Flow

Winter Vines

Bridge Base @ Night

Holiday Color

Why is red (and green) the color of the season?

Droplets

Unusually warm day for late November, light rain to go with it.

Moonrise Over Hudson View Gardens

Purple fading to blue in the early evening sky.

B-Sides: Lovers

By Minako Yonisho. Taken last summer, installation along the Hudson River. The base is made up of broken bluestone with love notes/messages, each written by a different individual, in black sharpie.

Colorful Plywood Panels

Under the 59th Street Bridge, I believe this is a temporary construction platform for repairs on the underbelly of the bridge.

Yellow and Blue

Exposed backsides of a row of apartment buildings as seen from St. Nicholas Ave. heading toward 145th street.

Upper West Side

Upper West Side

A photo posted by Michael Gatton (@michael.gatton) on Jul 24, 2015 at 4:00pm PDT

OK, my last instagram post on this blog for a while - I just figured out the embed problem and wanted to post one. I wish there were a way to just add an instagram feed to the sidebar with my blog list, but so far have not found a way to do that.

UPDATE: Figured it out - instagram feed now in sidebar.

UPDATE 2: Snapwidget directs to horrid ad-filled page.

UPDATE 3: Websta is a little better, so I'll keep it. You can avoid websta by clicking on the "View on Instagram" icon instead of the photo. Websta does display the name of the instagram filter used, if any, in case you are curious about such things. There's a trending phenomenon called #nofilter but people cheat! Not only that, but you can manually adjust the image to create your own "filter" that shows up in the metadata as "no filter." The never ending debate...

Loosening Up

Sometimes I just need to turn off my brain and take pictures. I need to put the fun back in  photography and not take myself so seriously.

In that spirit, I have finally joined the instagram crowd. This will be a place to post casual photography, snapshots, and all the stuff that is just fun to shoot. For now they will mostly be from my cell phone, since that's the only way I know to get pics to instagram, and the easiest tool for walking around and snapping casual photos - no feeling conspicuous or self-conscious because of a big SLR. At the moment blogger is not allowing me to embed pics directly from instagram, not sure why.

This picture is from a little playground with a giant sculpture overlooking the Queensboro Bridge. Just a snapshot, but I like the two people sitting apart from one another - I wish the one on the left were not in the shade...

Follow me, I will follow you...

NJ Transit Bus

Another wide angle from yesterday, this time with more dramatic motion blur. Composition still needs some work. Maybe the bridge isn't the best place for this kind of shot - the bridge elements are distracting.

Also note the sky here, about 10 minutes or so before yesterday's post.

Costco

Playing with the ultrawide today, I like the distorted, elongated effect on the 18-wheeler. Storm moving in from the north (left side of the photo if that's not obvious).

East River Bridges

Manhattan Bridge. maybe the first in a series. My bike path around Manhattan takes me past several East River crossings, and it occurred to me how odd it is that there's only one bridge crossing on the west side of Manhattan across the Hudson (the George Washington Bridge, which I have shot extensively).

Flower Power 4th of July

Numerology

Strings

Slowly working back into some shooting. Spent most of the last several months working on portraits -- all students and colleagues, so I'm not really comfortable posting online (I never asked permission).

Nice thing about portraits is you already know WHAT you're going to shoot, its just a question of HOW. It's a different kind of challenge.

Overpass

Looking up from my bike path, an overpass connecting Riverside Drive with Riverbank State Park (A concrete urban park built atop a sewage treatment facility - long story).

Fog and Bridge

I love fog....

Short Cuts

Playing around with the school camera today, not too happy with the quality, so I cheated a little and did some post processing in Nik Color Efex to bring out the clouds and the contrast here. If I didn't tell you I cheated would you know? I did try to bring it down to a more natural look, but my eye gets a little jaded while editing...They are NOT desaturated or B&W  - the building is dark gray and it was a gray day in NY.

B-Sides: No Standing

Another oldie. Also from 2012.

Psychiatric Institute

Part of the Columbia Medical Center. One could argue that all of NYC is just one big psych ward, but that's another post....

B-Sides: Moore is Less

An oldie from 2012 that I kept thinking I would get around to shooting again some day under different light conditions, but it never happened

MoDERN

Walking around midtown this morning. On the left side of the sign is reflective surfaces giving a moiré effect from the building across the street.

Stone Staircase

Nothing but clouds and rain starting yesterday and continuing into the latter part of the weekend. This stairway leads over the Amtrak rails from Ft. Washington Park up to Riverside Drive, I think - I've actually never walked up to see where it leads.

Portraits

(I accidentally deleted this post, apologies to commenters, and sorry for the re-post that shows up in your feed/blog list.)


My son as a good sport if somewhat reluctant model. A little help from NIK software. I don't have much in the way of light and light modifiers, at least not yet, so this is pretty minimal set up: off-camera flash with a DIY grid (via Strobist).

Cross Beams on GWB

After another bleak and dreary, record-cold, and snowy winter, spring has finally arrived. Dipping my toes back into a little blogging, can't promise it will be sustainable over the next couple of months, but one day at a time. I'm off this week on spring break and then school gets a little crazy - but at least it's warm enough and the days long enough now to walk around and take some pictures.

I have been working on portraits with my photography club at school, I may post some examples over the next few days and possibly beyond - it's a new thing for me and a learning curve, but I am enjoying it. Just need to get permission form the subjects to post.

Snow Tracks

A light dusting of snow fell yesterday. Back to work this week means limited opportunity for shooting, Combined with early sunset it's a challenge.

Four Square

A little color break today. Four square is a game we played in the south in the 70s in middle school (7/8th grade, around ages 11-13). I've never seen kids in the city play it. It's a rather aggressive game best described by wikipedia ( don't even remember all the rules myself).

Curves

New York City is a crowded, messy, loud cacophony of both sights and sounds (or whatever the visual equivalent of a cacophony is). Finding simplicity and peace amid the noise, I've come to realize, is what my photography is mostly about. It's why most of my photos are about zooming in on details and small slices of the city to cut out or reduce the chaos.

Cables

They look so delicate at this distance. Cables suspending the George Washington Bridge, sunset highlights.

George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal

The terminal is undergoing major renovations at the street level, Looks promising. Here's a street level shot showing how decrepit it is now.

Blocks

A little geometry today. Plus light & shadow.