Tuesday, November 29, 2011

History of Central Park

http://www.centralpark.com/guide/history.html

Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates of creating the park--primarily wealthy

Skating on the Lake in turn
of the century Central Park.

merchants and landowners--admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable facility to establish its international reputation. A public park, they argued, would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage rides and provide working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Coney Island Boardwalk

http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/coneyisland

http://www.coneyisland.com/

What happened in 1923?

Time Magazine is launched

The Hunchback of Notre Dame , starring Lon Chaney is Released

Women's One Piece Swimming Suits Begin to be worn.

The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille

The Explosion of recordings of African American musicians including the great Louis Armstrong

Charlton Heston is born

and much more here:

http://www.brainyhistory.com/years/1923.html

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1923.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923

Coney Island Boardwalk

The Riegelmann Boardwalk, known simply as the Coney Island Boardwalk, is located along the southern shore of the Coney Island peninsula adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean.

The boardwalk, built in 1923, stretches for 2.51 miles from West 37th Street at the border of Coney Island and Sea Gate to Brighton 14th Street in Brighton Beach.

Many of its most famous amusement parks no longer exist, but the boardwalk still hosts the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster and the Wonder Wheel Ferris wheel, as well as the New York Aquarium. The more recent MCU Park is home of the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclonesbaseball team.

Riegelmann Boardwalk, December 2008

The Riegelmann Boardwalk has a steel and concrete foundation supporting wood planking for the walkway. Restroom facilities, benches and waterfountains are located along its length. As of October 2010, the city has been renovating the boardwalk: parts will receive new wood planking over concrete supports, and parts will be replaced with concrete entirely, for lower maintenance cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island_boardwalk

Wilkes says that he photographs a scene continuously for up to 15 hours. “A select group of images are then digitally blended into one photograph, capturing the changing of time in a single frame.” In regard to the Coney Island photo, Wilkes said: “We will be launching a really cool time lapse video from that particular shoot, which will also be in the gallery exhibition.” The “Day to Night” series includes images of Times Square, the High Line and Central Park, among others, and will be on view at ClampArt Gallery in Chelsea from September 8 through October 29, 2011

Wilkes said his favorite photo of the series is the one of Coney Island: "The perspective is from floating above the boardwalk. The amusement park is night, the beach is day, and it’s full of activity. The level of detail — I’m working with a large-format camera, and it’s exciting that people can see the detail online, but in person, you can see it 60 inches big, and the photos look like windows, and you can actually see into people’s windows…"

http://amusingthezillion.com/2011/09/07/photography-floating-above-the-coney-island-boardwalk/

Stephen Wilkes Photographing Coney Island. July 16, 2011. Photo © Tricia Vita

RESULTING IMAGE:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/coneyisland

http://www.coneyisland.com/

4X5 Digital Camera

PhaseOne Digital Camera

http://www.digital-photography.org/PhaseOne_4x5_in_digital_cameras/PhaseOne_Digital_Camera.htm

4x5" Drum Scanned Film vs. 39 Megapixel Digital
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml

ARTIST INFO AND LINKS

For more than two decades Stephen Wilkes has been widely recognized for his fine art and commercial photography. With numerous awards and honors, as well as five major exhibitions in the last ten years, Wilkes has left an indelible impression on the world of photography. Over the years, Wilkes' photographs can be found in a variety of magazines including Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, Time, Life Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. One of his most famous fine art series, Ellis Island, was a special artist feature in The New York Times Magazine and can now be found in book stores all across America titled Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom. Wilkes has been praised many times by the photographic and design industry for his unique perspective and depth of raw emotion and humanity in his pictures. His awards include the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography, Photographer of the Year in Adweek Magazine, as well as top honors in Graphis Magazine and Communication Arts.

HOMEPAGE : http://www.stephenwilkes.com/

FACEBOOK : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stephen-Wilkes/97244237457

TWITTER : http://twitter.com/#!/swilkesphoto

Saturday, October 15, 2011

CLAMPART GALLERY

CLAMPART is an art gallery located in New York City (Chelsea) specializing in Modern and Contemporary paintings, prints, and photographs.

RELATED LINKS:

http://clampart.com/about/about.html

http://clampart.com/

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Day To Night

Photographer Stephen Wilkes has put together an amazing “Day to Night” series of photographs which capture the changing time of day into one scene. Each image was photographed throughout the day and a selection of photos from hundreds taken were blended together to create a very interesting picture. Stephen Wilkes spent up to 15 hours at a time perched on a cherry picker to take up to 1,000 pictures of New York locations. He then blended around 50 of these photographs into single images capturing the bustle of the city before and after the sun sets. Half of each picture shows the scene in broad daylight while the other depicts the same scene at night. Stephen's 'Day To Night' series has captured familiar locations including the Flat Iron building, which includes the poignant sight of the Tribute in Light, a memorial to the World Trade Center.

Flatiron

Central Park

Highline

Park Ave.

Times Square

Washington Square