New York Bikes, Part One

New York, New York

One of the advantages of teaching workshops several times a year at the Penumbra Foundation is that I get to spend time in mid-town Manhattan. In order to secure a parking space in the enormous non-permit lot at Southeast, north of Brewster, I drive over to arrive at about 8:00 in the morning so I can buy a 16 hour parking ticket which takes me past midnight—weekend parking is free. Then I hang out for half an hour reading on my phone in the car before hiking the long walk to the station with all the stuff I need to take to the workshop, to catch the 8:48 which is the first off-peak train—half the price of peak with my senior citizen discount. Another hike from Grand Central to 30th street gets me to Penumbra, where I spend an hour or two setting up the workspace we will use for the workshop, which last weekend was Traditional Platinum, meaning that we begin by shooting film, developing it, and printing.

That means that by about 1:00 PM I'm free, and in late May I have about seven hours to spend street shooting. The actual workshop runs on "New York Time" which is 10:00 to 6:00. Since I can't sleep past six in the morning, this means that Saturday and Sunday I have at least a couple more hours of street shooting each morning. Another hour or two Saturday evening. Along with teaching the workshop, that's about twelve hours of street shooting, so it's not surprising that I arrive home exhausted and tend not to get a lot done on Monday and Tuesday.

I love bicycles. I was an avid cyclist in my thirties and forties but haven't ridden in quite a while now. My big-tube aluminum Cannondale road bike is carefully preserved in the barn and just needs new tires to go back out on the road, which I might even do this summer. I love photographing bikes and cyclists too. There's something essentially elegant about a bike, whether it's being used for sport, exercise, or delivering pizza. So for the next few posts, I'll show some of the bikes I saw in Manhattan last weekend.

A platinum/palladium 35mm Contact Sheet

New York, New York, Penumbra Foundation

At my Penumbra Foundation Traditional Platinum Workshop last weekend, Michael Page Miller brought several rolls of 35mm film dating back to the 1970s. Just to see what would happen, we tried making a Pt/Pd contact sheet from one. Maybe a first? But not the first exotic experience for this roll of film. Michael tells me it was shot in Peru in 1971—bulk loaded cassettes developed in the field with processing chemicals warmed on a small brass SVEA 123 camping stove and low-grade gasoline for fuel. But it worked.

Traditional Platinum Workshop, Day One

We began by making five new photographs together, using 5x7 inch film, working on the Penumbra Foundation rooftop and Studio B. The idea was to demonstrate proper exposure for Pt/Pd negs. Then we developed them in PMK pyro. After I demonstrated coating and prep, and development and clearing techniques using the group portrait, each of the five students got to make one print by the end of the day. Today, we'll be printing all day long from the eight negatives, using Hahnemühle Platinum Rag paper.