Tag Archives: photography

Picture Postcard Tuesday- Sheepshead Bay, 1980’s

15 Mar

March 15, 2011- midday

A trio today. These were all taken at the same time in the early to mid 1980’s. They are undated but I seem to feel that they are from 1983. I have distinct good memories of taking these pictures and for that reason alone I’ve decided to post them. Although the pictures are old some of the scratches and squiggles are from my old scanner. I decided to leave the imperfections in. Down the line I may change my mind and rescan them.

This was taken looking across Sheepshead Bay towards Manhattan Beach. The water had frozen and you can see the way the ice is cracking in the foreground. The wake in the water is frozen in place and if you look closely  you can see birds walking on the ice.

The piers there have been significantly improved and rebuilt over the years. It was a years-long process. I think this picture speaks for itself, a nice use of light and shadow.

It isn’t only the piers that have been renovated. Across the street from the piers are now rows of modern restaurants and shops that replaced mostly wooden single family homes. While the construction was going on residents and activists lobbied against most of it. They complained that the area would lose its “fishing village charm.” Being young I totally disagreed with them at the time but looking back they were totally right. The area is now a more upscale and less rustic (though “rustic” in this case is a matter of degree, depending upon how rustic it may or may not have been in the first place.) The fishing industry is not what it used to be, and part of it is because of ridiculous fishing rules. It used to be that you could keep a fluke at 11 inches, then 13, and who knows how high it is now. Of course, commercial fishermen can keep far smaller fluke. If you are raising the size limit in order to preserve the species, why pick on weekend fishermen whose take is a mere fraction of what the commercial fishermen take?

The picture above is of a long gone house. Look at the birds on the roof. Just a second before I snapped it there was a fourth bird in the middle of the row. You can see him flying away. The fact that the birds are now asymmetrical still bothers me because it was the symmetry that impelled me to take the picture in the first place. And don’t judge the era by the car. It was already old when I took the picture.

Tomorrow I’ll continue the “piers” theme with a modern picture of the decaying Atlantic City pier.

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Picture Postcard Monday- Lonely Beach

14 Mar

March 14, 2011

I took the picture below on a lonely stretch of beach in Brooklyn and trust me, there aren’t many lonely stretches of beach here. The lights in the background are South Brooklyn looking from Sea Gate toward Bath Beach.

I was first there twelve to fifteen years ago. It was a very cool place and fairly isolated. There were remains of some very, very old industry there. All along the beach were rusted ship chains attached to the ground, remains of a wooden pier, and large rusted metal rings set into the ground. There was also a large trapdoor set into the ground. It was dark and secluded and every bit as Scooby Doo as it sounds. When I returned last year there was a big change. Some years back we had a very bad winter storm that washed out most of the beach in South Brooklyn. The army corps of engineers came in and replaced all the sand in Coney Island and Sea Gate but they added far more than I ever saw in my lifetime. For example, you may be familiar with the old song “Under the Boardwalk.” That was based on the Coney Island boardwalk and all of my life the boardwalk was ten feet above the sand. Now the beach is so elevated that the sand comes right up to the bottom of the boardwalk.

In Sea Gate, this means that most of the cool artifacts are now buried. Even the tall fence that separated Sea Gate’s gated community is now so short in places that you can simply step over it. The pilings you see in the picture used to stand tall in the water, stretching into the sea. Now they are buried in sand.

The picture was taken in extreme low-light conditions. The flash was useless and the only illumination was from the moon. I needed to do some fooling around with some imaging programs to produce that picture but it is a very good representation of what I saw. I have always had a soft spot for black and white photography and I think the graininess adds to the haunting quality of the picture.

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