I Shoot Photos, Don’t I?
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Remember that 35mm lens I was selling? I also listed it on Craigslist. There were a few queries, but none of them seemed serious.
On Friday, I received an email asking if the lens was still available. I wrote back saying that it was, and I then received this reply:
From Jose Dave (eastalbel04@gmail.com):
Hi, Thanks for the mail.i was introduced to this site by a friend at
work and I’m seriously interested in buying the item on your posting
on CL for my cousin ‘Richie’ who is out of the state and has been
requesting for this exact item.I’m okay with your selling price i will
add $150 for the shipping charges to him.i would have loved to come
for a face to face transaction but due to my work, as a Petroleum
Engineer and currently offshore. i really want this as a surprise gift
for him so i won’t let him know anything about this until it get
delivered to him there because he is in need of it as a matter of
urgency and due to my work i don’t have time to handle the shipping..i
will want you to help me handle the shipping very well to him..Get
back to me with your confirmed PayPal email address for the payment
asap…
As you can tell, it’s a scam. There’s no way I am sending my lens to anyone through Craig’s List I cannot meet in person. That’s rule number one.
Meanwhile, my lens sold on Amazon!
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Shortly after selling my telephoto lens last December, I bought my first prime lens. It was a Canon EF 35mm f/2 lens that finally made it possible to take photos of my adorable but always moving nephew without motion blur. I also finally got that beautiful blurred background that gives my snapshots that professional, shallow depth-of-field look.
Since then I upgraded to the Ultrasonic 28mm f/1.8 lens, and I find myself using the 35mm lens a lot less. It’s not that the 35mm lens is bad or anything, it’s just that I prefer the quiet USM focusing of the wider lens.
If you are in the New York area and are shopping for an inexpensive Canon 35mm prime lens, contact me with the form below and we’ll set up a meeting and you can check it out. If you prefer to shop through Amazon, I have listed the lens there too.
Update: Despite someone on Craig’s List trying to scam me, I sold my lens this weekend!
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
As part of this year’s LIC Arts Open, a week devoted to showcasing the numerous art institutions in Long Island City, the Jeffrey Leder Gallery staged an opening of recent paintings and drawings converging on the theme of minimalist techniques. Dina Muenzfeld curated this show, titled Reductive.
Dina saw me shoot photos of Ellen Schneiderman’s opening in February at the same gallery. She must have liked my snapshots because she asked me to shoot the opening. Either that, or she liked that I worked for free.
I was pretty happy with the photographic quality of the shots. There were for the most part very sharp and crisp. Shooting in a gallery is a little tricky because of the competing light sources and their various temperatures
But since I bought a WhiBal card last summer, I have been able to mitigate the light noise. Also I can get pretty true colors, which I did in the photos from the Reductive opening and last July’s Staff Show at Philips DuPury.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
If you’re concerned about buying a third-party battery for your charger, my experience with a Pearstone has been fairly positive so far.
Over our train trip through California in December and January, I left my camera battery and charger connected to the in-seat power outlet on the southbound Coast Starlight. I had the battery and charger since I bought my Canon 20D camera in November 2005.
Thankfully, the battery is pretty common as it was used in almost all Canon digital SLRs until the 40D but was the battery for the 5D Mark II. Since there are so many of those out there, it’ll be a while before these batteries become rare. However, original manufacturer batteries can be expensive, so it’s tempting to look for third-party brands.
To replace my lost battery and charger, I bought the Pearstone BP-511A battery and the matching Pearstone Compact Charger. I’ve used it for about four months, and so far, I haven’t noticed any diminished performance. Only time will tell if it will hold up to repeated charging cycles. My original battery would last for well over 1,000 exposures, even after over seven years of fairly regular use.
Good luck.
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
On April 1, NYC Runs staged a ten-kilometer race on Roosevelt Island. Steve asked me to come over and take photos for this race, hoping that I would shoot photos from the Central Park Ekiden in February. After finally clearing a bunch of to-dos from my list, I have processed some of the photos from that day.
I have to admit that these are not very great shots. During that weekend, I was not very mobile due to a painful ingrown toenail that hobbled me for the better part of a year. Consequently, I basically sat or stood in one spot and snapped shots as runners scurried past my camera. Most of the shots were of runners crossing the finish line. As a result, almost all of these shots are of runners reaching with one hand to turn off his/her stopwatch. The composition of most shots were similar, with the runner in the center of the frame, a consequence of relying on auto focus.
After I had shot the photos, Steve asked if there were any shots of the Manhattan skyline or of the tram. Unfortunately, because I shooting the runners crossing the finish line as I facing east towards Queens, most of the shots featured a power plant in Long Island City. Getting the tram would have been difficult, in any case, because I didn’t even see the tram while I was there. The only saving graces were a few shots of the Queensboro Bridge and of the FDR Drive in the background. I hope those help create a sense of the race’s location.
Anyway, I’m glad that my toe is feeling better and can move around.
It’s been several months since NYC Runs held its first race in Riverside Park. As a favor for the organizer and figurehead, I snapped a bunch of photos of the Lousy T-Shirt Race. Since then NYC Runs has grown significantly. They even staged a pretty serious marathon in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park the weekend before Thanksgiving.
On Sunday, NYC Runs staged a Ekiden relay race in Central Park. Again, I brought my camera and shot photos of the relay race.
Aside from the excitement of watching two- to four- person teams split the sixteen-mile course in Central Park, there was one funny moment. It was when one woman was trying to pass on her sash to her teammate. Unfortunately, she was wearing earphones and it came off with the sash. After a quarter minute or so, she managed to untangle the earphones from the sash but not before her iPod hit the pavement. There’s a lesson here, which I heard from many experienced runners: “don’t wear earphones in a race.”
If you stumbled here looking for your race results, check the NYC Runs Ekiden page for official information and results.
Today is November 11. Not only is it Armistice Day, Veteran’s Day, and Corduroy Day, it is also the day I bought my first and only SLR camera. I bought my Canon 20D on November 11, 2005. I didn’t actually remember that I bought it on this day, except that I was registering a new lens and a new flash, and the Canon website showed me the list of products. Evidently, I had bought the camera on this day back in 2005. Cool!
When I bought the camera, it was during the graduate student strike against NYU. The GSOC strike started only days earlier, and would continue into the cold days, cruel days of the winter. I brought my then-new camera to the picket line and found plenty of opportunities to shoot photos of the strike. One of the best opportunities came when GSOC’s undergraduate allies occupied Bobst Library.
I shot the photo above during that occupation. I posted it on an older version of this website, and it was seen by the GSOC brass. They eventually published the photo in a book about the strike, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. Despite the attention we got and the perseverance of many on the picket line, the strike was a total bust, and almost no one remembers it. The union died that winter.
At least I got a little practice in amateur photojournalism.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Yesterday was Bastille Day, and since I get a little more sensitive about it as the years go by, I tried to keep as hush-hush as possible. But, of course, as it tends to do, Facebook let the cat out of the bag and ratted out to my friends about Bastille Day. My dear friends posted nearly 100 messages with nice Bastille Day messages. Awww…. shucks!
Fortunately, Pilar’s boyfriend Bill had an art show at the art auction house where he works, and it was a very big party. He had three very large drawings, which we all saw and posed with for pictures, but it was the selection of complimentary summer cocktails that made another passing year a little easier to digest.
This was exactly the kind of Bastille Day I wanted. I got to drink for (almost) free, I got to spend it with some friends, and I wasn’t the center of attention.
Congrats to Bill, and cheers to everyone who wished me a happy Bastille Day.
Yes, I’ll admit that yesterday’s sunset through the cross-streets of Manhattan, affectionately known as Manhanhattanhenge, was pretty amazing, tonight’s event made for an even more picturesque sunset.
At about 7:00, a passing thunderstorm came through the region and soaked everything, but it left behind a great cloud cover. Once the sun went down, the skies turned an amazing set of mostly purple colors. It made going back for a second consecutive day worthwhile.
Is tonight’s evening show more spectacular than the sunset on Independence Day?
After nearly ten years of living in this city, I finally made it to the east side and saw the sunset through the Manhattan grid, along 42nd St. Actually, I went past the East River and perched myself on the waterfront at Gantry State Park in Long Island City.
I first heard about it about seven years ago, and read the obligatory introduction, written by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the head of the Hayden Planetarium. It only happens twice a year, in late May and again in mid July, around my birthday.
And today, I biked over to the pier and snapped about 150 photos. I’ll post the choice ones on the photo gallery shortly.
