Me. Well, that wasn’t that hard. But here, take a look at a quick trip to Suffolk in Boston I made with my friends on late night/early morning this week. I was taking pictures out of the car the whole way playing around with high ISOs, low Apertures and various shutter speeds. As always- the full set of new snaps is viewable on my Flickr Stream.

Alright. So firstly I just upgraded to a Flickr Pro account and already can tell it was worth it. The unlimited bandwidth and unlimited photo sets is enough in itself- however the image statistics will be awesome- especially since I hope to be expanding to making my club photos available to people I took the pictures of. Anyway. It’s been ridiculously hectic the last few weeks, so the updates have been lacking.

Sidenote:I saw Marc and Sarah speak at Katzen the other day, which was awesome. Wooster Collective is among my favorite (photo) websites. They seemed like really legit people. It was cool to finally meet them. (Oh yea, Gaia was there too!) I couldn’t believe it when I saw they were coming to Katzen at AU- there was NO advertisement of any kind for it on campus. Anyway. Big ups to them for sharing the glory and amazingness of street art with the world for over 6 years.

So here’s some stuff for the week. Last night at Lotus, I started to get bored and began playing around with light and imaginary ISO (H = 3200… or at least that’s what the EXIF reads).

This first one I zoomed in as the shutter was open- the face on the guy in the middle is really cool:

All others in the playing with light set can be found here. The entire un-edited chuck of pix can be found here.

So I’ve been on break and wicked lazy with updates. However, I have some pictures from the past two or so weeks. Mostly skies, sunsets. Take a look- I uploaded a view versions of each picture- I’d love to hear what look people like the best. Hope everyone had a good New Year. (Oh, the sky on the T picture isn’t ’shopped.) Cheers.

vs

(T image is original, but all others have been color adjusted, to see originals, follow them back to my flickr).

So this past week I was lucky enough to be apart of my friends movie project for his final. He loves zombies (and what’s not to like) so he was making a zombie movie. Apparently I impressed him with my 28 Days later style zombieness when I helped him a month or so ago as a stand in for the rough draft teaser. So, I got to be a badass zombie. I did all the make up for myself (the others weren’t as willing to get so messy, but honestly, when do you have a chance to get all gored up and run around campus foaming from the mouth and scaring people?). Here are some still frames from the movie. If you like it, let me know, maybe Chris (the friend) will post a trailer to youtube or something. Anyway, it didn’t end up being 100% perfect due to time restrictions, so hopefully we’ll get to re-shoot some stuff and do sound after break. Cheers! (more…)

Some of my shots were featured in today’s edition of the Eagle. You can check them out here.

The lighting was terrible, only two cans at right with gels, at about 12feet, I couldn’t adjust them, I don’t know the exact colors of the gels, but they were a yellow and rose/pink. All the shots in the article are with no flash. All photos except for the first and last ones were shot with a f2.5 50mm, the others were a 70-200 at L/f4.

pftw: Here are my favorite ones from the assignment that were not published (click through for larger formats on my flickr).

[EDIT: After this spread ran as a full front page of “The Scene” section of the Eagle, I got an email from the business school who ended up hiring me for their yearly Case Competition]

Ok, so here’s this Pictures from the week thing second time in a row, maybe I’ll keep it up.

So today I went to an abandoned factory built in the early 1900s, it was utilized by a plastics company until the late 80s maybe even the early 90s. It’s the third time I’ve been, second time in. However the first time in I only had BW film, so this was a new (and very cold) experience.

First though, I would like to say that I love natural light, period. I have nothing against studio lighting, sometimes its really really cool (see one of my modern favorites Patrick Hoelck). But there is just something about natural light, especially in the fall when all the foliage is out, and it gives the light this remarkable warm tint. I want nothing more than to do some kind of model shoot in this factory, however, snapping around inside is also pretty fun.

So on the note of natural light, one challenging thing about parts of the factory’s insides (mostly corners and the generator room) is that it was very dark. Seeing as my wide angle is a 3.5-5.6 I was having some difficulty. I hated using a direct flash in this situation because it looked like crap, especially with the natural light present. Additionally the metal surfaces always gave overblown highlights or just a non-desirable finish. Then when you mix the flash with natural light you can tell very easily a flash was present, the coolness is unappealing and ruins the character of the subject by taking away the signature subtle warmness- however, after taking a few test shots I realized that a lot of the ceiling and ventilation ducts were rusted or discolored. So using the flash shooting straight up to bounce off the ceiling resulted in this very natural, organic and warm “rusty” light that perfectly complemented the existing available light. It was awesome, I just wish I had figured that out sooner because by that time my card was almost full, my batteries were almost dead and I couldn’t feel any of my fingers. Pushing the shutter button was an interesting situation.
Anyway, here are some of the resulting images, some more can be viewed on my flickr photostream.

A set from the Movie SAW anyone?

Fan (recreation of a BW shot)

Rubbish

Generator Room- I like the colors in this one.

So I’m still trying to post on this thing with some consistently. Classes have kept me really busy but I think after Thanksgiving things should slow down, at least until next semester. Here are a couple of pictures from this past week. I don’t know if this will definitely become a “Photos of the Week” thing, but it very well could.

Anyway, here’s a shot from Eastern Market in DC on Saturday. This is Tamrat, he was collecting change for the Salvation Army on a street corner between the market and “murky coffee”. I’m not sure if he was really drunk, a bit crazy or both, but he certainly was interesting. I snapped this one as he was going through a few poses for an improve photo shoot that he insisted on.

You can see more on my flickr photostream.

Preparing for a personal project that I will be working on over the course of the next few months/year I took a few test shots of my friend to try out different composition and framing. This shot represents basically exactly how I want the pictures to look as far as how the face is framed and composed. I want a somewhat even lighting and natural light whenever possible. The facial expression will be completely up to the subject.
Right now, the working name for this project is the Genea Project. Genea taken from Greek meaning family. Again, it’s a working title so to speak, the project is about people. I’ve always been interested in the minute but visually drastic differences in peoples faces. How we perceive and interpret even the slightest subtlety in facial structure to assume and mean different things. How we tell people apart and also how we may confuse too completely different people. I feel like some points of this project may sound incredibly cliche when said out loud, and they may have been approached by other artists already: we are all humans and belong to the same species but look so drastically different. Humanity, and all those good artistic buzzwords and phrases. But the main part of this project for me, at least right now, is the physical nuances between faces and what makes them more or less different or the same in our eye. How such little changes result in such a largely different picture. What makes one person look different than another. I’ve had this general idea for a while, but while I have a core purpose and concept, I know that some aspects of this project will evolve over the course of it and I’m pretty excited to see where it goes.