No Shenanigans Subscribers Gallery: Chinatown Hydrant
A lonely street cleaner, a pensive prostitute, $219 noodles, premature gummies, a stunning view, and this hydrant
This is an example of a one of the types of backstories to the prints in my No Shenanigans Gallery that I’ll make available to all paid subscribers. In addition, every paid subscriber gets to choose a free print, with $100 Pledgers get a bit more. I’ll try different styles of posts. What will connect them will be a deeper, personal story behind the photographs, and some technical explanation. Please, let me know what you think.
I don’t know why this hydrant is angled as it is. How is it not flooding the sidewalk, assuming that it’s still connected to a water main? And what’s the implication if it’s not connected to water?
I captured this particular hydrant in Chinatown Boston. I could have been more curious about its engineering, I suppose, but it’s the story surrounding the capturing of this image that I want to share. And I want to talk about the camera that I took this photo with. It’s a camera that changed how I see the world. An exaggeration, I get it, but it’s the story I want to tell.
It All Started with This Airbnb Promise: ‘A Stunning View in the Heart of Chinatown’
At least 50% of this Airbnb description of the Chinatown apartment that I booked was accurate; I’ll leave it to you to figure out which 50%.
Here’s the “stunning view” from the kitchen, which was also the apartment’s only view:
This was June, 2019. I was in Boston for a conference. There were times during my business trips when I needed to stay in a conference hotel, but whenever I could, I liked to say in a neighborhood as a way of exploring the city.
For this trip, I checked into my Airbnb mid-afternoon on a Wednesday and shot Chinatown for a couple hours before my work obligations started that evening.
The Hydrant was one of the first photos I took that first afternoon. But before I get to it, let me talk a few images from the next night, Thursday night.
My Night Obsession with Street Washers
I’ve got night street cleaner photos from several cities I’ve traveled through, taken with longish exposures. It was a thing of mine for awhile. These were my first.
For a few years I was taken by the ghostly effect I could get from the street cleaning with long exposures. With the right lighting and a slow-enough shutter, the spray can create a misty, fog-like effect, especially in black-and-white. Adding the blurs from people or cars moving through the frame could make for a pretty ethereal, noir-like environment.
Night Shooting: Always with a Monopod
I almost always have a monopod attached to my camera when I’m out at night. It’s necessary for longer exposures. Not to mention that a monopod is like 100x lighter and more agile than a tripod. And not to mention that holding a long metal stick is a pretty good idea while I’m out alone at night. I won’t lie.
With the monopod and my Olympus’ stabilization features, I was able to capture the street cleaner scenes at 2000 ISO and a 1/2 second shutter at f/9 without any noticeable blur from hand shake. Take a close look at the building details and street signs if you don’t believe me.
Here’s one with even more detail to look at:
Photographers always tell me that I should increase my ISO in low light like this so I can increase shutter speeds, but I can’t stand how a high level of noise reduction softens and flattens the details.
ISO 2000 with the Olympus requires a relatively small amount of noise reduction in Lightroom. Yes, I admit that the result is a softening of the details to a degree, but not horribly so. I’m happy to work within these limits.
Call me Ludditish. I could purchase an AI noise reduction software solution. Solutions can be good. I get it. But limitations challenge you. My mind’s not static, so ask me again tomorrow, but today I prefer the challenge of technical limitations over a partial software solution.
And let’s face it, my camera is a computer that could have practically gotten Apollo 11 to the moon. Let’s keep “limitations” in perspective.
Here’s the pay phone on the outside of my building, with only slightly different settings: ISO 2000, f/10, 1/10 second:
The light bursts are crisp; the brickwork’s sharp enough, though it’s missing its texture. I would definitely process this image differently today, but I like remembering my two nights in Chinatown with this softish, glossy one.
As a quick aside, I turned this photograph into my first-ever cyanotype print (talk about a technical challenge) which I was (and still am) hugely proud of:
We will talk cyanotypes another time. For now, back to the Hydrant…
…as soon as I share one last photo I took that night with the monopod.
I’d eaten a couple of cannabis gummies before I met her. I didn’t think that they’d kick in until much later, when I planned to be in an after-hours dive eating noodles and drinking beer. People watching after midnight with a beer and a buzz. That was the idea.
Boston felt Puritanical; Chinatown actually had an after-hours dive that served beer after alcohol sales had stopped. f
But I miscalculated. Badly. The weed had already kicked in as I was approaching her. She was standing on a sidewalk, in front of an empty parking lot.
At the far right of the lot behind her was the dark mouth of an alley and a brick wall with old farmhouse-style light that cast a soft-yellow symmetrical light-fall along the facing.
At the far back of the lot was more brick, shadowed and lit from street lights, a soft and chalky brick wall with cracked mortar.
In my mind’s-eye I could see her against either of those walls. But with the gummies kicking in, the express train of every skill I needed to take a good picture was quickly leaving the station without me.
I couldn’t form the sentences that I needed to get her to move three feet, never mind across the lot to one of the walls. It didn’t matter, my photos would have sucked. I can’t photograph stoned. Simple as that.
But I could listen. And she could talk. She told me about her apartment, the school program she was attending, how she kind of liked dead nights like this, with nobody on the sidewalks and everything shut down. She could stand alone and think and sometimes sing to herself.
All I could do was to imagine her against those walls. But somehow I managed a few clicks as we chatted, grateful that this photo of her came out.
As for the rest of the evening:
I left her for the after-hours restaurant where I apparently ate and drank a lot — an expensive lot.
It seems that when I’d had enough and asked for the check, I reached into my pocket for my wallet. But no go. I’d forgotten that I carry only a small amount of cash when I’m shooting at night. No phone and no wallet. Just an ID and a bit of cash, $20 maybe, not enough to pay the bill.
I didn’t black out, but I’m confused to this day by how I paid for that meal. I recall the waiter telling me that he could take PayPal, and the next morning, true enough, PayPal tells me that somehow without my phone I had sent $219 into my waiter’s personal account to pay for a my beers and food. Yes, that’s right, two-hundred-nineteen-dollars-and-00/100 cents.
And the Hydrant?
One last night-shot first, taken much earlier that evening.
This is Mary Soo Hoo Park, Chinatown’s historic gate is in the background. It’s a good history to retell. Mary Soo Hoo opened the first hair salon in Chinatown in the early 1960’s. As her Chinatown neighbors sat in her salon chairs and shared their life stories, she learned of the prejudices and injustices the women had to endure. Those stories led her to becoming a life-long activist on behalf of the Chinatown community. And here was a park now named after her.
As fine a story as Mary Soo Hoo’s is to share, that’s not why I’m discussing this photo. It’s the photo’s point-of-view that I’m most interested in.
Take a look at the side-by-side with the Hydrant:
What connects these two photos is this:
Before you cancel me for sneaking in product placement, you should know that I mostly use a Fuji now. I’m not selling you on Olympus. But the Hydrant’s meaning for me is largely tied to this particular camera — an Olympus OMD EM1 Mark 11.
The rectangle you see sticking out from the body? That’s an articulated screen. It can be turned and swiveled at nearly any angle for composing. A Fuji snob once made fun of me by dismissing the screen as only useful for selfies.
But with that screen turned face-up, like it is in the photograph, I can steady the camera body on the pavement and easily compose a ground-level shot by just squatting or dropping to my knees. I didn’t have to lay my old, aching body flat on the concrete.
I wrote about shooting from ground-level in an earlier Substack. Shooting low upends hierarchies. Feet become important, as they should. Upper bodies, no matter the person’s size, take on more prominence. Shooting erect, we miss the life that moves at ground level that low angles can capture.
The Hydrant reminds me of how street photography — and that camera in particular — helped me to look at at my world from the ground up. I wouldn’t have shot this photo, or 1/10 of the low-angle photographs I’ve shot, if I didn’t start with this Olympus. It’s changed how I view things.
I don’t claim any knowledge of Chinatown beyond what these and a few other images show. I helicoptered in and out. But for me, Chinatown Hydrant represents those few hours that I walked through this unique and historical neighborhood, and how I learned to capture part of it from the ground.
Oh…yes, and how I paid $219 for noodles and beer without a wallet or phone. That story’s a keeper.
What Do Paid Subscriber’s Get?
A free print and more! Check out my Substack’s No Shenanigan’s Gallery for the details.
Why Am I Offering a Free Print to Paid Subscribers?
I want to reach across the virtual divide that separates us and offer something tangible, something meaningful to me that I’ve created with my own hands and that you can hold with yours. It’s old-school, I get it. And it costs me a little bit to do this, but your support means means everything to me. so let’s give this a try.
Great photos, great stories!
Interesting and inspiring. Too early morning (for me an addicted night owl) to think clearly enough to write more. Except I intend to go out soon and try to use what you showed here to make something new for me at least (such as ground up - no wordplay intended - or steadied slow shutter speed, maybe at night). And still thinking (too much!) about what’s worth sending of my “work.”