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Tom Scola

@heyscola.bsky.social

Photographer, Brooklyn Buffista

417 Posts416 Follower 255 Folgt

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 16h ago

Carroll Gardens, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #ProImage100

Photograph of the front façade of a bodega in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The bodega’s wall is covered in bright red paneling, but most of the walls and windows are covered in advertisements for beer and cider. You can see a little bit inside of the bodega, where there are cardboard boxes of beer, and also, weirdly, a Santa figure, even though this photograph was taken in August. Above the window is the remnants of a tattered cloth awning. This is a quite sad place, and I can assure you that the interior of the bodega is even more disgusting than the exterior. Yet the bright red color ultimately rescues the photograph from being completely dreary and disheartening.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3d ago

Carroll Gardens, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #ProImage100

Photograph of a closed storefront in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The entire front of the store is closed off by rolling gates. This would normally make the scene look dystopian and depressing, but here, the gates are painted in strips of jaunty colors! I see orange, blue, pink, yellow, and teal. A big win against the conspiracy to remove color everywhere.

This is an unusual photograph from me in that it is cropped. I normally try to compose my shots in-camera as much as possible. Composing in-camera and not cropping is one of the main practices that improved my photography immensely. But here, I had to lop off the right part of the frame, changing the aspect ration from the normal 35mm 2:3 to 5:7. This improved the compositional harmony of the frame immensely. The right part of the frame was just dead space that added nothing to the photo. I could have just walked closer to the subject and composed the building tighter, but that would have involved me standing in the middle of Smith Street while taking the picture, which would have been a stupid thing to do. So I had to crop in post instead.

So, anyway, if you want to get better at photography, get into the habit of composing your photos in-camera, and not cropping in post. It will improve your ability to look for photography subjects in the field, and the end product will be better. Pre-visualization, they call it, although I think that’s a stupid term. But also, crop when you gotta crop.

Lori 💙🧡 Knicks in 5 🏆🗽@nylori.bsky.social · 4d ago

Coming to NYC restaurants Knicks in 5 #KnicksSky

Julia Is Waving, Not Drowning @booktweeting.bsky.social · 3d ago

I have never wanted to be a different kind of mammal more than I do right now being able to roll myself into an armored sphere would fix me

Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️@snarkysillysad.bsky.social · 4d ago

The Southern Three-Banded Armadillo (Tolypeutes matacus) is one of the only armadillo species capable of rolling into a completely sealed sphere: #AGoodPlace Source: www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFu...

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 4d ago

Cobble Hill, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #400TX

Black and white photograph of a window to a home of a brick building in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The photograph is absolutely infested with wabi-sabi: The bricks are old and uneven since the building has settled since it was originally built in 1843. At one point in this building’s long history the façade was painted, but it has long since faded away, leaving only a few flakes of paint here and there. There is a vine crawling up the side of the window, giving what would be an incredibly boring photograph the perfect amount of visual flair. The window is covered with iron bars and is closed off with a sheer white curtain. If you look closely, there is a small drawing of a rainbow by a child hanging in the window, the visual impact of which is completely lost, since this is a black and white photo.

Chuck Wendig @chuckwendig.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Everything is bad, but books are good. Get a book. Read the book. Cherish the book. Finish the book. Tell your friends about the book, and leave a review of the book. Hold the book close. Listen to what it tells you. Do as it commands. Place it on the dread altar and let it guide your every choice.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 7d ago

Brooklyn Heights, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #400TX

Black and white photograph of the front façade of a house in Brooklyn Heights. This historic house, built in 1831, is clad in wooden clapboards. The noontime sun shines down on the clapboards, enhancing their contrast. A bush on the bottom right of the frame breaks up on monotony of the horizontal lines.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · last wk.

Brooklyn Heights, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #400TX

Black and white photograph of the side of an apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. At the bottom left of the frame is a wrought iron fence, with a bicycle attached to it with a u-lock. Above the frame is an unseen fire escape, whose shadow casts a lattice-like pattern across the frame. Even though this photo was taken midday in the middle of summer, I have the photo graded pretty dark, as the frame is mostly in shadow, with some sections of blown-out direct sunlight.

Trung Le Nguyen @trungles.com · last wk.

I’m signing editions of Pride and Prejudice at comic con now 🤣

A beautiful edition of Pride and Prejudice with a yellow-gold fabric cover decorated with swans 🦢

The signed title page of the of this edition of Pride and Prejudice where I do a little doodle of Elizabeth

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · last wk.

Park Slope, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #Ektachrome100

Photograph of a planter on a window sill of a brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of a diptych. The sun hits the scene at an acute angle, giving it an extremely dramatic appearance. The bed of the planter is covered in green leaves, while two small bright red flowers shoot upwards. The Internet tells me the plant is some kind of germanium hybrid. Of the two photos in the diptych, I much prefer this one, although the Internet disagrees with me.

The second in a diptych of photos of window sills of brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This window sill has no flowers on it. Instead, it has an abandoned mostly-empty cup of iced coffee sitting on it. Again, the sun is hitting the scene at a dramatic angle, and the window is quite dirty. The way the sun bounces off the dirt on the window gives the whole photo a dreamy, painterly appearance. People sometimes tell me my photos look like paintings. Eventually I noticed that when they do, it is always a picture of a dirty window in direct sunlight. I guess there is something about photos of dirty windows in sunlight that reminds people of paintings.

Even though I firmly believe that the first photo is objectively better than this one. This photo outperformed the first by a wide margin on social media. Maybe I don’t like this photo as much because I don’t drink coffee.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 2w ago

Park Slope, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #Ektachrome100

Photograph of the front façade of a commercial/industrial building in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building has a big rolling gate for trucks to enter, with the words NO PARKING stenciled onto it. Looking at this site on Street View, the entrance also has a curb cut which is painted bright yellow, and there is a bright orange traffic cone out front with another NO PARKING sign attached to it, and of course, a car parked right there. Next to the truck entrance is a doorway for humans. It was once painted a pleasing color of pumpkin-orange, but the paint has started to flake off, the door is weathered and dented, and has started to rust. To the right of the frame, the building’s cinder blocks are painted in a mosaic of pastel colors, which is the kind of vernacular architecture shit that I LIVE for.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 2w ago

Main Title

YouTube video by Joseph LoDuca - Topic

youtube.com

Becky Tyler@beckytylerart.bsky.social · 2w ago

What song did the Sirens sing in The Odyssey? Wrong answers only.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 2w ago

Boerum Hill, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #Ektachrome100

Photograph of the front façade of a home in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is a former 19th century carriage house that has been converted into a residence. The large swinging doors that were used to park a rich person’s horse and carriage is no longer functional, and the present owner has decorated it with plants. This building is charming as fuck, but it’s also a waste of space, since this lot could fit apartments for many people, instead of the pied-à-terre for one family. Since the block it is on is landmarked, it can never be torn down.

Kodak had recently re-introduced Ektachrome in 2019, and I got my hands on some here in 2020. I liked the results, but the extra expense wasn’t worth it to me. Plus, my piece of shit scanner and software had a surprisingly difficult time with this. Just reproduce exactly what appears on the slide, how difficult can that be? I had to tweak the hell out of these scans to get decent results, and a bunch of frames were wasted because I couldn’t fix them in post, even though everything was correctly exposed.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Tribeca, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Photograph of the front stoop of what was once an industrial building in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. Everything is quite Spartan in appearance. The stairs are made from diamond-pattern steel plates. The doors are a bland grey metal. There is a column next to the doors, again painted a dull grey. There is a warning sign attached to the column warning about the building’s freight elevator. In spite of everything being drab and functional, this is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. I haven’t looked it up, but I don’t doubt that apartments worth tens of millions of dollars sit above this inauspicious entrance.

Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 3w ago

A glass door with a hand-lettered sign reading:

NO!!!
SOLICTATION!!!
except Tamale lady

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Tribeca, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

Vertical photograph of a bright red wall in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. This is really, really, red. I overexposed the UltraMax by two stops to bring out the red even more in the bright sunshine. This is way more red than your monitor can handle. On the sidewalk in front of the wall is a metal barrier, with vertical bars, and above, out of frame, is a fire escape, whose shadow projects horizontal bars across the top half of the frame.

Since 2020, this wall has been painted black, part of the conspiracy to remove color from all our lives.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Current Air Quality
AQI 155
Unhealthy
Brooklyn, NY
1 PM EDT JUL 15, 2026

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Red Hook, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #UltraMax400

A vertical photograph of a fenced-off lot in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Sitting on the sidewalk in front of the fence is one of those free newspaper dispensers you see all over the city. This one has been absconded, painted red and black, and has been repurposed as a Little Free Library. However, it looks like the LFL has failed at its new purpose, and now sits empty and abandoned, next to a small pile of trash.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

A vote for a Republican is a vote for EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA.

Post nicht verfügbar.

Tom Scola @heyscola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Canal St Station, 2020 #BelieveInFilm #400TX

Black and white photograph of the interior of a NYC subway car. This is an R62 subway car, built c. 1984. Forty-two years old, and going strong; due to be replaced in the next 5–10 years. The interior is mostly stainless steel; perfect for the black and white rendering. On the wall is a posting in the NYC Subway Poetry in Motion Series:

Faithful Forest: an excerpt by Alberto Rios b. 1952

The leaves liked the wind, and went with it.
The trees grew more leaves, but wind took them all.

And then the bare trees were *branches*, which in their frenzy
Made people think of so many ideas—

Branches were lines on the paper of sky,
Drawing shapes on the shifting clouds

Until everyone agreed that they saw horses.

Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 4w ago

I really kinda feel like all the news reports on this are burying the lede. Which should "The only way a Cyclospora outbreak can happen is if raw sewage is getting onto the food."