The Red Doors

Purchase Print

As my friend and I were headed back down towards New York city from the Rhinebeck, N.Y. area, I spotted this gem and yelled "Stop!" This was actually still in or very near Rhinebeck. It must have been a beautiful home at one time and circumstances caused it to become neglected and/or abandoned.
These abandoned homes always make me wonder about the back story, what happened and at what point did it no longer become a place someone called home. Perhaps an elderly person or couple passed away and there is no family around to care for the house, or maybe not ready to move on.

It does look as though there may be someone going in or out of there at times as noted by the trampled area of vines in front of the doors.

I shot this from across the road which may have been about 100ft away using a 70-200L 2.8 IS Canon lens. This allowed me to frame it as I did including the steps, porch and awning trimmings and side windows compressed into a neat composition. It was shot at about 148mm using three bracketed exposures which were later blended together in Photomatix Pro and then cropped and color adjusted in LightRoom 4. The IS (image stabilization) made it easy to hand hold this shot at those settings (slowest shutter speed was 1/40) and still have it all very sharp.

The House on the Hill

House on the hill stretched canvas print

Enter House on the Hill stretched canvas print

These two photographs are from a recent road trip with fellow friend and photographer George Argento. George teaches video and multimedia at New York University. He likes to go out shooting old abandoned places as much as I do and so we hooked up and headed up to Dutchess County, New York.

George plotted out a few points of interest that we loaded into our GPS but the real fun and discovery comes from hitting the backroads between points. On our way to a farm, which turned out to be a bit too new and not very interesting, I spotted this old abandoned house on a hill of wild overgrowth off Cemetary road in Germantown. We parked, made our way up and grabbed some shots.

It was a bitter cold day, which turned out to be fortunate because the spot where I grabbed this photo of the house on the hill was actually a a swampy area that had frozen up enough that we could walk up to the house. Nothing too interesting inside the house, although we did manage to frighten a family of squirrels as they did us.

These two photographs were handheld 3 exposure HDR images. I have my Canon 5D mk2 setup to take three bracketed shots each 1 1/2 stops apart. They were aligned and blended in Photomatix Pro and later finished up in LightRoom and CS6.

The color process is a cold and somewhat split toning effect that I feel brings a pleasing color visual as well as keeping with the eerie mood that we saw that day.

These are available as framed, metal or stretched canvas prints. the stretched canvas really seems to compliment these well, my preference.

Mosh

Purchase print

As I am in the middle of editing some pics from a recent road trip with fellow photographer George Argento, I wanted to post another shot from my session with Mosh a while back. Mosh has such a classic Hollywood starlet look that I shot her with a beauty dish and edited for a classic feel.

She is cleary wonderful and a fantastic subject. This image ws shot against a gray seamless background. Beauty dish and 580EXll shot through portable softbox for fill. A strip box was used for rim and hair light but really any light and modifier could have done the job for this shot. It's what I happen to have had mounted on my studio wall....


Edited in Lightroom and CS5, some healing brush for skin perfection, gaussian blur on layer for soft hair and features and color/contrast adjustment layers.


Isn't she fantastic!

A place in time, Mosh

framed print available

Here is a black and white portrait I did with Mosh during our shoot. I selected it from several because of her direct and deep gaze into the lens, which was what I had been looking for and asked of her. Mosh is simply fantastic, one of the best subjects I have had the pleasure to shoot.

This as with most of the studio sessions were shot against a seamless paper background. This in particular being a medium gray. It was later swapped out, or rather had a different background layered and blended over it in CS5. A stock image of clouds I had taken a while back was converted to b&w and used to add atmosphere and mood to the portrait. The image was intentionally done in a gritty and grainy texture to further emphasize a sort of timeless feel.

The setup consisted of a couple of MWhite Lightning heads using a medium softbox for main and a stripbox for rim and hair. A few portable strobes in with modifiers to add fill and background light. Canon 5D MK2, Canon 85mm 1.8

Finalist in Canon's Project Imaginat10n

I have been quiet here lately, going through some personal things and also spending more time with family. I have not focused on photography for a few weeks now, and while it seemed to be refreshing initially I do feel I want to begin working at it once again.

I was fixing my sons laptop a few weeks ago and got it fired up. His browsers homepage popped up(Youtube) and I happen to catch a banner promo on top the page for the upcoming Project Imaginat10n (a joint effort by Canon and director Ron Howard).

Long story short, I decided to submit a few photos and received a phone call several days later congratulating me on being selected by their panel as a finalist in the "Time" theme. They sent me paper work to fill out and notarize within two days and asked me to keep a lid on it until the finalists gallery launched this afternoon.

All finalists images will be voted on by the public for the winning selections as well as additional images being selected by Canon and Ron Howard.

If your so inclined, take a click over and look or even vote for the image you feel is best. My photo is "Life long gone" in the "time" theme in the "finalists" category. Thanks for looking. I hope to get back to it and get some fresh work up here again.

Project Imaginat10n Finalists "Time" Life long gone

Doghouse session

Doghouse

Doghouse, portrait

This is a shoot I had wanted to do for some time now. An old string bass and model posed in a somewhat retro burlesque style shot in a pinup sort of way on white seamless.

Thank you to bassist Trifon for the use of his bass and being generous with his time as to bring it by the studio and hang out till the session was finished. We got a late start, and he was pressed for time and so were we.

Mosh is a fantastic model, appearing in tons of print magazines and covers. She is a reknowned fetish model and also interested now in getting into the burlesque scene. Mosh did her own styling here ( quite well at that) and brought her own wardrobe and after some discussion we chose this look for the doghouse session.

"Doghouse" is a slang term for string bass, double bass, stand up bass, etc. It's got a lot of nicknames and I liked the term doghouse, especially how the name plays off the beauty of the model.

Lighting was two softboxes on camera right as main (one high and one mid level angling downward to expose the legs and shoes), a strip box on camera left and behind subect catching the hair and filling in the back of the models body. Another softbox camera left inline with camera position for mild fill mostly to head and chest area. Two small softbaxes aimed at background to get it white.

Editing was done to remove some stray hairs, ome mild skin blemishes and to adjust exposure to certain areas where I wanted more and less light. Black and white conversion done as a final step in Lightroom 4.0

Thanks to Mosh for a wonderful session, and to Trifon for coming through and hanging in there with us.

Barn and Tree

barn and tree framed print

Last month I had a chance to venture out and hit the back roads of New York state. I traveled up to Sullivan county, which is a place I spent many summers when I was younger. It was March and late in the afternoon when I came across this scene on a quiet road.

Camera on tripod, I tried many angles of this shot until I felt I had it where I wanted. Mulitple exposures to create a very natural looking hdr image. The 5 exposures blended together allowed me nice shadow detail in the barn and tree while keeping the cloud definition in the sky without it blowing out..

Processed in Adobe CS5 and LightRoom 4.0.

Ironically, a few years back i had come by this way and captured the very same tree in an image called "the playmate".  the image was taken from the other side of this tree, and at that time the tree had a tire swing hanging from one of its branches which apparently is no longer there....

Lost Prisoner in the abandoned asylum

Lost prisoner Contemplation Lost prisoner, out of rm 43 lost prisoner, final portrait

I know I have been slow to update the blog but I am trying to do some catchng up here. Lately I have been doing some Urbex (urban exploration) shooting and have hit some abandoned places and asylums here in New York State.

My friend Henry, who some of you may know from my past shoot with him, saw some of the locations and suggested we shoot his "lost Prisoner" character in one of the asylum buildings. He sent me some images of his character and needless to say I did not need an arm twisting to get me to head out there with him. Henry William Oelkers is a model/actor and man of a thousand faces. He is fantastic to work with and always brings it all to the set.

We shot these images in building 136 some of which can be found in a previous post here about my asylum adventures. All of these were shot in natural light except for "lost prisoner, out of RM 43" which was done with the help of a speedlite that I handheld over Henry to bring him out of the dark. I had forgot to throw my radio trigger in my bag and had to pop the flash manually during the .5 second exposure...took a few shots to time it right. We had fun with this.

During our shoot here I had heard footsteps in the hall outside the room we were in. I told Henry to hold on a second and let me take a look to see if we had compnay in this place. I poked my head out of the room just as two young photographers had been slowly walking up the hall and nearly scared the daylights out of them.

We later exchanged contacts and have been in touch since. Henry and I both wondered what would have happened if he had went to have a look and they saw his character emerge from the room.....

August morning

Framed Print

Having had some down time with not being able to shoot some personal work in a while I decided to look back into my archives and pick out a few from my "potential" collection and see if I could come up with something.

Here is an image shot back in August of 2009 upstate New York early morning. The mist and hazy atmosphere comes from the cool night giving way to the heat of the day coming in as sun rises. A young donkey looks on and watches my every move from afar.

Reading up on donkeys, I have learned that they are sometimes used to protect a flock from predators such as wild dogs or coyotes. The donkeys are allowed to mingle inthe pasture with a flock and they become very protective and try to maintain order. They generally do not like canines and when one approaches they will stand between the flock and the predator and will attack if neccesary.

This image was taken with a Canon 70-200mm 2.8L IS lens at 6.3 and 200mm.

A bit of post processing in Lightroom to bring out some more clarity and vibrance. I think I'm pleased with this. . . down time can be up time if we use it wisely.

Art Tour International magazine cover

From Portrait stuff

Anyone who has followed some of my more recent portrait works knows that I have collaborated with the fabulous Masae Satouchi on a number of shoots, whether she be the subject/model or working with me as a stylist.

One particular piece we did where she was the subject of a portrait done up with props and styling of her doing was this freebird haute couture portrait.

Well, working with Masae is always a ton of fun and so its a real treat for both of us to see the fruits of our creative labors grace the cover of a magazine.
Art Tour International magazine chose to use our portrait as wel as give Masae and myslef a full page article including some additional works of ours and some they selected as well of my dance and theater photography.

The magazine is in hard print form and distributed internationally and can also be had as a download in pdf format via subscription.