Category: New York City

Famous Blue Raincoat

Posted by Chris Klug – June 7, 2010

Delta 400 pushed to 800 in Rodinal

It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You’d been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody’s wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane’s awake –

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear

– Sincerely, L. Cohen

When I recently visited New York I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, where Leonard Cohen lived for a number of years. After I checked in I was told that my room, 424, was where he had lived those years. I am a big Leonard Cohen fan (his most well-known song is possibly ‘Suzanne,’ if you don’t know his work, you most certainly have heard that song, and American Idol has recently made ‘Hallelujah’ sorta well-known as well). After I found out I was staying in his room, I wondered what songs had been written while he stayed there. My favorite Cohen song is the one I quoted above.

I love NYC. When I lived in Phoenix we would often sit around and talk about where we would like to live (almost everyone I worked with had moved from someplace else to work at the company). I would most often say when asked ‘New York.’ I would get stares when I said this, because most people, even those who LIKE New York, wouldn’t want to live there, necessarily.

At the 23rd Street stop on the 'E' train line

I grew up in NJ, 13 miles from downtown by car, and loved living there. I loved going into NY. We lived so close that if it was, say, Saturday night and we felt like having Chinese food, and it was 10:30 at night, we’d think nothing of jumping in the car and heading into the city, ’cause we could be standing in line at Wo Hop’s on Mott Street in less than an hour from that moment.

When I worked at SPI in 1981, I lived in a sublet on the corner of Waverly and Gay street for about six months. Loved it then. I don’t know whether I could take living in NY today (aside, of course, from the cost of rent and such-like) but it’s a great place.

Interesting technical info about this roll. It’s Delta 400 pushed to 800, and developed in Rodinal. I really like the look. The combination of t-grain Delta 400 and Rodinal seems to work quite nicely. Additionally, I actually UNDER developed it by a stop. I read the wrong time on the Dev Chart, so these images are underdeveloped a stop, or, put another way, underexposed a stop. They came out a bit thin, but still scanned quite nicely.

Take a look at this one. Underexposed a stop, a little grainy, but still quite nice.

Visit to NYC via the Train

Posted by Chris Klug – May 31, 2010

We changed crews in Harrisburg

So all the images in this post are taken with the Bessa/Zeiss Biogon 35/Tmax, and all from the first roll of the trip.

I traveled to NYC via Amtrak, just for the fun of it. I carried my camera along the way, and grabbed a few images. Harrisburg is about 1/2 the distance from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, we stopped there for about 20 minutes to change crews.

While we made stops all along the route, the next major stop was 30th Street Station Philly, where we changed crews and engines for the last leg through NJ to NYC.

The light inside these stations was very dark, and I was shooting hand-held at about a 1/15th of a second at f/2.

Notice in this frame gent to my left is moving a bit. I was really surprised I could get this close to a crucial operation (de-coupling the engine) without someone telling me to either back off or put away the camera.

After I got to the hotel, I wandered around the Village and grabbed some shots.

This was the first time I shot Tmax and developed it in FG7. Learned a big lesson. When you develop in FG7 what you are supposed to do (with traditional grain films, anyway) is to rate it slower (I shot it at 250) and expose for the shadows. FG7 is a compensating developer and it will hold the highlights while it keeps the shadow detail. If you think about it, by exposing for the shadows and down-rating it, I effectively shot Tmax 400 as if it was ISO 125. While this process really worked for a number of the dark-ish images, the images I grabbed in broad daylight had a bit of an overdeveloped look to them. Tmax had a very broad latitude by reputation, and I think this combo was too much. So, next time I use this film, I’ll either develop it much less or rate it at 400.

Clearly Tmax has a look of its own; not quite as biting as HP5 and mot quite as smooth as Tri-X.

Visit to NYC

Posted by Chris Klug – May 31, 2010

42nd Street Library Lion

Developed and Scanned first rolls from NYC visit, more to come. This is just a teaser. For those of you just dying to know, Tmax 400 developed in FG7, exposed at ISO 250, captured with the Bessa.

New York, New York

Posted by Chris Klug – May 21, 2010

FTb, IR transparency film of some sort, 1979 or so

I’m leaving tomorrow for a few days in NYC to attend a conference. I was reminded of the image above when I posted the ladder shot the other day, and then though “well, how fitting that I’ll be in NYC soon.” While there I hope to meet up with Dave Beckerman as well as Kevin Lee Allen, and perhaps take in the Cartier-Bresson show. I’m sure I’ll be checking out B&H as well.

I took this image with my old FTb on some kind of IR transparency film (I don’t remember what, exactly). I’m pretty certain it was IR film, and I’m also pretty certain that it was the only roll of that kind of film I ever shot. There’s a portrait of my dad on that roll that was the best image I ever took of him. I was living at my parent’s house at that point and I vividly remember grabbing a ‘snap’ of him sitting at the kitchen table in a very typical dad pose, heading out to get in the car and driving into the Village and wondering the streets, snapping away. You may recognize that the image is my gravatar image.

It’s partly because when I see the image I remember that day so vividly, and partly because I know that a few frames before this image is an image of my dad that I chose this to by me gravatar. It’s also obvious, if you look at the ladder image, that I am drawn to this kind of vertically segmented composition. It doesn’t shock me that I kind of replicated it with the ladder.

You’ll have to pardon me, as all this talk has made me want to post that picture of my dad.

Gerard Alfred Klug

Both of these images were posted on the original version of this blog, which existed on my iWeb site.

If anyone remembers what that film might have been, let me know. The next images will be from my NYC trip.

Live Bait

Posted by Chris Klug – January 24, 2010

HP5, Rodinal

Taken while Kevin Allen and I walked down West 23rd street in September, just before I captured the image of the two women on their cell phones.

I remember distinctly glancing across the street as we walked along the north side of the block and thinking ‘Live Bait, what an odd name,’ framing the shot, clicking the shutter and moving on. After I developed the roll, I kept staring at the image, wondering why it called out to me, if anything, louder after the image had been developed than on the day I grabbed it. Today, as I was working on the image, it hit me.

My first job in the game business in 1980 was at a company called SPI (Simulations Publications, Incorporated), whose original offices were located at 20 East 23rd Street. If you look at the image above, that building is not actually in the frame, but it is just to the left of the frame — you can see 16 East 23rd street right there, however.

I never worked in the 20 E. 23rd Street building, I did work at the next address they inhabited, which was Park Avenue South, about three blocks South of this building. The one year that I worked for them, they held their Christmas party at a bar near their old haunts which was, you guessed it, at a bar called ‘Live Bait.’ That’s why I knew that building so well, we used to hang out at this bar and drink quite a bit of Jameson’s.

New York, for me, is like that. Having worked there for eight years in the game business, and having done off-broadway theater there for years prior to that, there probably aren’t many restaurants or bars south of 23rd street I haven’t been in at least once, whether I remember them or not

Somehow, to me, having a company Christmas party as a bar called Live Bait is something that could only happen in NYC. Not quite the same as Mesa or Gilbert Arizona, where the last company I worked for wouldn’t have considered dumping their garbage in a place that looked or felt like this place did (does). But for those of us who worked at SPI, there couldn’t have been a better place to celebrate that holiday.

Glad I snapped this one, for sure.