Greenpoint Nurses' Residence: Inside Brooklyn's Abandoned Quarters

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1940s Greenpoint Hospital Campus Tax Photo There is a certain kind of quiet that only abandoned buildings have. Not peaceful, quiet. More like held-breath quiet. The kind that makes you hyper-aware of every footstep, every creak, every shadow shifting at the edge of your vision. I found that quiet on a cloudy afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, standing outside a chain-link fence and looking up at the old Nurse Quarters of Greenpoint Hospital. I had stumbled onto the building almost by accident. I was deep into researching other vacant structures across the borough when the Nurses' Residence turned up on the blogs. The fact that it sat close to home made the decision easy. One overcast day, I drove slowly down the block on a hunch, scanning the fence line. That is when I spotted it: a gap, barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. No rope. No gear. Just an opening and a window of time between passing cars and foot traffic. I slipped inside. The entrance foyer stopped me cold...
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eBay Vintage Lens Buy: Asanuma Auto-Tele 135mm 1:2.8



This Japanese lens was made by Asanuma Shokai in the early '10s and '20s. The lens is pretty well built for these particular types of old manual lenses. It s pretty light and not to solid or heavy like a Takumar. A good choice for a short tele-photo lens in the camera bag. So far the images are pretty sharp and overall great contrasting colors. A lens I will be surely using for the foreseeable future.

Asanuma Shōkai has been a Japanese distributor of photographic supplies from the 19th century to the present day (2010). It manufactured its own large-format studio or field cameras, and also some amateur cameras in the 1910s and 1920s. Today it is best known for its range of accessories sold under the brand King.










Source: Photo Pentax, Camerapedia,

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