(Manhattanhenge over 72nd Street and Columbus)

I was fortunate enough to witness Manhattanhenge this year as I joined my friends, Mo and Francesco, on 72nd Street and Columbus. As I arrived at the intersection I could already see a small crowd gathering in the middle of the street. The sun was hiding behind some thin clouds, so we waited. As the sun revealed itself, a brilliant orange glow illuminated the entire west side. Squinting in the direct sunlight I snapped my photos in rapid succession. More people gathered in the middle of the street as they snapped photos with their phone cameras. I couldn’t have asked for a better photo opportunity.

(my dad’s old Asahi Pentax camera)

My dad used to take a lot of photos of us with an assortment of cameras he had bought in Japan. Recently I dug out an old Asahi Pentax camera that had been picking up dust in the basement. Not knowing if it was still functional I took it to the local camera shop to get it checked out. Back when my dad was still using film he would always go to L & L Camera. The owner, Lenny, has been a celebrated photographer who had served in the military and traveled the world. His son, Lenny Jr, greeted me and began to delve into the mechanics of the Pentax camera. Soon after, Roger, who has a lot of film photography experience, began teaching me the basics of photography. He would say, “the depth of field is the range of focus your lens is capable of.” He would then go on to the finer points of how the aperture and shutter speed related to each other. Having already learned this lesson through my own work with digital photography I allowed him to indulge me on the basics. I felt like he was passing on his wisdom to me and I appreciated the fact that he spent so much time explaining things to me.

(top view)

I left L & L Camera enthusiastically with five rolls of film and a mission. I wanted to take everything I learned about photography over the years and try my hand at manual film photography. The Pentax camera and the 50mm f1.4 lens that was attached to it takes very beautiful photos. It has a retro look that cannot be reproduced with a digital camera. Looking back over all of our family albums, the photos really take me back to another time and place. I had the perfect subject: my nephew, Bay. I set the aperture at 8 and shutter speed at 1/125 as recommended by Roger. Then I just snapped away from every angle I could think of. The manual lens took some getting used to. It’s very hard to tell when it’s in focus under low light conditions. It may just be my eyes but after some time fidgeting with the focus I got a pretty good handle on it. Babies are quite unpredictable in their facial expressions so I waited patiently for Bay to turn my way and look at me. I was hoping he would crack a smile like he does sometimes but I was not so lucky.

The body of the Pentax camera is mostly solid metal which gives it a sturdy feel. A nob at the top left adjusts the shutter speed, while on the opposite side there is a nob that adjusts the ISO. The 50mm lens also has a very solid feel to it. It has rings to adjust the aperture and focus. The aperture ring snaps into place when I hit any specific f-stop. The manual focus rings feels very smooth. It gives the impression that you have control over the focus to the n-th degree. I can see why hardcore film photographers prefer these kinds of cameras – you tell the camera what to do, not the other way around. The camera doesn’t compensate one way or the other. It does exactly what you set it up to do. It requires more thought and the fact that you’re limited to the number of photos on the film keeps you from wasting your shots.

I am eagerly awaiting the development of the first roll of film that I shot with. Although film photography is inconvenient and rather expensive to develop I am hoping the rewards will greatly outweigh the costs. Photos to come…

(movie posters)

(model poster)

The area of Jackson Heights that I live in has a predominantly South Asian population (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan). It is affectionately referred to as Little India or Jaikishan Heights. 73rd and 74th Streets are lined with various South Asian restaurants, grocery stores, jewelry shops, bakery/sweets shops, sari boutiques, electronic shops and dollar stores. On any given day it can be densely packed with shoppers and restaurant goers. As you can imagine it can be quite chaotic as the traffic situation around the neighborhood is less than ideal. Many buses try to push through as the regular shoppers and taxis double park in and around 73rd Street. But this is a minor annoyance because Jackson Heights has grown on me and I find it to be a very convenient neighborhood. Cheap food is available within a few blocks: Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Mexican, Colombian, Cuban, Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Argentinian to name a few. I am still discovering new restaurants from time to time such as Mie Jakarta on Whitney Avenue, which is technically in Elmhurst.

(main entrance to the Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Avenue train station)

(Jackson Heights bus terminal)

I live right around the corner from the Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Avenue train station. I can get on the E, F, M, R and 7 trains. Citifield is only about 10 minutes away by the 7 train. Getting to the city is pretty easy although the morning commute can be pretty crowded. Renovations for the train station/bus terminal were conpleted in 2005 for about $132 million. This was after it was voted the dirtiest subway station in 2000. Considered one the of the first “green” subway stations in New York, it includes solar panels and recyclable steel. The tens of thousands of daily commuters witness its modern look and feel as they travel to and from Manhattan and the other boroughs of New York City.

(Halal butcher and goat meat)

(Himalayan Yak Restaurant)

(game of Chinese chess or perhaps Go)

The thing I most appreciate about Jackson Heights other than its diversity is the fact that it hasn’t been overrun with new developments. This would no doubt raise property values and gentrify the neighborhood, but I appreciate the pockets of ethnic localities that give Jackson Heights its personality. The area between 76th and 88th Streets and Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard was designated as the New York City Historic District of Jackson Heights in 1993. This gives much of Jackson Heights protection from major redevelopment that could forever alter what has been preserved until now, which is to say its historic architecture and affordability. But as people continue to move into Jackson Heights from Manhattan and Brooklyn due to high costs of living, it’s hard to say how much longer things will remain as they are.

I wanted to capture some of what makes Jackson Heights unique and special by walking around some of the areas I’m familar with and some that I haven’t been to before. I started out by taking wide shots with my 17-40mm lens. But I realized that I needed photos of people and my 70-200mm lens helped me do that without being intrusive. Most of these photos were taken this winter but a couple were taken last summer.

(balloons)

(lemonade stand)

(fruit stands outside a Chinese supermarket)

(a game of basketball)

(car wash)

(Chinese bakery)

(cash for gold)

(Elmhurst Hospital)

(street parking)

(stretch of fence)

(pair of shoes and mailbox)

(no parking)

(by the 7th train overpass)

(restaurant signs – some of the food here is great including Penang and Pho Banc)

(corner jewelry store and Eagle Indian Theater – this was recently closed down; wondering what will replace it)

(mannequin with Indian dress and Ganesha)

(street vendors selling trinkets)

(street signs – the no honking sign is never heeded)

(Gandhi, the one and only)

So not knowing how long it would actually take to make gnocchi, I just got my stuff together and began my adventure. Epicurious had a decent recipe for gnocchi so I decided to make the gnocchi from scratch. Bad mistake. Four long hours had elapsed before I was finally able to sit down to eat my twice-cooked gnocchi. As my friend put it, it was a one out of a possible ten. I totally undercooked it and it tasted like crap. The gnocchi were gargantuan because I had no idea how big they would end up being. I had to cut them into smaller pieces and reboil them. After that it tasted like something that resembled gnocchi.

So I learned that grating potatoes and kneading dough is not my thing. I’m still proud of myself for sticking it out and finishing what I started.

(the ingredients)

(crimini mushrooms)

(baked potatoes)

(30 minutes of mindless potato grating)

(the product of 20 minutes of kneading)

(stretching out the dough)

(preparing the gnocchi for boiling)

(creamy mushroom marinara sauce – the only thing that tasted good)

(boiling the gnocchi)

(my dinner)

A good sampling of Chinatown would be some Shanghai-style Xiaolongbao (dumplings), Singapore Chow Mai Fun and Tsing Tao beer at Joe’s Shanghai followed by some bubble tea from Ten Ren or Quickly. Heading over to the edge of Chinatown where it meets the lower east side, you can watch some soccer matches at the Sara D. Roosevelt Park. You can cap the night off with some karaoke at any one of the KTV karaoke bars. You will get your moneys worth by spending your evening in Chinatown.

(Crab)

(Fish on ice)

(Fish by the pound)

(Duck & jumbo shrimp)

(Dragon fruit)

(Fruit for sale)

(Vegetable stand)

(Fruit picking)

(Late night fruit stand)

(Information kiosk and grocery)

(Chinese lanterns)

(Miniatures)

(Fruit stand)

(Shopping)

(Street lamp on Doyers Street)

(Doyers Street)

I started working with the Zend Framework before the version 1.0 release, and even then it was a pretty polished framework with many features to like. It had great promise because it was being developed by Zend and because of all the industry support behind it. The great thing about the Zend Framework is that you don’t have to implement the framework itself and incur its overhead. You can just use the many useful classes it offers such as Gdata, Caching, Feed, PDF and Search Lucene implementations. But if you wanted to use the framework then you have a pretty solid framework to work with.

My first Zend Framework project required a group of external RSS feeds to provide the content. Zend_Feed provided everything I needed to handle RSS and Atom feeds. Zend_Cache’s file adapter allowed me to cache the feeds. Having worked with the CakePHP framework before I found setting up the framework pretty straightforward. The documentation on Zend’s Website provided most of what I needed even though I found the Quick Start Guide somewhat lacking. The Website was built quicker than I had anticipated and my first impression of the Zend Framework was a good one.

Without caching and properly optimized code the framework can be a bit slow. I was handed a Website done by a third-party developer in order to polish it up a bit. They had built their own implementation of the configuration, data abstraction layer, caching and other classes. This additional overhead may have increased the load time of the Website and it seemed to me that the Website would have been better written if they had not extended many of the core classes and just kept it simple. Even with some of their clever caching the Website would not load quickly enough. After some tweaking of the database queries, caching, server optimizations and other bits here and there, we were able to improve the load time to an acceptable level.

Now there are more things to like about the Zend Framework as they have added support for the Dojo and jQuery Ajax libraries as well as pagination, validation and command line tools. It is a solid framework for middle to larger-sized projects. Many developers swear by the Zend Framework because of its industry backing and exhaustive list of features. I find it to be a solid framework as long as the developer knows how to optimize the code for good load times. Here are some Websites or Web applications that are powered by the Zend Framework

• IGN’s Grand Theft Auto ‘Hood
• Magento Commerce: A powerful and flexible e-commerce platform built on top of the Zend Framework
• Atmail Webmail Client
• Digitalus CMS