attempts to pinch filter and free transform the distorted original. As you can see, there are some tradeoffs. I was able to straighten the vertical lines at the cost of stretching the white car. I stopped because the laptop was getting sluggish from all the disk trashing.
It should go without saying that I liked the look of the back windows on this building. Too bad about the plywood patch, but this is exactly the kind of organic character that isn’t built into new buildings. The brick is probably original, while the big block of windows and door on the left is a later adaptation.
As I was gazing into the alley with my camera, some old woman waiting for a bus came over to look too. When she couldn’t see what she imagined I saw, she was distinctly puzzled. I didn’t exactly confront her, but we had a moment… She had some preconception about what would be worth taking photographs of, and I didn’t match it. I have a variety of sentimentality for the built environment that other people have for relatives or pets. That’s just the way it is.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:10:00 GMT
This is what you would see at the end of my alley - where it emerges on Ontario Road between Columbia Road and Euclid Street. There used to be a photographer in one of the shops right there. I don’t think he’s still around, but I believe he was involved in the creation of this mural.
Ever since I read all those suggestions from people who want Olsson’s to open another bookstore in their favorite neighborhood, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the tide of gentrification, and the calculus of locating your business. I forgot, but was reminded recently, that there is a “Business Improvement District” called Adams Morgan. I used to see idealistic youths from an Americorps program cleaning up my street on Saturday mornings, and now there is a program called “Ready To Work” that supplies sweepers in blue jumpsuits. It makes me wonder - Where’s the City? Don’t we pay taxes to the City so that we can have city services? I don’t want to be too naive here, but look at the logo on that garbage can: It’s property of the District Of Columbia.
I know this has to do with the gradual privatization of all things. You will all draw your own personal lines on this issue, and I suppose that’s all for the best, but… I really want the City to do city stuff, not some mutant chamber of commerce thingy. While it may be nice to have someone come along and provide much-needed services, it leaves a weird vacuum of responsibility. One theory I haven’t verified is that the city agreed to this patchwork of corporate neighborhood boosting. That would make some sense. But if they can’t take care of those aspects of running a city, then what are they doing? A government has to be held accountable - and most governments are content to make back-room deals or create arrangements too complex to follow.
Before I go too far off on a tangent…
I looked. And, there really are empty store fronts available in the neighborhood. I’ve been marveling at how long some of them have remained vacant. There once was a Caribou Coffee on 18th, there is a space left empty for years right near the bank. A clothing shop next door to CVS closed recently, and there is the old Vina Fabrics further up Columbia toward 16th. That last one is fascinating - the front is at an angle. It’s two doors down from a bookstore/restaurant called the Potter’s House. The neighborhood seems nice enough to me because I’m used to it - and because it probably looks better now than it ever did.
The north side of Columbia between 16th and 17th is dominated by three big apartment buildings. Places with annoyingly high rent - not luxury, but not affordable either. Places filled with white-collar workers who you might expect to bring a neighborhood some class. It doesn’t seem to work that way, though. I don’t think most of those people contribute anything to their community. As I walk by, I see mystery boxes - an inscrutable cliff face. Some neighborhoods are dominated by front porches, not that I ever see many people wave hello from theirs on my walks around town.
There is no doubt in my mind that humans have become divided against themselves. I don’t know what to call it. I don’t expect people to be activists, out in the street, marching to take back their communities - something about that seems off. But, I’m not seeing enough of the subtle participation that goes along with what we keep calling a community. Maybe I should shoulder some of the blame - I’m alone in a room with a computer and an Internet connection.
It’s just that… I live where I do for an important reason: It is a town where I can go out and see people walking past on the street. Too many cars make a place dreadful I need to be able to bump into strangers, not cruise quickly past unseen by anyone. Within a few days of moving in, I bumped into someone I knew from work and it was like a new dawn: That can’t happen to people who emerge from their houses to get in their cars. The glue of life is being there. But where are you? out on the freeway. You aren’t there, I don’t see you. Our lives cannot intersect.
Much of my city is bedroom community. People travel to other places to work, to shop, or to eat. They are not moving through the world as I do. But this is a two-way street, because I miss much of the opportunities these people have.
Posted in photos, urban-studies, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:41:00 GMT
I’ve been practicing my Ruby scripting.
Submitted for your approval is scatterpic, a scattering of 18 random photos from my directory.
I was planning to do something a little less random with placement, but this should do as a first approximation. I’ve got a few ideas for setting them down better. In the meantime, this is all you have for serendipitous photo discovery from my collection.
The other day I was looking at Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits” with envy. I was already thinking of a script for putting a random selection of my photos in a grid. Oddly, it’s hard to get the HTML to play nice. At least, it is for me.
I’ve almost given up on the grid idea as not interesting enough. My next idea was to have them scatter close to a curve. The HTML specifies the location of the upper right corner of each picture. Most of the pictures are 150x200, but not all. I also thought I was keeping to a naming convention: “…_sm.jpg” for the thumbnails.
Today’s browsing is courtest of Wired New York Forum, which I noticed on Kottke.
Some other ideas for improving my scatterpic script: colors of the backdrop.
A final note: I’m curious about the behavior of the random number generator. It seems to produce duplicate photos quite often. This will probably be less of a problem as I add more thumbnails to the server, but it made me think about a procedure for knocking out the photos from the pool as they are used…
I have an idea already: I can use the “slice!” method on the array of file names to remove it from the list after it is selected.
Crap! It didn’t work. My manual says that “slice!” returns the indexed element of the array and sets it to ‘nil’, instead of merely returning the element. But in practice, that code gave me no photos at all. I should check the HTML with that code, but it’s too late now, I already switched it back. And I’m back to seeing a lot of duplicated photos.
Posted in photos, programming, web-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:15:00 GMT
Is there a theme here?
No, not that I can tell - it’s just a bunch of stuff I saw walking in DC…
When customers heard about one of our bookstores closing, some of them made suggestions about where we could open our next store. Some of the suggestions were a block away, and some of them were “Takoma Park” or “National Harbor”. My first reaction was to go look at how much the neighborhood has changed, and explore outward from there.
I did wonder why things are this way. And, by “this way”, I mean: Olsson’s wouldn’t put a store just anywhere. It would seem that every new store has been in brand new buildings for as long as I can remember. Is there an advantage to new buildings? Some of the infrastructure of these buildings left a lot to be desired. The Lansburgh building is some sort of luxury residential hotel; For people with million dollar salaries who don’t know how long they’re going to stay in town. I’ll never know how the magic trick is done: The cheapest possible multistory construction job is finished with the thinnest possible veneer of luxury appointments. And people see “Quality”. In the meantime, laundry suds would occasionally drip from the acoustic tile ceilings onto our CD bins. Not the “attention to detail” that I keep hearing about.
The inevitable redevelopment of every block with the same crap architecture is a clear disincentive to doing anything positive with the land in the interim.
This in turn got me thinking about one of my favorite reasons to take photographs: To document the things that will be lost. With some things, we’re probably better off with just the photograph. An entire block of 5th Street could argue for that.
So I present a handful of views from my Friday afternoon walk: Some memories I cherish, some memories I won’t cherish, the forces threatening to destroy them, and a startling juxtaposition or two.
Posted in urban-studies, DC-roaming, photos, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:35:00 GMT
Finally, some photos taken within the last four hours. These were some rushed shots from my walk to the bus stop this morning. I spotted the broken car mirror lying in the alley when I was headed to the coffee shop. I decided to risk the rearrangement of the object by passing trucks for a few minutes while I bought my espresso - I usually backtrack past this point to get to the bus stop. Besides, my camera was in my bag, and I was carrying the laptop bag, too. All a bit cumbersome. When I got back, I set my coffee down and circled my prey for the right lighting conditions and a good angle with enticing reflections in the broken bits of mirror. A couple people walked past and must have thought I was crazy. That’s one of the frustrating things about vision. Other people don’t necessarily see it too.
At the bus stop I still had my camera out, so I looked around for something worth capturing. I’ve spent a lot of time at that bus stop, so it never seems like a promising place. I suddenly remembered that I arrived at work the other day with a little seed pod riding on a crease in my laptop case. I couldn’t work out where it came from at first, so it’s sitting on my desk in front of the computer monitor getting dry and wrinkled. I put my chin on the top of the stone wall surrounding Meridian Hill Park, and saw those seed pods scattered around. So I went for some shallow depth-of-field shots. Of course, at this point, my bus pulled up. Can’t get one of those things when you need it - but start taking photographs (or some people just light a cigarette) and it’s prompt service. Well, I don’t really like this version. For the first shot, my camera decided to flash(!?!?). I guess it was dark in the magical wonderland of the park. But, it always takes an agonizingly long time to return to operating voltage after the flash fires. Granted, it’s only about three seconds, but as I said, the bus was on its merry way. I didn’t need to shoot photos for another ten minutes, or however long it would take for the next bus to come. Deliberately letting a bus pass by always seems to tempt fate. I think the conditions will be identical tomorrow - barring some kind of catastrophe, so maybe I’ll plan to look again then.
Posted in photos, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:56:00 GMT
It’s been too long since I posted a good batch of art photos. So here goes…
There were a couple days when my camera turned on in my bag, and sucked the batteries down completely dead. This messed up the clock chip - which apparently has a capacitor to keep running while I change the batteries. Whatever happens, it holds the time if it doesn’t have power. I noticed within a couple days that the clock was off by about 36 hours. At first I wondered how long it had been wrong, and started to obsess over whether I could trust the file creation times on a whole range of pictures. But then I remembered the completely dead batteries and that seemed to explain it all.
These first two photos were part of a series of low light, hold steady discipline out on 18th Street one night. There are always a bunch of cool motorcycles parked out in front of Asylum. The rear-view mirror on this green scooter caught my eye - for introducing a reflection, and for ‘orbiting’ out there in the middle of the asphalt expanse. I hoped to get some completely blurred vehicles passing by, and at least this one obliged. Otherwise, it’s a lot of stalled traffic and jay-walking.
Between auto-focus and me not holding still for long enough, most of this series was not sharp. These two came out okay, though.
The colors are brassy from the ambient light - your basic sodium vapor lamp. And, they happily form splashes of primary color, which is mainly thanks to the owners of the two-wheelers.
Posted in photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:41:00 GMT
Posted in photos, DC-roaming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 06 May 2008 16:27:00 GMT
These photos are from the alley behind the bank on 18th and Columbia. It was a summer day, and I think those clouds are the outlying edges of a major hurricane that didn’t strike us. It was July 22nd, so you can check for yourself.
I was just walking along when I saw the late afternoon light, and the deep blue sky, and the vast expanse of brick curving along the back wall of the bank. There were a lot of disappointing shots of the bricked-in drive-through window. Technically, these photos were taken in the disused drive-through. There is a PVC drainpipe to add even more abstract charm. I must be drawn to that big bland scale right in the middle of such urban chaos. It’s something out of an art museum - something a pretentious artist would try to pass off at least. “100 Foot Curved Brick Wall”.
Posted in photos, DC-roaming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:11:00 GMT
