three days ago they cut down a very old tree from our deceased next door neighbor’s front yard. the tree was over 120 feet tall and old. gina and sophia counted 89 rings on the stump that remained. i witnessed most of the cutting and it was pretty sad as there was nothing wrong with the tree. the irony of the situation was that the tree needed to be cut so that an oil spill could be cleaned up. the fifty year old oil tank that was under the tree had been leaking for many years and had contaminated a deep and wide area of the ground by the front yard of the house.

ruth's tree as it stood after 90 years

initially they had called a tree cutter from PA who was a total maniac. he just climb up the tree and started cutting huge branches and dropping them right onto the street. there was no way we were going to let him cut down the upper branches as they were over our house. we quickly put an end to his day or he would’ve really made a mess.

the crazy pennsylvanian

note the branch about to hit the ground. each branch probably weighed 500 lbs.

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a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

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LoveNY

as is usually the case i’m always running late and sept 11, 2001 was no different. by the time i was getting ready to leave park slope for my job on 11th st. and university in manhattan, the towers were hit and getting into manhattan was pointless. gina and i went up on our rooftop to videotape our view. we saw tower one fall a few minutes after we got up top. the plume of dust and debris expanded so fast that we could not see tower two fall. we walked around park slope and everyone was in a speechless daze. by early afternoon dust and ash fell from the sky coating everything in a light gray dust. later that day we saw people who had walked from downtown manhattan back to brooklyn. they were completely covered in gray dust. it was a very surreal sight

love

we finally got into manhattan a couple of days later to check on my apartment on attormey and stanton. manhattan was very solemn and eerie those first few nights. at the vigils in union square park gina and i shot a lot of video and photographs, partly to help us deal with it ourselves. we edited a small piece which was shown on a few cable channels. i’ll have to dig that up. the photographs shown here were featured in the ‘here is new york‘ exhibition and have traveled the globe. they are also in madame tussaud’s permanent exhibit as well as the planned permanent exhibit of the new WTC 9/11 memorial and have been re-printed in many magazines.

hope