GammaBlog - NYC Street Art, Architecture from the East Village

Shooting it RAW

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

I’m starting to shoot in the RAW format on my Lumix DMC-FZ35. The main disadvantage for me is the length of time it takes to save the photo to the camera’s card. This limits how quickly I can snap my next shot. RAW alone takes 5 seconds. JPEG at highest quality takes around 1 second, and 1 second is annoying enough, especially when I’m shooting on the street. The other disadvantage is storage, saving as RAW requires roughly 4 times the size of saving as the highest quality JPEG my camera can generate. But after experimenting with the RAW editing software that came with my camera (Silkypix Developer Studio 3.0) the ability to reduce digital noise and the range of color corrections I can do is really sweet. Silkypix, so far, does as much as I really need, and it does it non-destructively. When it is developed, you save to JPEG, as well as save the editing parameter you applied to the RAW file, but without altering the original photo data.

So, I’m really glad this post on Reddit convinced me to explore RAW. It is good to have in my photography tool bag, for specific occasions where the lag is not a factor.

This photo of the old Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, was developed to JPEG, then reduced to web size in Irfan View, and then processed by Flickr again. But I think I was able to keep the digital noise to a minimum, or at least far less than I would have been able to do with only a JPEG save.

Filed under: Photos- , Williamsburg - by gamma
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Bicycle Fetish in Williamsburg

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

I arrived too early to the scene for the hipster bike modders, that probably arrived fashionably later.

But the Puerto Rico Schwinn Club dominated Havermeyer and Grand with their chomed, beautifully restored and modded bikes, and gave me plenty to shoot.

Imagine yourself behind the wheel.

Definitely the slickest shave-ice cart I’ve ever seen.

Times-up was there doing bike repairs, but not much other than vending was happening when I arrived. These hand-painted helmets are lovely, and reasonably priced. bellehelmets.com

Carefully bent tubing belies an actual crash.

Filed under: Art, Brooklyn, Photos- , Bikes, Williamsburg - by gamma
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Time’s Up Street Art Bike Ride

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

We met at the East River Time’s Up in Williamsburg. The ride was co-led by Jake Dobkins and Becki Fuller, both longtime street art photographers and bloggers.

Becki commanding the megaphone in front of a Williamsburg wall. Though the Time’s Up listing called it a graffiti ride the emphasis was definitely on street art, I learned a lot about artists otherwise unknown to me.

Strangely other listings on the web stated that the ride would cover Queens and Harlem as well, which would have been a sweaty marathon. As it was we covered a large chunk of Williamsburg and then headed to Bushwick, enough riding for me as my trip started across the bridge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The lines of this amazing rabbit are from a fine tipped spray can, wielded by the French Artist ROA. Factory Fresh had a wonderful show of his work this past May. The bike tour ended up Bushwick and they let us park our bikes behind the gallery to see the show.

A small piece but one of the favorite things I saw, artist unknown to me.

The Christian Paine piece looks in a style he was using five years ago, though most of them deteriorated quickly in the weather. I always like the name, even more blatant than Lost’s Christian Shepard, and the fact that he was putting out one-ups, original paintings on paper.