Happy New Year !!!
Damn Ugly Photography
R.I.P. Bud Greenspan
A million years ago…well, back in 1995…I photographed Bud Greenspan. Bud, of course, is famous for his documentaries about the Olympics. One of those touchstone memories I have from my childhood is being glued to the TV, watching them whenever they were aired. How could I ever have imagined that years later I would have the privilege to photograph the man behind these wonderful time capsules of history, but there I was, shooting him for the 1996 Olympic Program! We did the shots the art director wanted and then, just before he had to leave, I asked for one more moment of his time. If you knew anything about Bud, you probably remember seeing him behind a camera on the sidelines of an Olympic event, with those heavy glasses he wore sitting on the top of his bald head…that’s what I wanted to capture. A few quick Polaroids and we got it. A partially solarized negative with the director staring back at me…almost looking right through me…it’s always been one of my favorite portraits.
Christmas? Ummm…OK?!!
Damn Ugly Is Number One ?!!
Yesterday, David Hobby…The Strobist…dropped his annual list of Favorite Posts from the past year and the big news that knocked Mr. Damn Ugly on his ass was that the interview David did with me back in May…* Cue the Celestial Harps & Trumpets *…was his Number One Post of the Year!
The Strobist Top Posts, Ranked by Clicks
Now David predicted that this news would lead to me getting a big head…and he was right! I mean, by his own count 2,469,886 different photographers visited Strobist from 218 different countries and territories. That all added up for a total of 20,531,296 onsite page views, with another 12MM via RSS….my hat size is growing exponentially!!! Honestly, I don’t know how I’ll be able to live with my own fame…..
Damn Ugly thanks David and all of his readers at Strobist for the honor. I plan to live up to all the duties and obligations that come with such a title and look forward to my reign at the top of the Strobist hit-count heap in the coming year!
Now THIS Is Impressive…
The other day I stumbled across what I thought was just one more way to waste serious time on the web, but instead really knocked my out…PhotoFunia Dot Com!!! It’s a site that uses an online photo editing tool that allows you to upload any photo of yours into one of a couple of hundred (and counting) stock images. Now this ain’t exactly new…I’ve seen plenty of other sites like this in the past…but what truly impressed me was the way PhotoFunia’s proprietary technology automatically identifies the face in the photo and imports it so damned well into the funny face photo montages….and it does it in seconds!
It takes about five seconds to upload the image and no more than five seconds more before you can download the finished montage to your desktop. And it’s all so well done…I’m not kidding when I say this is the kind of Photoshop work that some cases would take me hours! It’s kinda freaking me out with how this type of photo manipulation is advancing…but it’s still a lotta fun!
Check out PhotoFunia…I guarantee you’ll have a blast!
Rainy Day In NYC…
…nothing going on today…..just me paying bills and Camille sittin’ in the window watching the rain…
You Can Shoot Here, Or You Can Shoot There…
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I know how much some of you like seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff on my shoots, so as my tour of the Nation’s boardrooms and office spaces progresses, I offer to you my recent session with Gordon Fowler, the President and Chief Investment Officer of Glenmede. What follows is part lighting tutorial, part manipulating reality, but mostly it shows what can be done when you only have ten minutes to photograph a high profile subject and still come away with unexpected, arresting images.
On the location scout I did a couple of days before the shoot I was presented with two things. First, Gordon was extremely busy and wasn’t going to be able to devote a lot of time to a photo session, and second, there were really only two areas that would work as possible locations…
The ‘Art Wall’…
…and the ‘Wood Wall’…
The two spots were literally side-by-side, so by setting up both shots beforehand it would make it easier on Gordon’s time limitations…
We began with the portrait in front of the ‘Art Wall’…
It’s pretty obvious that I changed the overall look and feel by adding some moody blue drama to the scene, but the shot was actually pretty easy to light. Gordon was lit by a fresnel spot (with a full CTO gel) that was almost directly overhead and a second light with a 7″-40 degree grid skimming the wall behind him. The final light was a ringlight (with a full CTB gel) filling in the overall scene. After five minutes of Gordon in the chair, we went around the corner to the wood-paneled wall…
For this shot I wanted to keep things simple and just focus on his expressions, so I kept the lighting pretty open with a gridded beauty dish up high above his face, a couple of skim lights on either side of him and another ringlight adding not only fill, but a nice reflection highlight on the wood that separated him from the background. But the real beauty of the shot was the unexpected caught moment of him just enjoying his coffee and having a laugh before we actually got under way. I finished things off with that tight portrait at the top of the page, but the magazine went straight to Gordon and his coffee cup…
Two setups…ten minutes total shoot time…done!
I Got ‘Behanced’…
Last week I found about a new “…platform for creative professionals that covers all industries…” called the Behance Network and I figured I would take it for a spin. In the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee, I signed up for a portfolio, uploaded a selection of my work and sat back to see what might happen. Well…this morning I wake up to a boatload of emails from all over the World from people who had suddenly viewed my behance page…because the editors at behance had chosen to feature my work on the homepage of ‘Featured Projects’…! Now this has me thinking that just maybe I should have spent more than five minutes tossing those images up there!
You can sign up for your own Behance account at http://www.behance.net
Mola Likes Damn Ugly Photography
The guys over at Mola were paying attention a few months ago when I was interviewed by The Strobist and I mentioned that very often my light modifier of choice is one of their reflectors. They were so impressed, they featured me on their blog along with a few of the many shots I’ve done using the various Mola dish reflectors…
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Steven Spielberg with the BIG (43.5″) Mola Mantti
Edie Falco using the 28″ Mola Setti
Follow the link to the rest of the story on the Mola Softlights Blog HERE
I Drive A Minivan…
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I’ve always been a gearhead…I just love cool cars…I’m glued every week to Top Gear wishing it was me powering along those windy roads behind the wheel of the Supercar of the Week, so it’s just bloody sad that my main method of conveyance is a 2003 Dodge Caravan! Of course, I’ve got nobody to blame but myself…and I suppose it does make much more sense to load my 600 pounds of lighting gear into that functional but ugly-ass Mom-mobile than it would trying to cram it into the backseat of a ’69 Camaro, but it’s still a drag. So when I got to hang out for a day with gazzilionaire investor Jim Glickenhaus in the Top-Secret warehouse that houses part of his World-renowned car collection, I was over the Moon!
Jim’s day job as head of the investment firm Glickenhaus & Co. allows him to pursue a hobby that unless you are the head of such a company, you couldn’t afford the entry fees! Jim collects exotic cars. The BEST exotic cars! He is particularly well-known as a Ferrari aficionado, with a stable that includes a 1947 Ferrari 166 Spyder Corsa, a trio of ’67s…the Dino Competizione, a P3/4 and a 412 P…and then there is the Ferrari he is most famous for…the 2006 Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina.
The P4/5 is a one-off that Glickenhaus envisioned as a modern version of the Ferrari P-series. But how do you redesign what many consider to be the finest sports car of all time? Glickenhaus went to Pininfarina, the car designers & coachbuilders long associated with Ferrari, and laid out his design concept…he purchased the last Ferrari ‘Enzo’ in existence and told them to redesign the Enzo in a style similar to his 1967 Ferrari 330 P 3/4. Now the Enzo cost him close to $2 million dollars…but the final project…with more than 200 components designed especially for the P4/5…would add an additional $4 million, not that Glickenhaus thinks it’s a bad investment, as he said, “…it would not amaze me if, in 50 years, the P4/5 goes for $100 million…”
Some of the other cars in Jim’s collection include a Duesenberg J446, a Stutz DV-32, the Ford GT40 Mark IV J6, a Lola T70 Sl 71-32 and the 2009 Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, but ohhhh those Ferrari’s…..
Why Would David Dorn Wanna Look Like Me?!!
I’ve known David Dorn, the SVP for Digital Strategy at Rhino Entertainment for a lotta years, but aside a few snapshots I did at his wedding, I’ve never shot him before…until this week. He had a last-minute trip to New York and an odd request…he saw the recent rather moody portrait of me and wondered if I could do the same for him! So I fired up the studio and the above portrait was the result…but the question now is, who looks creepier…Me or Dave?!!
Getting In Close With Marty Whitman
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I’ve photographed Marty Whitman…the Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund…twice before, so when Adrian called me a couple of weeks ago to go back to the well for the third time I knew I wanted to do something completely different from what I had already done. Marty is a very cool guy…he always did whatever I came up with, whether it was to play tennis in the halls of his office, or pose under a fish that he caught on a company retreat…but this time I really just wanted to focus on Marty and do a study of just him without all the props and surroundings…..
While I was looking around the office for a place to shoot, I noticed kind of a quirky scene where they had pushed a bunch of chairs in front of some file cabinets so they could install a ping pong table in their cafeteria…
It made for another cool shot that bears a striking resemblance to a photo I did a few months ago of Neil Barofsky, the head of the TARP Fund. Maybe my next long-term photo project should be file cabinets across America……?!!
What Your Choice of Camera Says About You…
I very rarely simply re-post stuff I find on other blogs, but there’s no way around this one. The Shutterfinger blog has the most astute…and accurately funny…dissection of the kind of person who buys a particular brand of camera. For those of you more affected by Attention Defisit Disorder, the Cliff’s Notes version has Canon owners switching to Nikon, Nikon owners switching to Canon, Sony owners believe in the Easter Bunny, Pentax owners are cheap, Olympus owners have no friends and Leica owners are, of course, poseurs with Hasselblad envy! But those are just the broad strokes and I implore you all to head over to Shutterfinger for the complete read!
Andrea Jung in the London Sunday Times
Palm Beach + July = Very, Very Hot !!!
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Back in July, Eric Godwin, the Photo Director at Bloomberg Markets magazine, asked me to head down to Palm Beach to photograph Chris Cline, a billionaire Coal Baron and head of Foresight Energy, one of the country’s largest producers of coal. As you can imagine, Palm Beach in July is just about as hot as a coal furnace, but with added humidity! Add to that our location…Cline’s 164-foot yacht, ‘Mine Games’…and we were in for a hot time in Florida!
Kaz and I got in a day early and on our scout we immediately were made aware of the quirks of trying to photograph a portrait using a prop as big as a yacht…the boat was in a rather tight slip with very little room to maneuver for good angle and the boat itself…while certainly large and luxurious…offered few spots to do the kind of shots I had in mind. But a couple of locations did jump out…
…this spot…shot from inside a hedge and through a bunch of tall grass…would let me stack up the boat behind him.
…and I thought it could be almost regal having him descending this staircase…
And I guess the Art Director was thinking the same thing when he named the story, “New King Coal”…..
One thing became very apparent as soon as the sun rose in the sky…since the entire deck was gleaming, shiny white…even slathered up with an SPF-50 sunscreen, my white ass was gonna fry like a lizard on a rock in the desert! I spent a lotta time re-greasing myself during the day and did a good job of not turning into a human lobster, but there was one place I neglected to coat…the inside of my nostrils! All that sun bouncing up and into my nose gave me the most excruciating sunburn I can remember, so for any of you who may have seen me after I got back from that trip with a finger up my nose…furiously scratching away…now you know why!
Big Jet Engines
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A couple of weeks ago, Adrian DeLucca at Barron’s asked if I wanted to shoot a cover story featuring Louis Chenevert, the CEO of United Technologies…the only problem was, United Technologies didn’t want to let Louis leave the office and go play with any of the cool toys UTC makes…like the really Big Jet Engines that I knew they had sitting at the Pratt & Whitney plant right across the river from their corporate headquarters in Hartford! But after a little back-n-forth with the folks in corporate communications at the company, I convinced them that since I had shot at UTC many times in the past and I knew the offices were Death on Toast…very functional, but not exciting in the least…a location scout was in order! And after only five minutes of poking around the Testing Facility Hanger, this was what I found…..
Now all three locations would be perfect for both my cover and the opener for the story, but the problem was, we were only going to get Louis for ten minutes…tops…..and he was showing up at 8:00AM, surrounded by assistants and P/R guys whose main mission in life was to make sure I didn’t get a second longer than what was promised! That meant Kaz and I would have to set up everything the night before and for the shoot, move our subject from shot to shot quicker than we have had to do in a long time. Here’s how things looked…..
Fun At The Fair!
Yesterday I channeled my inner farmer and hit the Harwinton County Fair, complete with ox-pulls, carnival rides, corn dogs and a whole mess of chickens and horses and cows and bunnies! My iPhone (set to ‘Hipstamatic’, of course!) has recorded some choice bits for you to enjoy…
Killer Attack Rooster…
Very Friendly Horse…
Sleepy Bunny…
Tiny Donkey…
Girls Sitting With Cows…
Terrifying Rides…
Whac-A-Mole…
Dead Guys…
…And The Best Damned Potatoes You’ve Ever Seen!!!
Now I know that still pictures hardly do justice to a good carnival ride, but if you watch this video long enough, it might generate enough vertigo to make you sick….
Do you feel like judging a few chickens?!!
Not a fan of chickens? Then how about braving the crowds to look at the prize-winning bunnies?!!
And if all that wasn’t enough fun for ya, The Flying Wallendas were even on hand cheating death for the 7,496th time!!!
New Work – Robert Nardelli
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My tour of the nation’s boardrooms continued last week when I got to spend some time with Bob Nardelli, the ex-CEO of Home Depot and Chrysler, who is now at Cerberus Capital Management, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the country. His new gig has him running the Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company…a little portfolio that includes about 50 companies with combined revenues of nearly $50 billion. With that as his day job, it’s not too surprising that I was not going to be given a lot of time to do what I do, but I was further hamstrung when the location I wanted to shoot him in was deemed ‘too public’ and instead my only choice was…the boardroom.
The boardroom is always the first place I’m shown and usually the last place I wanna be! The person giving me the office tour typically says, “We’ve done a lot of photography in here!”, which makes me wonder why they think I would want to go where thousands have gone before, but beyond that, most boardrooms are just not that photo-friendly. They can be High-Tech or Old-World and as well-designed as possible, but there’s no gettin’ around the monstrously large table that inevitably takes up the bulk of the room. And even the best boardroom is usually kinda bland, overlit and without much drama. So to overcome these little obstacles I decided to get a bit dark and moody and make a shot that was more cinematic than real…..
…then, for a quick secondary photo, I decided to do one of my Artificial Portraits (above) that I could also serve as a nice setup for a tight portrait…..
iPhone Photo of the Day
And Now… A Digital Back For ‘Pure B&W Images’…?!!
The steady march of technology in the photo biz often makes my head spin, especially with the price of admission factored in, but this mornings email from PhaseONE even made me take a deep breath. For the mind-bending sum of $41,990.00, photographers can now enjoy a ‘pure’ digital Black & White experience with the release of the new 39 Megapixel PhaseONE Achromatic+ Back. That’s right…42 Grand and you can only shoot B&W! Now I don’t wanna seem too Old Skool here, but if ‘regular’ digital backs are having such a hard time capturing Black and White images, couldn’t we just load in a roll of Tri-X like the old days and be happy? Was there really that big of an outcry from the photo community for a piece of equipment that essentially moves the medium backwards?!! I’m not saying I don’t love Black & White imagery…far from it…but spending 42 Large on a digital back is sort of like inventing a High Definition Video Camera that only shoots silent movies! And yes…Phase is touting the scientific applications of such a back as one of the main reasons for going forward with such a project, but you just know there are gonna be a lotta kids with messed up priorities who will have the Achromatic+ on their wish list this Christmas!
Damn Ugly Photography 