Long Exposures-Wellington, Florida

Wellington is the small city in Western West Palm Beach, Florida where I attended High School. It has changed a lot since I lived there, but it is still the same in many respects. I had an itch to do some night photography after finding inspiration from Todd Hido's work, so I hit the sleepy streets of suburban Wellington to shoot long exposures for three straight days in late December. I'm not sure how I feel about the shots. At the time of shooting, I thought the city turned into my own personal photo land where I kept discovering new points of view to shoot an old landscape in which I once knew . I didn't have a tripod to place the camera on, so I used a bench, or the ground, or I placed it on a post to keep it steady. I shot the same view multiple times with different exposure settings to have different ways of seeing the same shot in different light.



The shot above is a photo of a community recreation center that has several baseball fields and basketball courts. It would of been nice if I could of been elevated maybe 40 ft, so I could of captured more of the fields instead of just the lights in the distance from the main road.

Here is a video of Todd Hido. The inspiration behind this blog entry. I really enjoy his work. I think his photographs are open ended and speak volume to the viewer. www.toddhido.com



On the subject of long exposures, check out this 6 month exposure captured with a homemade pinhole camera. click here

Meet the Palmer's

On the day I was going to leave S. Florida, a friend of mine, Matt, had his family come down from West Virginia and San Diego; they wanted to take some photo's. We were suppose to meet the night before, but there were schedule conflicts and not everyone could take part in the photo session. On the next day, I drove down from West Palm Beach to Ft. Lauderdale to meet them at Lauderdale by the Sea. On the way down, there was a heavy downpour. I didn't think we were going to be able to shoot, but right when I parked, the rain stopped.

Once everyone got there, we headed down to the beach. Since it had been raining, no one was there which made it terrific! Plus, the overcast day, gave off nice even light. In total, we shot maybe an hour and half. The Palmer family was great! They even treated me to my favorite salmon at Aruba's. If you are ever in Ft. Lauderdale, you have to go to Aruba and order the salmon. I think it's the best!

When I left to go to the airport, the rain started again. I guess we had some good timing!

After the shoot was over and I was back in New York, the post worked started which took me about 8 hours to edit 20 photo's. That's like 25 minutes per photo. In reality, that's really not too bad considering a single photo can take as long as 40 hours or longer. I will share with you what I did. First, I created two photo's from my RAW file. One of the photo's was exposed for the sky, the other photo exposed for the Palmer's. I then masked the two images together to get a photo that isn't too under exposed or over exposed. I then created a couple layers of curves, one for contrast, and one for color. I played with the selective color tool. I tried to remove any shadow's from their faces, so under the red color I removed a good portion of the black tones. I also continued to tweak the other colors as well to find the result I thought looked best. I then saved my psd in case I wanted to re-edit it, flatten the layers, and did some sharpening with the high pass filter.

Ghost of Gloria

About a month ago I had a shoot with a local south Florida band called Ghost of Gloria. We met at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida. We had no clear cut idea of where we were going to shoot, but as I walked around, I ran into a friend of mine who I met playing basketball when I used to live in South Florida. He also happens to own the club Passion. Since it was a Tuesday afternoon and the club was closed to the public, he gave us access to shoot anywhere we wanted. It was a very fortuitous happening, and I was very grateful to say the least. 

Once we got inside the club and decided on a location to shoot, I started to set up my equipment, but we had an issue with a power source, so the setup ended up being my laptop, camera, and a folding reflector to bounce light from the window onto the band members. This created very hard light and dark images, but it seemed to work.

After we left the club, we went in the parking garage where we found a couple of red chairs sitting aside alone, so we decided to use them. I had one of the band members throw one in the air and then act natural like he didn't throw it, and a chair was just floating in the air. I guess I could of done this in post, but it was more fun actually doing it. Can you guess who threw the chair?

Here are a couple of solo shots that we shot in the club.

New York City Marathon 2008

Think Write Act with the Bill of Rights

Sitting quietly under a statue in Washington Square Park is where you may have seen Meggan Gomez over the past several months. She usually has a sign under her feet stating, "Ask me what I am doing" and her web address www.thinkwriteact.com I had an opportunity to sit with her last Monday to observe her project in action.
The idea is to get people thinking and involved, specifically with the original ten amendments. She prints out full page stickers with the Bill of Rights on each of them. She then sits at a location to hand them out, usually Washington Square Park. She waits for people to approach her and then she explains the project. Nine times out of ten, people are really enthusiastic to be apart of it and take at least one sticker if not more. Just for the day I came out with her, there were several people who wanted to donate their time or resources to the project. According to Meggan, her stickers have found their way from Boston to Los Angeles and many other places.
For more information you can go to  thinkwriteact.com