N.Y. / REGION
An Expensive View (but Hardly Expansive) of New York City


JUNE 28, 2015
Photo

A view of the Statue of Liberty through the Brooklyn Bridge captured from the Manhattan Bridge with a 1200-millimeter lens. CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times


AdvertisementContinue reading the main story


Grace Notes

By JAMES BARRON
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Email
Share
Tweet
Save
More
Continue reading the main story

It came with a warning: Looking through it would be like looking at the city through a soda straw — a traditional soda straw that does not bend like an elbow.

A $180,000 soda straw.

The warning applied to a camera lens that is unbelievably large, unbelievably heavy and unbelievably expensive. It is, in order, three feet long, 36 pounds and see above. At 1,200 millimeters, its focal length is almost as audacious as its price tag — which is $1,000 more than what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo earns in a year and $6,000 more than what United States senators and representatives earn in a year. It is $45,000 less than Mayor Bill de Blasio’s salary. But of course there are taxes to be deducted.

From way up in the crowd at a baseball game, an ordinary lens would not show much more than a cellphone’s camera would.

A 1,200-millimeter lens brings the world so close and so narrow that all it captures are stamp-size scenes — the grimace on a runner’s face as he slides into third base, perhaps. Or the third baseman’s hand, reaching to apply the tag. Or the umpire’s fist as he calls the out. The view with a 1,200-millimeter lens is so narrow that you might not catch all three moments in the same frame. But what close-ups. If Jimmy Stewart had had a 1,200-millimeter lens in “Rear Window,” he could have read Raymond Burr’s newspaper across the courtyard.Photo

A jogger at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

I read about the lens on photography blogs and realized that a second warning applied: Don’t even think about taking a selfie. It will not focus on anything closer than about 46 feet. I read that it could keep objects in the background sharp from a distance of eight miles. That is about as far as seeing straight to La Guardia Airport or Columbia’s campus from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Still, I admit it: I harbored Mittyesque daydreams. I longed to look at the city through that lens, to see not the big picture — the bridges and the buildings against the skyline — but the small details: the taut strings of those bridges, the skins on the buildings, the little carved figures that nobody notices, the mullions, the lintels.

Faster than you could say ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, Todd Vorenkamp of B&H Photo, the Manhattan store that sells the lens, said he would meet me someplace, and he would bring the lens. The idea was to put it on my own camera. But The New York Times assigned Chang W. Lee, a staff photographer who has taken any number of amazing sports shots in the last few months, to see what he could do with the lens. So it was his better, more complicated camera that would record the images.

Mr. Vorenkamp wasn’t going to let us take the lens out alone. B&H is not a lending library, but more than that, he had learned the hard way that the 1,200-millimeter lens is difficult to haul around. Taking it anywhere is “a two-pallbearer operation,” he said, adding that its case weighs about as much as the lens itself. He said one person could heave the lens over a shoulder and carry it like a rifle. He did that once, with consequences: a bruise on his collarbone.


AdvertisementContinue reading the main story


AdvertisementContinue reading the main story


AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

Mr. Vorenkamp and colleagues from B&H had toted the lens to places all around the city to scout shooting locations. On the way to Staten Island, they were stopped at the ferry terminal in Manhattan. A bomb-sniffing dog was curious about the lens. Mr. Vorenkamp said he offered to open the case, but the dog’s handler did not bother. Apparently, the dog just liked the smell of the case.

The dog was not the only one that took notice — after all, the lens is larger than a small telescope. It easily dwarfs almost any camera body that is mounted on it.

Canon made the first of these lenses for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The company made several more in the 1990s and was said to have lent one to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to photograph every pitch Mark McGwire faced in 1999.Photo

A Marine Corps aircraft prepares to land at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, as photographed from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. CreditJames Barron/The New York Times