Last night a good friend of mine scored me a free ticket to see Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden for the Monster Ball.  I hate to sound trite, but words don’t do Gaga justice so I will just say that it was amazing.

When I go to events like this I struggle with whether or not to sneak my good camera in so that I can take some nice Creative Commons photos of one of the most inspiring artists working today.  To bring a clunky DSLR means that I no longer feel like a spectator to the event as much as a documentarian.  I don’t sit back and enjoy the show (or dance in the aisles as I did last night) but instead I’m always on the lookout for crisper photos, better angles.  It can make an event I am in the middle of feel far away.

Since my Creative Commons project is more-or-less officially over (with exceptions), I left the DSLR at home and brought my Samsung cameraphone.  Obviously, the photos aren’t so great, but my own personal experience was so much better without the DSLR.

Me and Brooke with Gaga in the background.  Thank you to the security guard who took this photo and then promptly told us to go back to our seats.

She is actually playing the piano she is on top of in the photo above.

Brett and Brooke having a blast.

Below are three shots that I think remind the viewer of two things:  the immensity of New York City; and that it exists on a series of islands.  It’s such a large city that it’s easy to forget those.

All shots taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.  All photos taken with the Samsung Memoir cameraphone.

The famous financial district in lower downtown with the Hudson River.  Taken from Jersey City’s Exchange Place train station.

Downtown Brooklyn with the East River seen from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Bridge with the Manhattan Bridge behind it, and the South Street Seaport in the foreground, taken from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan.  That’s one of the historic boats docked at the seaport’s museum.

I thought this was one of the most over-hyped blizzards ever.  It’s embarrassing how the city shut down over an average snow storm.  Below are photos–licensed Creative Commons 3.0–of “Snowmageddon 2010″ New York City (yawn) that I took with my Samsung Memoir cameraphone:

Snow plows in the East Village on the corner of 1st Avenue and Houston.

Little Man in front of our building, trying to deal with the snow.

The view overlooking Wall Street.

Looking down toward the street, financial district, Manhattan.

Looking toward City Hall.  The tall skyscraper in the distance is the still under construction 99 Church Street.

I captured this trio in Tompkins Square Park in my neighborhood, New York’s East Village.  An unseasonably warm day in the city, a lot of people were out to enjoy one of the few outdoor days before winter.

The guy was singing his heart out, and these two girls were lapping it up.  The girls were far more attractive than the guitarist.  Just goes to show how far music can carry the heart.  They were both quite taken with him.  He sang so loudly that passers-by had to look.  I am not saying the singing was bad, but its volume created a spectacle.

The one in the middle provided shy, barely-audible background vocals overpowered by his Steve Perry meets John Mayer power chords.

The listening fare included Shwayze – lol.

They are sitting at the base of the famous Hare Krishna tree (from Wikipedia):

One of Tompkins Square Park’s most prominent features is its collection of venerable American Elm (Ulmus americana) trees. One elm in particular, located next to the semi-circular arrangement of benches in the park’s center, is important to adherents of the Hare Krishna religion. It was beneath this tree, on October 9, 1966, that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, held the first recorded outdoor chanting session of the Hare Krishna mantra outside of the Indian subcontinent; participants in the ceremony included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The event is seen as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States, and the tree is treated by Krishna adherents as a significant religious site.

Photos taken with the Samsung Memoir camera phone.

There are some festivals that happen in New York you always wonder if they might up and close on you (Lady Bunny and Wigstock are still missed). So it’s excellent that the HOWL! Festival–the annual tribute to Allen Ginsberg and counterculture–continues in the East Village.

Each year the festival hangs up canvas over the gates of Tompkins Square Park inviting anyone to contribute a painting. It’s called Art Around the Park, and much of the work that goes up is as good as what you might find in a gallery (some artists seek to sell their work; others are anonymous and first grab wins once the festival is over).

Above to the right was a favorite of mine, by artist Izuo Watanabe, aka Izu, whose other giant face works can be viewed on Flickr, or on his website.

Finally, the last few weeks of testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–is coming to an end.  Previous forays include a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B); poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F);  the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival (Grade: C); and its use as a spy camera (Grade: D-).

The shots below were all taken with Samsung Memoir, and it did a phenomenal job.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA HOWL! TEST GRADE:  A

Michael Jackson

Artist David Greene–who has painted a series of public reproductions of iconic celebrity portraits–contributes his Jackson Five-era Michael Jackson.

Bloomdog Billionaire

Artist:  Krezell

Ben Dover

Artists:  Nora King and Lee Dawson (who seem to have come out of the Global Girls Art Workshop)

Anti-CIA

Artist:  Unknown (pictured)

Miscellaneous

Artist: Anonymous

Perfection or reality

Artists:  Sabel Salazar and Jeffrey Lux (click on photo to see contact information)

Politics of the LES

Artist: LV 2009 – I loved this!  I wish I could use it on Wikipedia.

Since I was a little kid I wanted to be a spy, a common childhood fantasy that never leaves as we grow older, as evidenced by the never-dying popularity of spy films and James Bond.

One of the uses for a camera phone is, essentially, as an amateur spy camera.  New York City, my home, arguably has the most vibrant street life in the United States.  On a typical commute to or from work, you can run into movies and television shows being filmed; modeling shoots; brawls; protests; and a variety of other sights that make for a far more interesting daily existence.

In short, New Yorkers are rarely bored.  When people tell us they can’t imagine living here because of all the crazy people, what makes one a New Yorker is  not being able to imagine living without them.  We love real life, and not the sanitized, behind-closed-doors living that people in many of the other 17 cities I’ve lived in seem to prefer.

Over the last few weeks I have devoted my blog space to testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–in various settings.  Previous forays include a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B); poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F); and the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival (Grade: C).

In this installment, I look at the camera’s use for amateur spying.

Samsung Memoir makes for a poor spy camera

The main problem with the Memoir as a spy camera is…it looks like a camera.  Unlike virtually ever other camera phone on the market, when you point the Memoir at someone you look like you are taking their picture.

You can’t be a spy when you can’t camouflage your intentions, should you go noticed.

The second problem is the zoom.  Samsung proclaims that it has a 16x digital zoom.  That essentially means that the zoom is non-existent because it’s not optical zoom.

Proclaiming digital zoom as a feature is deceptive because it does exactly what you can do with editing software.  The difference is that digital zoom does it far more poorly on the camera than if you took the full-frame and zoomed it using free photo editing programs like Picasa.

Let me repeat:  Digital zoom is worthless; always look for optical zoom.  It’s the only zoom that matters.

Finally, the lens quality is all over the place.  You can’t use a flash for spying, and the Memoir’s autofocus uses a red beam that, when it lands on the subject, is instantly noticeable.

Spy photos on the subway

I used the subway over the last week as my spy photo testing ground.  The goal was to take photos unnoticed.  Many tourists come on the trains and take photographs of the “subway experience” so New Yorkers are used to it; however, to be a spy I had to go undetected.  You can see below that the spy photos are all over the board in quality.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA SUBWAY SPY TEST GRADE:  D-

Every year in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of New York City the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival takes over.  Parker lived right on the park.

As readers know, I’ve been spending a lot of blog space testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–in various settings.  Previously I did a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B) and poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F).  The Parker festival was an opportunity to test the Memoir at an outdoor concert.

First, a little about Parker–a name you should know–from Wikipedia:

Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker’s innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker’s songs have become standards, including “Billie’s Bounce“, “Anthropology”, “Ornithology“, and “Confirmation”. He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines – such as “Ko-Ko“, “Kim”, and “Leap Frog” – he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation “Parker’s Mood” represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.

Parker, who hailed from Kansas City, had absolutley no desire to ever be buried there.  His death was dramatic:

Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Nica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City while watching The Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on television. Though the official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, Parker’s demise was undoubtedly hastened by his drug and alcohol abuse. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker’s 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.

It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death. Parker had told his common-law wife, Chan, that he didn’t want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home and he didn’t want any fuss or memorials when he died. At the time of his death, though, he hadn’t divorced his previous wife Doris, nor had he officially married Chan, which left Parker in the rather awkward post-mortem situation of having two widows, a scenario which muddied the issue of next of kin and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in his adopted hometown. Dizzy Gillespie was able to co-opt the funeral arrangement^s that Chan had been putting together and coordinated a ‘lying-in-state’, a Harlem procession officiated by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and a memorial concert before flying Parker’s body back to Missouri to be buried there per his mother’s wishes. Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemeter^y in Kansas City, Missouri.

The photographs of the festival once again showed how limited the “best” camera phone is in producing quality.  It’s the lens, not the pixels (the Memoir packs a wallop with 8 mps).

See, everyone thinks “More Megapixels, More Quality” but it simply is not the case when your lens is worthless.  Essentially, you get really large crappy photos.

More dispiriting is that the conditions for shooting–outside, daylight, but with shade–that I previously found to be the camera’s optimal conditions for shots helped little.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA CHARLIE PARKER FESTIVAL TEST GRADE:  C

The Stage – I was up pretty close.  For a camera phone, the Memoir produced a decent shot.

Arguably the best shot I took of the festival, the park was swarmed with people.

One of the tricks to the Samsung Memoir is to get absolutely no light in an otherwise dark frame.  The only difference between this shot and the one before it is the sunlight/sky above the stage, which completely throws off the Memoir, as it did here.  If I framed the shot lower to remove the sky above the stage, it would have come out clearer.  Unfortunately, if you have to change your shot’s frame dramatically over things like ‘there was sky in the photo’ then the camera is not worth much.

Charlie Parker’s home on Tompkins Square Park.  This came out better because I cut off the top half of the building, which was much lighter due to the position of the sun, to keep the bottom half’s color intact.

I’m testing the new Samsung Memoir 8 megapixel camera phone to see how it holds up in various conditions.  This weekend it had the chance to prove itself on vacation in Fire Island, where it was graded a B for its performance.

Last night at the famed Blue Stockings bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Memoir summarily failed on all fronts in its Eileen Myles test.

(continued below)

A packed, sweltering Blue Stockings bookshop sweats patiently in the heat for Eileen Myles to take the mic.

Myles is one of the United State’s more influential writers, and I have had the supreme pleasure of photographing her now three times.

It was this third time that was depressing.  The Memoir produced horrible photos of Myles reading to her audience.  It was amazing:  I stood only about five feet from Myles, yet it was impossible to take a clean shot.  The color was off every single one, and the blurriness added insult to injury.

Photographing Eileen Myles through the years

The first time I shot Myles was at the 2006 Brooklyn Book Festival.  I’m not much for poetry, but her rendition of “That’s Gay” was so linguistically melodic and intellectually complex that she won me over.  I absolutely love her work, and that was the first time I was exposed to it.  The camera I used was a low-priced 2.6 megapixel Fuji point-and-shoot.

My second opportunity was at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival.  By this time I had my Olympus E-500 DSLR, the main camera I used for Wikipedia, and the crispness of the work was far above the 2006 shot; however, on the 2006 I liked the lighting and background better.

But last night was the worst of the bunch.  The Samsung Memoir, using only its factory settings (with the anti-shake on) completely crapped out.

I couldn’t take a decent photograph of anyone, or anything, in Blue Stocking’s fluorescent lighting.  I tried so hard to make the camera lens focus, that I’m certain Myles–who read from her new work, The Importance of Being Iceland–assumed I was paparazzi.

Eileen Myles was sublime, as always, despite a room that felt like the inside of a hot leather glove left inside a car parked in the heat.  It was almost unbearable, and would have been had Myles’ wit and humor not allayed the crowd’s pending heat stroke with smiles.  Too bad the Memoir didn’t do the evening justice.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA EILEEN MYLES TEST GRADE:  F

At 10:15 this morning I stumbled upon a personal trainer boxing with his client right on Wall Street, with the famous Trinity Church in the background.  In the first photo, if you were to hang your first left you would be in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

It’s possible that these guys are from the nearby Trinity Boxing Club, the same gym where NBC’s The Contender held tryouts.

The photos were taken with the new Samsung Memoir; I have not explored the camera phone’s features at all yet – these were simply point n’ shoot.

Boxing requires tremendous focus.  It makes sense that a personal trainer would take his client in the middle of one of the busiest places on Earth to train him to keep focus on his opponent and not be distracted.

My old DSLR, the Olympus E-500, is large and cumbersome to tote around.  It is horrendously out-of-date, and since I stopped serious photography for the Creative Commons, I wanted a camera that was easily transported and allowed for quick shots.  Fights that break out on the bus.  Buildings that collapse.  Protests and other things you stumble upon walking around New York City.

I needed a blog camera.

I also wanted an MP3 player and updating my 2007 Blackberry wasn’t a bad idea.  The camera was prime.  I want to capture New York in a way that I did in 2006, and the bulky DSLR doesn’t allow for that.

I elected to go with the 8 megapixel Samsung Memoir, which will now be the official camera of this blog.  Look for it to be test driven this weekend in Fire Island.  The Memoir is generally considered one of the best, if not the best, camera phone on the market:

But that has all changed with the 8-megapixel Samsung Memoir, which is now available from T-Mobile USA for a much more affordable $249.99 (compared to the $700 or so for the Innov8). Indeed, this makes the Memoir the highest-performing camera phone with a U.S. carrier, though we’re sure this accolade won’t last long. The Memoir definitely delivers in the photo quality department, with great photos and camera features that rival even those on a standalone point-and-shoot camera. The Memoir even offers direct uploads to online photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket. [CNET]

Below is a shot I took from my office on Wall Street moments after purchasing the new phone.  Looking north toward midtown, the new tower you see is being built by UBS.  To get a better look at the gold New York Life Tower to the right of the UBS tower, click here.