Sketchbook
Red Dye Fountain in St. Louis
I just got back from another exploratory visit to St. Louis. It was very hot and humid, and one thing is for sure: I’m going to need to invest in more shorts. Not only will I have less need to be in khakis now that I’m leaving the corporate world, but St. Louis is a [...]
Random Goodness: Scenes from New Year’s Eve
When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 2009 and we started were swept into 2010, I was at a party with some of my dear friends in the West Village. I had my G9 camera with me, but I didn’t take too many images, and to be frank, the ones I did take [...]
Walking to Work
I’ve been walking to work for the past couple of months (excluding the very snowy days) and have been loving it. In addition to getting about four miles of additional exercise each day, it offers me a chance to wake up and spend some time in the sunlight before cloistering myself into my cube each [...]
Megan at the Races
Here’s a quick shot from October that I finally have gotten around to doing the post-production on. This was taken at a steeplechase race in Virginia. Incidentally I picked the overall winner for the cup race that day – a horse called Bubble Economy. Unfortunately lots of other people bet on that horse as well [...]
Some Street Shots
On Monday I am going to be shooting a portrait of a partner in my firm for an upcoming publication. I have been given a photo brief from a designer in London which asks for black and white imagery, shot wide with dynamic backgrounds. The problem is that our office is exceedingly dull, and generally [...]
Model Mania
Boy, do I need to work on my posing skillz. I was tossed into a studio with three lovely models last Thursday without any thought or prep and kind of panicked. “Yeah, um, well, oh wait, don’t move that looks great….beautiful…” Sigh. After a while I got comfortable and was able to give some coherent [...]
Hard Light, Soft Fill
Last night in class we were experimenting with some hard light as our main light, and soft light as our fill. One thing that I took away was the idea of layering the light in a different way than seems intuitive. In general, as you’ll see in the samples posted below, I tend to put [...]
More Classwork
This week, edge lights and ring flash. Mostly stuff I already knew, but having someone explain the details and finer points, always helpful. Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, I love being around other photographers and talking about photography outside my bubble – almost as important to me as the classwork, although I’m learning a lot [...]
More From My Lighting Class
I have been having a lot of fun at my lighting class – there is so much to learn. Last week we broke out into groups earlier than before and I was kind of disorganized with my group as far as breaking up the time appropriately. I guess I was having a hard time getting [...]
iPhlog
I came across iPhlog yesterday, which is a photoblog by Ryan Donnell from my home-state of PA. I love the soft-focus Polariod-eque atmospheric quality of the photos he’s making with his iPhone: iPhone + Photos + Blog = The iPhlog. No cropping, no High Pass Filter, no Levels. Just think of it like a sketch [...]
Self Portrait At Work with Poster
Alternate title: “I’m Too Busy To Play With My New Camera and I Am Therefore Grumpy” Poster in the background is a beautiful photo of Zhang Ziyi by Davis Factor for Corbis. As a side note, Corbis used to send out these awesome posters as promos but their rep told me recently that they stopped [...]
Fette Sau and Beer
On Friday night I joined some friends at a BBQ joint in Brooklyn called Fette Sau (Fat Sow for the who’s at home). It’s an amazing place with tons of great food, dozens of varieties of rare and interesting bourbons, and of course lots of beer. The first time I went to Fette Sau we [...]
Hardcopy
In the digital world of Flickr and the plethora of online photography applications, we don’t often think about making actual prints. Hell, Polaroid has even stopped making film. In my staff photographer position, 90% of my work goes straight into printed publications, but rarely do we have a need for actual photography prints. I find [...]
Real People
I am envious of the big name photographers. Duh. No, seriously. I wish I was in a position where I could shoot beautiful and handsome models all day long, models who are being paid to be there, models who know how to act natural, and understand how to pose, and of course, understand what they [...]
Details
When I shoot a portrait, I love shooting a closeup of something in the room where the portrait is shot, or some detail of the subject’s clothing, and then pairing it up with the portrait image. I think it makes the portrait have much more impact. In this way, two or more photos can have [...]
Power of B&W
Converting a color photo to black and white is a pretty standard way to turn a mediocre photo into a good photo. We’ve all done this in an attempt to hide bad light, rough color, or to make a grainy photo work. But there are many other reasons to shoot color and convert to black [...]
Letter of the Law
One of the challenges of my firm’s brand, is their strict rules about icon usage with photography. Often we have a client who has designed (or asks us to design) an icon to represent an idea or a service line, and then asks us to include it on top of a photo on the cover [...]
The Importance of Crop
Last weekend a friend of Dr.Girlfriend’s was in town, and she brought along her two little boys. One night we had them over to our place, which caused some stress when the youngest immediately walked over to my lovely HD TV and put his hands flat on the screen. And a bit more stress when [...]
Miniature University
I wanted to post a couple of quick samples of the stuff that I’ve been working on lately – the most interesting has been for part of the tax practice at my firm. Pretty neat stuff – the creative director built the structures and hand painted all the little people. It was a great shoot, [...]
Ringlight Test
I bought myself an ABR800 as the next addition to my personal studio lighting set up and I’m very excited. I haven’t gotten to do much playing around with it, but grabbed a few shots of a coworker and am very pleased with the results. This sucker is powerful. As you can see, my subject [...]