21st Century Photography

Posted on 3 Comments
the sea

For those of you in NYC this weekend, make sure you come to the 21st Century Photography Opening Party on Saturday, January 17th, from 7-9pm at the NY Camera Club located at 336 West 37th Street, Suite 206.
The show kick starts a weekend of inspirational activities by the f295 group with a seminar at B&H the next day.  See my previous blog for the list of amazing artists!

In other good news, one of my Holga images made it into the Krappy Kamera contest that will open at the Soho Gallery in NYC on Tuesday March 3rd!  Now in it’s 11th year, the Krappy Kamera contest received over 1500 lo-fi images and mine was one of 50 selected!  The opening party at the Soho gallery is always a blast, so mark your calenders for that fun event!

Looking for a cool night photography workshop?  Interested in abandoned car graveyards?  Night Photographer extraordinaires,  Troy Paiva and Joe Reifer, are hosting their popular Pearsonville Junkyard Workshop on the full moon weekend of March 7th and 8th.  Now it is in California, but I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in Night Photography and especially Light Painting techniques.  Availability is limited to 10 people so sign up quick!

Finally, I’ve been wanting to blog about this one for a while.  Project Tandem is the story of two young people bicycling across the United States in search for the folks who help make the world go round.  Photographing and capturing audio along their journey, Alan and Morgan are already bringing us the incredibly inspirational stories of the day to day people they meet who make a difference.  Follow their blog and check out the tandem trailer and hopefully share in their story as they will probably be visiting a town near you!

Happy New Year

Posted on 3 Comments
caption
champagne
caption
balloons

I hope that everyone’s end of the year festivities were spectacular and wishing you a creative and prosperous 2009!  My year is starting off with a bang!  I’ll be giving my newly revised seminar on The Fine Art of the Long Exposure at B&H’s Event Space this Monday, January 5th.  It will be an inspiring double feature with B&H Maven David Brommer starting off the day with his seminar on Creative Composition at 11am.
I’m also excited to announce that one of my pinhole images will be featured in the f295  group show featuring some of the finest alternative process/techniques photographers of the 21st Century.  The show’s opens at the Camera Club of NY on Saturday, January 17th, from 7-9pm.  So if you are in town, come on down to see some great art.  The show will begin a weekend of amazing education on Historical Photographic techniques and Alternative processes.  On Sunday January 18th, the B&H Events Space will host the 2nd annual f295 seminar on 21st Century Photography.  Featured speakers will be Jo Babcock, Craig Barber, Michelle Bates, Dan Estabrook, Alida Fish, Joy Goldkind, Robert Hirsch, France Scully Osterman, and Tom Persinger.

Session 9, Eddie Adams Workshop, & the Lensbaby Plastic Optic

Posted on 4 Comments

Happy Halloween Everyone! I hope you all spend some time living out a fantasy, eating candy, or at least watching a scary movie tonight!Nancy and I just watched Session 9, which is thrill/horror movie that just gets under your skin. It tells the story of the haunting of the Danvers State Hospital, which was built in 1878. At the time it was a beautiful 70,000 square foot Gothic spired building that from high above looked like a giant bat. It was the model for humane treatment at the turn of the century but we know how that worked out in the lobotomy happy 50’s. The fortress-like castle was closed in 1992 and Brad Anderson filmed Session 9 there in 2001. The movie, to some extent, foretold the future of Danvers State Insane Asylum as it was renovated in 2006 by Avalon Communities. Only 1/3 o the hospital remains but for as little as $1175 a month you can rent 775 sq ft in a former “Haunted Insane Asylum.” Of course, a fire broke out in April of 2007 and destroyed 3 unfinished buildings that were to house 147 apartments. The cause of the blaze was “officially undetermined”Check out urban explorer extraordinaire, Mr Motts, who has some amazing photographs of the pre-renovation Danvers State Hospital. His website Opacity is probably one of the best for historic ruins. I don’t know how he gets into all these places but when he does he truly captures the essence of the space. His site not only showcases some amazing photography but also features the rich history of these abandoned buildings.

BarnstormXXISM.jpg

 

In other news, I’m still recovering from the Eddie Adams Workshop up in the Catskills of New York, where I volunteered during the Columbus Day Weekend. This was the 21st annual EAW and the 4th that I have attended. It is the premier workshop for young photojournalists; thousands apply via portfolio but only 100 are chosen. Those 100 students are divided into 10 teams of 10 and then assigned a famous professional photographer, editor, and producer to their team. The workshop takes place at Eddie and Alyssa’s Barn in Jeffersonville, New York. The students are given 2 days to complete their assigned shoots, while the rest of the team work around the clock to edit and put together multimedia slide shows for the final presentation on Monday. The 100+ Industry heavies that come up and volunteer their time and share their stories make this an amazing community event in an industry that is not always the most communal. I usually average about 8 hours of sleep, total, for the whole weekend. But of course there is always a little mandatory after hours relaxation going on! I’m part of the Black Team, who runs all the behind the scenes activities like AV, IT, Security, Transportation, Hospitality etc. A really humorous movie about “Black Team Love” and what really happens behind the scenes was made by my man Andre Costantini and can be viewed here.

I’m also continuing my beta testing for Lensbaby who sent me an updated Composer with the Plastic and Pinhole/Zone Plate Optic kits. As mentioned in my previous blog, the new Lensbaby Composer is actually a unique housing for several types of Optical Elements that Lensbaby calls their Optical Swap System. Essentially you can own one Lensbaby but have up to 4 different optical effects! I was very excited to try the Plastic Optic as it is a single plastic lens that is suppose to have the image quality similar to the very popular Holga toy cameras. I really have to say that it actually looks better! The two shots above were taken with the Composer Plastic Optic and the first one has an extraordinary glow from the shiny students arriving at the barn! The second image in the more subdued light combines the best of the Lensbaby selective focus and Holga plastic perfect imperfection. It is a picture of Philip Andrews, who coincidentally won the top prize at the workshop…a 10k scholarship from Nikon to continue his studies. Congrats Phillip!

 

20081019_GAB_1.jpg

The next weekend after the EAW I continued my travels with the Lensbaby Composer to the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. It was peak foliage time, and I had a blast just driving around with my family and stopping for Composer Inspiration! Yes, big thanks to my Mom, Sister, and stepfather who patiently waited for me as I shot and stopped every 5 minutes! The first two shots were taken with the Zone Plate Optic and have that great zone plate glow. The next two shots were taken with the Plastic Optic and interpret the foliage in more Lensbabified way. I had a blast shooting with them both. If you shoot with any Plastic Toy cameras like the Holga, Diana, etc then getting the Plastic Optic for your new Lensbaby is a must! I also noticed that dirt and dust do show up in your image more frequently when using the Zone/Pinhole Optic. This is not a fault of the lens but a reality of using a lens with a small aperture. Remember the Zone plate is f/19 and the Pinhole f/177. If your Digital SLR has a dusty sensor and you shoot with an aperature of f/2.8 and then f/22 the dust WILL be more prevalent in the image you shot at f/22. That’s just the facts. So be careful when swapping your lensbaby optics and lenses on your DSLR and always have a little rocket blower in your bag.

Brooklyn Bridge Photowalk

Posted on 1 Comment

What a week! Less than 15 hours after touching down from my week at the Maine Media Workshops I met up with over 40 strangers and led them over the Brooklyn Bridge in celebration of Scott Kelby’s 1st Annual Photowalk. A Photowalk is a social gathering of photographers who walk around, take pictures, have fun, and share their images. Scott Kelby is “the man” who organized over 6,000 people from 43 countries (44 states in the U.S) and in 241 cities to come together on August 23rd and have fun photowalking. There were 4 photowalks in NYC alone! Thanks to Scott, there were probably 1 million images taken that day in the name of photowalking! Pretty cool. Oh ya, Scott Kelby is also the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, #1 technical writer on Photoshop (he makes it fun and funny!), and good friend.

When Nancy and I showed up to our meet our fellow Photowalkers at the base of the NYC side of the Brooklyn Bridge we all felt like we were doing something special. In front of us were hundreds of tourists crossing the bridge, but we were photowalkers and we were on a mission to shoot, have fun, and get some ice cream on the other side of the bridge! The walk was two hours and probably took 1 hour to be mindful of the bikers, tourists, and other photographers crossing the bridge. The other hour was spent exploring the Brooklyn Bridge Park, cobblestone streets of Dumbo, and the Old Fulton Landing, which has spectacular views of the NYC Waterfalls and the 125 year old Brooklyn Bridge. I was happy to see that I was not the only one shooting film as I counted 3 people using Holga/Diana cameras!

It was a great time, Nancy and I met so many friends and great photographers! Our group’s top picks can be found on our flickr page. Look through here and tell me your favorites! I had a tough time choosing “the one” as there were so many strong images. My winning choice can be seen here.

You can see all the winning images from all the cities, including the grand prize via the Photowalk website.

Finally, kudos to Geoff Fox, who travelled from Connecticut to take part in the Photowalk and created this amazing panoramic shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan from the Old Fulton Landing.

Night News

Posted on 3 Comments

I just got back from an amazingly intense week at the Maine Media Workshops where I took a Master Printing (darkroom) class with George Tice. Every night I passed this railroad station and each night there was something different to shoot. This exposure was 2 days after the full moon and was an 8 minute exposure at f/11 with my favorite night camera, the Mamiya C220.

Last chance to catch my newly revised seminar “The Fine Art of the Long Exposure” at B&H’s Event’s Space today from 3-5pm! This is my third time speaking and I have done a 75% revamp of the talk focusing more on Night Photography techniques and Day for Night imagery!
One of the best Night Photography Books has just come out, check out Jill Waterman’s book Night and Low-Light Photography: Professional Techniques from Experts for Artistic and Commercial Success. She collects some of the top Night Photographers in the country who offers some great insights, inspiring imagery, and tips on the how to capture the night light.
Finally, the coolest Night Photography Workshop ever still has spots left! If you enjoy abandoned junkyards with tons of classic 50’s and 70’s cars then Troy Paiva & Joe Reifer’s Pearsonville Junkyard Night Photography/Light Painting Workshop is a must. It takes place over the Full Moon Weekend from October 11-12 in Ridgecrest California. For more details click here.