Time lapse of the full moon rising over Joshua Tree
Joshua Tree National Park is a surreal landscape in the high desert called Mojave that is scattered with the foreboding, tree-like cacti from which it is named. It’s unique beauty is also reflected in the myriad of other hearty plants that dot the landscape and is oddly interspersed with other-worldly piles of gigantic rocks. Toward [...]
A mosque in my home town, Berkeley, IL
I moved away from my home town of Berkeley, IL over 30 years ago but still have family there and visit a couple times a year. Oftentimes, when I’m visiting I like to wander around and take pictures of the place, though some of it has changed drastically. I attended Field School in the 1960′s [...]
PhotoRescue 3 saves the day
Occasionally you come across a product that is so impressive that you want everyone to know about it, and PhotoRescue3 is one of those products. An advanced data-recovery solution for digital photography media, PhotoRescue is so good the developers don’t want you to have to pay for it unless it can prove to you that your images can be recovered. This just tells me the developers are interested in creating a quality product that simply works.
Culver City Car Show 3D!
The George Barris Car Show came to Culver City this past weekend and I worked with the 21st Century 3D team to capture all of the fuel injected fun in 3D video.
A dreary day at the skate park
I rode my bike down to Venice Beach on Sunday, as I usually do, but this particular Sunday was unusually overcast and dreary for Southern California. None-the-less there were plenty of skaters at the skate park and I managed to get a couple of shots. I used a polarizing filter to cut the light down [...]
Blue Sky Mining
Last week I was working on a pilot for a television show and our location was a strip mine. The mine is still working, in fact they have plans to completely decapitate some of the large hills in the area. It’s gorgeous country and kind of sad to think it will all be leveled in [...]
Night Photography in Chicago II
It used to be a writers town and it’s always been a fighter’s town. For writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes, cat-bandit, baggage thieves, hallway headlockers on the prowl, baby photographers and stylish coneroos, this is the spot that is always most convenient, being centrally located, for settling ancestral grudges. Whether the power is in [...]
Two Nights In Baton Rouge
I’m told it’s a four-hour drive from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, but my recent run-in with Louisiana Highway Patrol has me setting the cruise control to keep me traveling at a safely under-the-radar ramble through the forests and over the bayou’s of this lovely state, and it actually takes me slightly closer to five hours [...]
Shreveport, LA. Part One
Pre-production for the latest feature film I am working on has begun in and around Shreveport, LA, a city built on oil money which seems to be fairly wet, with lush green landscapes and some of the prettiest sunsets I have seen in awhile. Hopefully I will find an interesting point of view of this [...]
One Night in Chicago
One of my favorite things to do is wander around a great city at night with my camera. One night last week I found some cool colors and textures in Chicago.
See What I’m Saying wins best Feature Doc
See What I’m Saying, on which I was Director of Photography, won the best feature documentary prize at the Philadelphia Film Festival last week. The film was directed and produced by Hilari Scarl and is a look into the lives of 4 entertainers who all happen to be deaf.
Harleys and HDR
This week I took a trip out to the Salton Sea to try and find a place I had been to 10 or 12 years ago, where the sea had encroached on a small town and partially gobbled up several of the buildings. I thought this would be a great place to make some more [...]
First shot at High Dynamic Range
Art Tool Bits. That is what it all comes down to: bits of color information. The more bits per pixel, the closer an image gets to the range we can see by eye. These days that number is 32, and generally requires several exposures from a digital camera to reach that depth. I remember the [...]
Head Shots
Hot Head In Hollywood everyone is looking for the perfect headshot: an image actors use to market themselves and/or their looks to producers who may be angling to cast someone in a production. This is a very subjective area of photography. Every agent has their own opinion or idea of how their “client” should look in a [...]
Large Format Printing from a 20-year old slide
One of my clients came across some images from her days as a model in New York and she wanted to have one of the 35mm slides blown up to a 44″ wide print. This presented a couple of challenges and some fun creative choices to mull over. First, we decided to send the slide [...]
A Quiet Bright Reedsong
In school I learned that composition, emulsion, color, exposure, distortion, depth of field, are important elements in creating an image; creating a way for the viewer to see things through your eyes. When I had the opportunity to spend time with a group of Whirling Dervishes from Turkey, I learned a lot of things about [...]
Dominican Republic
While shooting a project in the Dominican Republic for Microsoft I spent a little time walking through a barrio just outside of Santo Domingo. At first there weren’t many people around, but an old woman invited me into her home to show me photos of her son who was serving with the U.S. Army.
Canon 16-35mm lens
Sometimes I just cannot stop myself from trying out a new lens. Even though it is not full aperture on my 20D I like the images it makes. That is Taylor who is just naturally comfortable in front of a camera.
That perfect moment
Have you ever had the notion that kids are much smarter than adults? I mean really young kids. It’s as if they have a certain natural wisdom they are born with that sometimes gets corrupted as they grow older. This is Vayle. I made this image while I was visiting her parents in Portland. I [...]
