digital and film

I was thinking today about why we don't seem to like digital as much a film. The differences between the two are really rather minor at this point, in fact I would argue that film has in most ways been exceded by digital. Digital is simply better. Sharper, faster, cheaper, more colourful. But yet- it's not quite film. Most people who argue this point have never used medium format digital and thus usually don't know what they are talking about when they argue film is still better. It isn't. But there are lots of other factors, namely format size and lenses that make a surprisingly important perceptual contribution to the 'look' of an image. Especially concerning digital.

I postulate that actually the thing we like about film so much is it's imperfections. It's quirks from processing. The saturation or undersaturation of colors. It's not perfect and I think we like that. Digital is nice. But digital tends to be 'perfect'. It also tends to be grossly in-focus. (on the APS size chip sensors)

But it's true. There's something about film. Digital is better, but there's still something about film.

Oldie but goodie

I've posted this before. But looking at it again today as I clean up my computer I can't help but think, "Why didn't I shoot this on film?"

Everything

Everything is difficult. Work is difficult, life is difficult and maintaining a clean kitchen is impossible. Magazines are incredibly difficult. Accountants are pretty difficult. Managing people is damn near lethal.

All that said I have to put together a super shoot for friday. I'm renting an entire floor of new skyscraper. Yep. 16th floor. All to my sweet sweet sweet self.

circles

I sleep well, all things considered. I generally get my 8 hours. But I work a lot and I move a lot and I spend a lot of time using my eyes. I also eat somewhat okay. I try to keep it relatively balanced with fruits and stuff.

I noticed in the bathroom today for the first time, I have dark circles under my eyes.

Improv

I should have done improv.

Fun Models

Sometimes your models work out to be simply awesome fun to work with. Gabriella was a real charmer and here's a portrait I'll send off to her agency.

Token Cuban GUy

*Oh my god* I'm one of the Cuban guys for Havana Club Rums new Campaign. It's really hilarious. The weirdest part is when I go out to clubs or bar my picture is on the drink I order. I will admit though, it's also pretty freaking cool.

or whatever

Feeling the light

Sometimes you shoot something, like this, and you get the distinct feeling, deep down, from the moment you see the mirror flipping up and feel the shutter slice open and shut- that if you worked at it, and that if you really tried, you could probably make a career out of just this one lighting style all by itself.

How home changes while your gone.

Just one of many examples.

Un Retouched

Oh yeah, and that picture right below this? That's unretouched. Nice huh?

Bathing suit style

I've been doing a lot of women in bathing suit attire lately. I'm putting together stuff for one magazine that I had shot for previously. It's all pretty girls in bikinis and such. It's quite fun stuff to shoot as you just light it simply and then let the girl carry the shoot itself. For shoots like this I keep my team in studio all-girl. Girl assistant, girl stylist, girl makeup artist. It helps the model feel more comfrotable when she see's so many girls around. Having extra boys on set when your shooting something that looks sexy is just a liability. If they aren't doing anything constructive, or usefull, every single second, then they are just leering. Not that I blame them, but in the studio only the photographer can be leering. Anyone else is distracting.

On this particular shoot the models mother was in studio for the entire shoot. At first I thought this would make everything much more difficult, but the models mom turned out to be great fun as well and added to a constructive atmosphere.

Mario Bro's

There is only one word for what this is. Awesome.

Monday: Description

There is a circus basically across the street from me. I haven't photographed it at all but it's been there for a couple of months now. It's quite interesting because some mornings I wake up early to stroll across the park and in these pens are all these exotic animals like Zebra or Camel.

So thats over there.

The street at the tram stop has an accident nearly every single day. It's the type of place that everyone approaches hessitantly and looks both ways several times. The girl two flights down was hit by a Russian guy in an Audi about a year ago and spent months in the hospital. It's an all-eyes-open type of street.

Directly across the street, if you can belive it, is a brothel. It's a small quiet place with a red light that never opens, yet also never closes. For the most part they make good neighbors. In this country brothels don't really attract as much riff-raff as you might expect. Infact business for them is so slow that they closed an attached sex-shop and instead have opened a wine shop with what seems to be quite a decent selection of Czech and Yugoslav wines.

To the right is the most active and perhaps largest functioning football stadion in the Czech Republic. Twenty meters away max. It illuminates the entire neighborhood. Big matches bring riot troops, crowd control tanks and a swarm of mounted police. The day after big matches finds the streets littered with dry straw colored horse dung.

To the left is nothing. Two blocks over and you hit Stromovka park which equates to the czech version of central park except dark, barren, forboding and empty. It's neglected and thus not much frequented except on the fringes where there are one or two interesting things. An old woman lives in what once was a trainstation (the train is now underground but pops out in the part occasionally) and she is guarded by a large dog. On her small, quite idylic plot of land in the middle of the darkness, she sells flowers and herbs that she grows herself. She is for the most part pleasent.

My roommate is home when I get home about 50% of the time. It's nice to come home with someone already home. Originally I thought I might live alone once my previous roommate moved out, but I'm glad I changed my mind on that.

Retouch

This is some recent magazine work and surprisingly, these shots haven't had hardly any retouching at all. Even though I love photoshop and the flexiblity it gives the photographer, these days I find it more and more important to shoot for the final product, in camera rather than fix things later on the computer. Honestly, I don't have the time anymore to be in photoshop for hours making something perfect. I go through so many shots per week that it just becomes impossible to do the retouching on my own. Of course, one advantage is that more and more often other people are doing my retouching- which rocks. Even so, as people begin to be able to see my work closer and closer to the point where it's created rather than after the point it's been finished, I find that I need to pay increasingly more attention to making it perfect on the spot. People are quite silly when it comes to first impressions in photography. Very few people understand the behind the scenes magic that goes on to make something perfect. Thus- greater becomes the nessesity to pack all the magic in at the begining so that you give people fewer and fewer things to critique your work on down the line.

Picture

Here's an outake from a shoot on sunday. Oh and by the way, Madonna's new song and video are awesome.

The nature of happiness

Happiness for the most part is a combination of three things: Disposition, perspective, and satisfaction. It can be kind of hard at times to get all three of these things to line up at the same time. That's okay because they all ebb and flow in their own cycles which gives us all the interesting and fickle moments that we experience throughout the day.

I was going somewhere with that, but honestly at this point I've forgotten where. (There's been about a half hour between when I started writing this post to this point).

Someone mentioned recently I should put up more pictures, and they are right. Yes I should put up more pictures. What I really need to do is put together my portfolio so you can see everything all in one place. Much bigger 'wow' factor. But until then, you'll have to be satisfied with my philosophy ramblings and horribly misspelled unproofed english.

Sentimental

I'm alway sentimental at night. Past midnight and I'm a wreck. I spend my time wondering about lost friends and old girlfriends. What on earth happens to these people? Where on earth do they go? Sometimes they really just dissapear. Sometimes they die, marry, change their names, or even sometimes just no longer exist.

This will never cease to bother me though. There are some people whom perhaps you didn't know for a very long time, but you knew intimately enough that you know you'll never forget. For tonights instalment of nostalgia I caught the Cure song "close to me" on the radio in the taxi cab on the way back from a magazine shoot. Back in the day I used to date one girl called Addie Auerbach. She was this girl who lived in South Oakland, the neighborhood right next to the school campus in Pittsburgh.

Firstly, I'll say that I don't think I can ever go back to Pittsburgh again. That city for me is the most conflicted sea of memories, dreams and mistakes I may ever know. I know, (or perhaps knew) Pittsburgh like the back of my hand. It was as familiar as a lover face, yet going there is like visiting a country as foriegn as a tiny island nation in the south pacific.

Anyway, Addie used to lie around in bed on sunday mornings, smokeing with an ashtray on her pillow, listening to the Cure. Addie, she was for The Cure, and The Cure was for Addie. That was all she ever listened to, and every single one of their songs reminds me of an exact moment in her day when she would walk up to the cd player, switch tracks and set it on repeat. Over and over. Every day. Smokeing and drinking and painting things she found on the sidewalk.

Well, Addie was one of the girls who really simply dissapeared. Google: Nothing. Friendster: Nothing. She's simply gone. Back then we dated for about two months, and that was it. I ran into her once three (maybe even already four!) years ago while she was in Europe and I, harboring some negative feelings, was a bit of an asshole to her. Okay, I was a big asshole and I never saw her again.

Addie I'm sorry about being such an asshole. At the time I was pretty upset at you, but in retrospect I probably should have already gotten over it by then. The song I'm listening to now? "Just like heaven". Yeah. That's a good one.

SO!

There's my ten minutes of 'sentimenal early college' memories. God in highschool college was everthing there ever was to look forward to, but if I had known college would have been such a abyss of regret, I don't think I would have worked quite so hard on all those entrance exam things.

Bellecour

I was in Lyon just a few weeks ago visiting friend on my holiday. Today I hear that riots have broken out in the center of Lyon. I have quite a few friends there so I wish them all the best and that my heart is with them and that I hope they will all be okay. Link

Monday Morning

Somedays when you wake up, there are a few minutes that you get while lying in bed that are totally absent of any sense of fear, self doubt, or defeatism. It is important to remeber that in these moments, rather than scounging your mind for all the things your gut tells you that you must be forgetting, concentrate on the little nugget of unbounded courage that you do have, and is right before you. Take this time, these few minutes, and promise yourself the world. Honestly, there will be plenty of time after for self doubt. It's important to plant the seeds of dreams in these few, trully ripe and fertile moments.

My kind of sunset.

time to shoot

Finding the time to shoot stuff that you really want to be shooting, and that is good for your portfolio- can be tough. Really tough. Sometimes it all just slips away from you and you find yourself working all the time, but never really getting a chance to pull together all those cool ideas you have up in your head. Grrrr. It's really quite frustrating. On the one hand you get paid for what you do, and its really good stuff, but you don't get much of a chance to do your real art work, the stuff that makes you a name. Of course, the trick is to find a way to merge the two- but I'm not quite there yet. Yet. I'm finding a way to crossbreed the work and play.

Woody Allen

I've been watching a lot of Woody Allen movies lately. I'm a bit sick and thus stuck at home. I just don't have the energy to work. So I trudge out to the DVD shop and trudge back.

I like his recent stuff. It's not like his older stuff for which his is so famed, but his newer stuff is interesting. I like how he seems to use his movies to explore ideas about people and living. It's nice to watch a movie that isn't about action or violence or tons of sex. Heck, it's nice to watch a movie with actual dialogue!

Little normal things

You know what?

Being normal simply just isn't ever going to happen. Nope. Never. It's all the little tiny things that it seems like just about everybody else has got worked out, that you are never going to work out. Nope. You have missed the boat on everything else there ever was. But it's kinda okay right? You tell yourself that at least. I mean what are you supposed to think when you realize you've probably just entirely f*cked everything up a really long time ago when you decided to chase your dreams no matter what?

Of course, perhaps this just is our lives right? I mean, what would you think? The other night I was telling a girl that I the reason I decided to be a photographer was because a long time ago I think I saw something. And that something was like a door, a door that somehow I knew was an exit. An exit to everything that seemed already planned for you. Destined for you. Fated for you.

Would you take it? I mean seriously. Even if you weren't so young. If you, right now, saw something. And just by looking at it, you knew, you knew it was a way out of everything that might have always been, for you. Would you take it? If you weren't so comfortable in your life, if you didn't clutch the bland stability of everything just for the assurance that although tomorrow won't be great- at least it won't be so bad, would you take it?

What does it take to wake up in the morning and walk out the door? What does it take to dream about the things you've never seen, never dreamed of, and never imagined? What is it like to choose that, over everything you ever knew?

As for me, I think I'm about halfway through that door. Ahead of me is just all this light. Like, this infinite 'you have absolutely no f*cking idea' type of light that curves around the edges of your skin and warms you with it's incredible purple and gold whiteness. And behind me is everything else. It's being normal. It's looking forward to things you can expect and you can rely upon. It's like standing with one foot in each place. And I've been here, this half-half, for quite some time now. Perhaps too long. It's like my feet are planted out of some deep nostalgic hesistation. Do you let go? If this is just some Plato's cave, am I even stepping into anything I can already conceive of?

I used to be really into physics, and I would read journals upon journals at the library each and every weekend my father drove me downtown. You know what really shocked me? They say, (them being physics people and stuff) that this universe is really composed of million, perhaps billions, perhaps infinite universes. Like dimensions. But all of them coexist, right here, in this very same spot. But we can't seem them. They are all around us, but we walk through our lives with absolutely no idea they even exist. The best example they can give of this is to imagine what life would be like if our universe was only in 2 dimensions. Like a sheet of paper. Imagine that we, all of us, are ants living on this sheet of paper. But then imagine that all the other universes that exist, are right here, on top of ours. Like stack of paper. On each sheet is a whole different universe of ants, walking all around, living their lives. The thing is, even though these universes are stacked right here, ontop of each other- we are all ants, and we simply can't look up. We can't even look down. It's just forward. But all these other universes are right here. All these possibilities, all these experiences, all these infinite paths of other lives. They are all right here. Touching us. But we just can't look up. We don't exist to look up.

But if we could.

Oh if we could.

Scouting

Ironically enough, the agency that I shoot test for might start to rep me as a model. Funny no? I was in the office the other day showing them prints and they were like, "hey! Have you ever thought about being one of ours?" It's been awhile since I modeled properly but I figure, "why not?". Besides, it would be kind of cool to be under the same agency that discovered the most successfully and highest paid model in history: Karolina Kurkova.

aperture

Oh geez, I'm so sold. Aperture.

ME on SEt.

This is me on set. That's a beauty dish behind my head.

Patriot Act

I have shamelessly duplicated this post straight from BoingBoing.net which I hope they forgive me for. Please check out the original. I just don't know how to link to the story directly. Anyway here is the text:


PATRIOT Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10,000 percent
The dread PATRIOT Act created many new powers for law-enforcement, including the ability to secure the prized super-warrants called National Security Letters without judicial oversight. In the time since PATRIOT was passed, their use by the FBI has increased by 10,000 percent. Each of these warrants can be used to invade the lives of many Americans, and none of them are being issued with a judge's oversight after presentation of evidence justifying these intrusions into the lives of private individuals. These warrants are issued on a copper's say-so, without the due process that is the hallmarks of democracy.

How far can one FSA go? Well, in 2003, one was used to secure the records of guests in hotels in Las Vegas over a four-day period: 250,000 people (the investigation was inconclusive). The use of NSLs is common, but us hearing about them is rare: NSLs come with gag-orders that prohibit those who receive them from discussing them.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined...

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

WorkFlow

Workflow is an absolute B*tch. I had basically nailed down my routine when I was working in 6 megapixels and scans. Shoot in raw. Transfer with BreezeBrowser, organize, tweak and batch process in C1PRO. Open in fotoshop, retouch, save to final copy.

That was then.

Ever since I made the switch to 12 megapixels though, my 6 megapixel workflow is broken. Breezebrowser doesn't support the camera. D2X white balance is encrypted. C1Pro can't seem to output the file. I tinkered with Bible, but for some reason I'm not entirely interested. (Yet, it looks quite nice I'll admit!) For now I'm wholesale converting .NEF over to Open Raw- the Digital Negative- DNG. The it's photoshop.

But it's a much slower process, and on my stock shoots I process upwards of thousand images to get my one.

If Apples Aperature is really as good as they claim it is, then I'm going to have to make the switch to Mac. That being said, I still have to solve my problems because there isn't any point in switching until the Intel Macs come out.

Finding models

I'm shooting the cover for a big magazine here again and I'm on the prowl for a model. It's a tough job, searching for models, really! As stupid a problem "finding the hotest of the hot girls" is in terms of the scope of the real world- it's indeed a difficult process. It's hard for non-photographer people to fathom the difficulty inherent in trying to sort through hundreds of beautiful women in search of the perfect one. Truth be told- they are all beautiful. Lovely girls, lovely women. But for every project your looking for something more than that. You've got an idea in your head (which I have) you've got something your really trying to capture. Generally there are always enough pretty girls around that you can find one that matches up with the idea you have in your head. The amount of time it takes though, sorting through model cards, meeting the girls, taking their polaroids- ugh! It's a real headache. Especially because you're always trying to take it a step above what they expect. You always want to make it just as freaking awesome as you see it in your head- and that's difficult.

Close up

Here's a close up of that foto. There is incredible amounts of detail there, especially given the age of the glass lens that I shot it with. Normally these days i shoot 12 megapixel digital and above. But even with that sort of equipment the detail level is nothing compared to a nice large negative.

Me and dad.

This is a picture of me and my dad down by the lake in the summer. I guess it's about two or three years ago I took this. I took it on an old russian 6x6 box camera. It's amazing that machines nearly a century old still work like the day they were made.
Love you dad!

The predictability of Beauty

Curiously enough there is an article in the New Scientist about how there is a direct correlation between hormone levels in women and their perceived facial attractiveness by others. In particular they found that women with a higher level of this hormone are actually considered "more beautiful" and all women, at some point in the month, will be perceived as "more beautiful" than at other times in the month. Very interesting! They even speculate slightly that young 13 year olds could be given hormone therapy to become more attractive as they go through puberty, making them more beautiful as adults. They don't however, know what the side effects might be.

Working in an industry such as mine, where beauty is judged quite frequently, and with little or no variation in the discernible "quantity" of beauty of a model- it's interesting to learn that beauty is actually hormonally controlled. The study also points out however, that makeup completely masks the differences that one woman experiences in the course of one month.

Here's the link

More

This sort of stuff really isn't very had to shoot. It looks very nice, but it's complicated at all. Most of the magic is in the post-production and in getting a good looking girl to work with in the first place.

delivery

Oh geez. After all these years I've finnaly discovered the carnal pleasure that is; Delivery Pizza. Ohhhhhhhhhh.

Party

Last year I had a going away party (one of my many) and one of my friends had recorded it on his cell phone. I just picked up a copy the other day. You'll need quick time to watch it in all it's postage stamp sized glory, but it's cool. Lots of sparklers. Den%27s%20Party%20Sparkler%20Scene.3gp

model test -retest

Tests are difficult. When you don't know the girl, it's really a pretty hit or miss type of thing. I know, I know. As a photographer, your supposed to be able to handle anything. But it's tough when A: you don't know the model and B: the model has never modeled before and C: the model is around 14.

Thats the typical senario anyway. And as a forigner who has his good and bad days in the local language, it can be sure-as-heck tough to get some of these new models to open up. This is from a retest. The original test was good, but the model agency didn't like the styling. Too dark they said. So this is the retest. Much nicer! But that's mostly because this time the model knew me. We had worked together previously, so the nervousness dissapears quicker. Lovely face.