OK…so on Sunday night, just as ‘Mad Men’ was lassoing its third consecutive Emmy for Best Dramatic Series, I was over on AMC watching that nights episode where our hero, Don Draper, wins his first Clio Award (and the apparent pain & suffering that comes with the honor). Well, maybe pain & suffering is a bit strong, since as Don does a victory lap around a bar with his trophy, all the gals in attendance are clamoring to spend the night with him! And that’s when it hit me…wait a second…..I have a Clio, and the damned thing has never managed to get me the ladies like it did for Don!!! I kinda think I got a raw deal…….or maybe I just need a tailored suit, a high & tight haircut, and a skinny tie!
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Ever since I posted THIS Song of the Day last week, I’ve been getting e-mails from photo geeks around the World asking me about the shot of Kate Tucker in that field. I’ve had more theories tossed my way than I ever could have imagined, from the type of lighting…did I use an HMI spotlight or studio strobes or small, battery-powered flash units…to whether or not Kate was even in the field…a lot of you actually are convinced she was shot in the studio and stripped into a stock field shot! All of this speculation knocked me out, especially since the truth is that it was a kind of a throwaway that neither Kate or I thought was working, so we bailed on it and moved on to another idea after only five or six frames!
So…for your photo-geeky viewing enjoyment…here’s a breakdown of the shot and the post-processing steps involved in making it look the way it does…
We shot this on the Hasselblad H1 with the Leaf Aptus 75 back which gave us this very normal, if a little flat, RAW file. To keep the lighting dramatic, the only light I used is that Profoto beauty dish (with a grid) you see above her head. It was powered by a Profoto 7B at about half power which nicely darkened the mid-day ambient light down to mimic twilight…
Next, I had to do a bit of cosmetic retouching and obviously the light boom and sandbag had to go, but since I grey-balanced the shot heavy on the blue side, I had to bring back the vivid red of the dress and yellow tone of the guitar. I also lowered the contrast and added a bit of shadow detail using the ‘Shadow/Highlights’ adjustment because I knew that a few steps down the line I would be amping up the levels and contrast a lot…
Now came some color correction. Leaf RAW files are inherently flat and need a lotta help to get the kind of color I like in my final images, and in this case, because of that very blue white-balance I did, I inserted a Color Adjustment Layer and added 20 Red to the shadows and 20 Cyan to the highlights…
…then I added a Selective Color Adjustment Layer and really increased the Blue and Cyan levels…
Next, I pumped up the contrast in the Curves and Levels Adjustment Layers…
…and the contrast went up even more when I duplicated the image layer, converted it to ‘Soft Light’ and applied a healthy dose of the High Pass filter set at a radius of 150 pixels…
With the higher contrast, the High Pass layer added a lot of drama, but I still felt I had to draw more attention to Kate, so in a final step I created a new Overlay Layer (filled with 50% grey) and I ‘burned’ down the horizon line, the grass on either side of her and a bit of the sky, then I dodged the grass directly around her to make more of a spotlight effect…
That’s it…a simple photo in only seven steps!!! And here are all of those steps…side-by-side…one final time…
If this little photography side-business I have going ever tanks and I had to find another gig, I don’t think I could ever be a real music reviewer because I have this nasty habit of always comparing any new music I hear to music I already know. I suppose it’s only human nature to think that way…I mean, when you tell somebody about a new band you’ve found they’ll invariably ask, “Who do they sound like?”…but real reviewers should have more arrows in their quiver than that. But then I’ve never professed to be a reviewer, but just an interested bystander. That hasn’t stopped millions of indie bands and tiny labels from sending me music from their latest Next Big Thing, which is exactly where today’s song came from. Henry Pope, the bass player for the Los Angeles based Atlantic Line, dropped me an e-mail offering their new album and would I mind get the word out to my cult-like followers? But it got me thinking, how did Henry know about my little corner of the musical interweb…and then I remembered that he also played with Lemonwilde and they were one of the first bands featured on the Song of the Day after I started the blog!
So now I’m gonna lean on my crutch of comparison and try to describe what I think of Atlantic Line…
I checked out their MySpace page and seeing the “Ambient/Live Electronics” tag these guys are describing themselves as, I was expecting a totally different listening experience from what I got hit with. Ambient?!! I spent yesterday with their album ‘Exit To Intro’ on ‘repeat’ and only one of the eight tracks (the Coldplay-like ballad, ‘Ghost In Daylight’) comes close to being described as ambient, so you rock fans needn’t be scared away by the thought of any frilly, loopy synthesizers and unintelligible lyrics! If you have to pigeonhole these guys in any category, Henry’s thumping basslines, William Oraha’s wall of fuzzy psychedelic guitar riffs and Noah Alexander’s power drumming is gonna be found in the arena rock section! And then there is lead singer Ray Silva’s voice…with his wailing and pleading and shouts, you come away feeling like you’ve just experienced a sort of weird mashup of Bono, Thom Yorke and Ian McCulloch. And since I mentioned Ian McCulloch (you can just feel another comparison coming on, right?!!), the first time I heard ‘The Muscle & Charm’ I couldn’t get the similarities to Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’ outta my head! Silva sings, “Who’s from the future, I’m from the future Honey…Do ya wanna see it, Do ya wanna see it Baby?”, but I’m hearing, “Buffalo and Bison…Bison and Buffalo…Ballyhoo and bedbugs…Bedbugs and ballyhoo”…! Go on…tell me I’m wrong!!!
Now here’s the best part….the boys are offering up the entire album on their website. It’s an honor system kinda thing and you can download it for nuthin’, but don’t be a cheap ass…if it gets you going, toss ’em a few bucks to show ’em how much you appreciate real music! (And yes…I kicked in!)
And then head on over and make friends on their MySpace Page
I’m gonna jump on my soapbox and make an appeal to all photographers who live or shoot in New York City. Today is the last day to register with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting to speak out at the hearing on June 3rd against charging fees for all still photography permits. Every editorial and advertising photographer uses the type of equipment that under current rules requires a film permit from the city and up until now those seeking a permit simply were required to carry $1,000,000 in liability insurance, but the new proposal is adding a non-refundable $300.00 ‘application’ fee for every time a permit is pulled to shoot! Given the razor-thin profit margins photographers are working with these days and the budget tightening our clients are faced with, a $300.00 permit fee will seriously hamper location shooting in the city.
I will be speaking on behalf of EP, ASMP, APA and NPPA, but the more photographers who get up and let their voices be heard, the better! If you’re available to to go the hearing being held June 3, 2010 at the 125 Worth Street Auditorium, you must register by TODAY…contact Dean McCann of the Mayor’s Office at 212-489-6710 or by e-mail at applicationfee@film.nyc.gov and if you can’t make the hearing, please vote “NO” on this online petition.
Damn Ugly hasn’t had this many hits in one day since he went to DC and photographed The President…and even then I don’t think the graph went that high! This morning, David Hobby, also known in photo circles as The Strobist, interviewed me last week and posted it on his blog at 8:00AM this morning….
His post today…and the launching of my new website…have resulted in a major traffic jam clogging up the interwebs! I could only hope and pray to get this kinda action on a daily basis, but since I’m trying to get people signed up for the Santa Fe Workshop Ronnie Weil and I are teaching, I’ll take whatever action I can get!
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Damn Ugly made it to the Top 100 Blogs of the Day on WordPress!!! #27…and climbing like a rocket!!!
The Redesigned Website Is Up !!!!!
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You’ve probably noticed my participation here at Damn Ugly has been sketchy recently, but after a couple of months of all-night design sessions, resizing images and portfolio editing, my new website is up & running!!!
This is the third website design I’ve put up and by far the best. Quite honestly, the format of this site is exactly what I would have wanted years ago, but the technology just wasn’t there. Until now I’ve been using a Livebooks design, but this time I worked with Rob Haggart’s web design company, ‘A Photo Folio’ to implement the changes and we went live over the weekend. While everything about the architecture of the site is new, I incorporated a lot of the basic design elements from my previous site in this new project.
The first major change you will see is that I’m no longer hamstrung with a single, small image window…the images are much higher resolution ands now dynamically resize as you change the size of your browser window, or…even better.…you can click the ‘Full-Screen’ button at the lower left of your monitor and view the biggest, sharpest possible images I can offer! Navigating with the Thumbnail view is also much faster since you can see larger thumbnail images and they pop up ten times faster than the Livebooks version ever did. And I really like being able to navigate forwards and back by simply clicking on the left or right of the image…as you roll your mouse over the image, a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon appears and you can click and go! You can also access the thumbnails by placing your mouse in the middle of the screen and clicking when the grid icon appears. I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because the site design is so intuitive it just seems natural! But if you have any problems getting around the site, just ask a five year-old…it’s been years since I’ve met a kid who couldn’t figure out the internet!
Finally, having these hi-rez images allowed me to add a couple of galleries that I plan to have a lotta fun with in the future. My ‘Artificial Portraits’ and ‘Light Tests’ will allow me to show more of those behind the scenes moments that normally get archived to a hard drive, but offer insightful looks at the nuts & bolts of my shoots.
As some of you already know, the past couple of months have had me furiously redesigning my current website with the folks at APhotoFolio.com and yesterday Rob Haggart, Mr. APhotoFolio himself, informed me that they have become the first photography website company to deliver custom designed iPad sites, built using HTML5, for all of their customers. Check it out…
As I sit here resizing TIFFS down to JPEGs for my new site, I hafta wonder if the next thing I’m gonna be doing is purchasing a carload of iPads to act as my portfolios?!! Given how labor intensive, not to mention expensive, printed portfolios can be, having everything on an iPad just might make sense! I dunno…it’s all very early in the game, but if I can get over not having a printed book of BIG prints to show an art director, who knows?!!
And now, here’s a quick look at a sample page from my new website, which will be up as soon as I finish resizing those damned JPEGs…
Click on image for Full-Size
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Mark your calendars kids, ‘cuz in July Mr. Damn Ugly is gonna be jetting off to teach a workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops!Reid Callanan, the High Priest of Santa Fe, has invited Ronnie Weil and I to teach a week-long program called ‘The Editorial Portrait’…..an intensive class that will let us show a group of young photographers what it takes to shoot for an editorial client. We’re still figuring out the curriculum, but I’m getting tired already! I figure by the end of the week, if the students don’t have a very good idea of what it takes to be an editorial portrait shooter, they never will! The week will be a non-stop cycle of shooting and critiquing work…every day new assignments are given out and the students have to adapt immediately and come back with great imagery. I’m looking forward to kicking some young photographer ass!!!
The fun begins July 4th and you can read all about our workshop HERE!
I’m tag-teaming a Song of the Day along with a bit of good, old fashioned log-rolling today. The song is a previously unreleased acoustic version of ‘On The Radio’Kate Tucker and Mark Isakson layed down for Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival last year. The log-rolling is explained below…..
Kate has finished recording White Horses, her new solo album, but she need a bit of help. Being an indie artist often means little details like coming up with the last few bucks to press CD’s, promote the album and loading up the tour bus sometimes force her to employ extraordinary measures…in this case, hit up folks on the internet for whatever they might be able to contribute! Kate has put together a Kickstarter Funding Video…complete with ‘prizes’…in order to raise the final $5000.00 she needs to put White Horses to bed. If you toss her a few measly bucks you can get a signed CD and a bit of good Karma…for 50 bones she’ll unlock the vault and give you her bootlegs from her first album, the out of print Eros Turannos, and a few more goodies…$500 and she’ll record an acoustic version of any of her songs, dedicate it to you, post it on YouTube, and send you an exclusive mp3…..and for you seriously High Rollers, a grand will get Kate to play a concert for you and 40 of your closest & dearest friends (!)…two grand and she’ll sing for you, and cook you dinner and get you drunk (!!)…and if somebody were to kick in the whole five grand…well, I think it goes without saying that if anybody hits that target, Kate’s gonna have a friend for life!!! (Or it means she sold herself into slavery…I’m not quite sure…..)
I’m asking all of the friends of The List to head over to ‘Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is! Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!’ and watch the Kickstarter video…and if you can, show her a little love. And then pass it along to a few friends. It’s a lot more interesting than those damned LOLCats videos that keep filling up my inbox! And let’s be honest…the more true artists like Kate out there might mean we have to endure less of Lady GaGa…!!!
I just heard from my friends at BusinessWeek…the entire Photo Department has just been fired and the phones in the Art Department are starting to ring, so they’re probably all gone too….
1:00PM UPDATE: Everybody in the Photo, Art and Graphics departments got fired……
4:10PM UPDATE: I dunno if this has anything to do with the days events, but I just heard that the 43rd Floor is on fire…for real!!!……
It’s kinda bittersweet to be posting about a job I just did for BusinessWeek on the same day I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding the expected job cuts, but what the heck…it might just be a long time before I have another BusinessWeek story to talk about, right?!!
Last Tuesday, I get a 7:00AM wake-up call from one of my favorite people in the whole World, Sarah Morse…the magazine just got an eleventh-hour OK to shoot Ron Burkle, the supermarket Gazillionaire, and would I be available…like right now…to shoot him?!! I was literally getting ready to head out for a location scout on another gig, but sure…I can call and get Bo’s lazy ass outta bed and the two of us could hang with Mr. Burkle for a bit. And I actually knew a lot about Burkle…he was a huge Democratic fundraiser, a regular on the New York Post’s Page Six, he owns the Pittsburgh Penguins, he hangs out with Bono and Diddy and Leo and various Supermodels…and he recently bought Sky Studio, a triplex photography studio with it’s own swimming pool that I used to rent, as a New York pied-à-terre for about 17 million bucks and that’s where we were gonna do the shoot! Of course, we were told that he would have very little time for the shoot and I wouldn’t get to meet with him until he arrived, but that didn’t matter. Even with a ten-minute shoot window, I figured I should be able to pull something kinda cool off…..
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The backlit, cantilevered staircase gave us a grand entrance focal point and we quickly saw it as the perfect location for our opener. Thank God Burkle showed up wearing a suit and not the jeans and polo shirt his publicist had promised!
After an extremely quick five-minute shoot on the stairs, I asked Ron if we could have a few more minutes to shoot him up on the roof…he graciously obliged and this was the result…..
You can read the article, ‘The Other Ron Burkle’, HERE and y’all stay tuned to see if I have any more BusinessWeek stories to relay in the future!
The sad news racing through the photo community this morning…or at least the small portion I find myself a part of…is that another sweeping round of axings layoffs at BusinessWeek is imminent. I suppose my acting surprised might seem a trifle disingenuous, but since Bloomberg assumed the reins back in December and the initial firings were announced, things seemed to be stabilizing and I was hoping (against hope?) that the friends and colleagues I have known for years would be spared further cuts, but with word that a new design team is in place and both the New York Post and Daily Finance reporting that as many as 30 more people might face the chopping block as early as tomorrow, it’s probably time to face the fact that the magazine I knew is due for some pretty big changes.
Sue Bloom gave me my first assignment back in October of 1988. Roxanne Edwards (then the Photo Director) took a chance and gave me my first cover story a few short months later. It was in 1991 that I began working with the current Photo Director, Ronnie Weil, when she sent me of to shoot the CEO of Pepsi. And Larry Lippman, Kathy Moore, Scott Mlyn, Anne D’Aprix, Sarah Morse, Andrew Popper, Mindy Katzman, Lori Perbeck, Regina Flanagan, Kat Malott, Burte Hughes, Sandra Torres…throughout the years these photo editors and researchers have been like family. This is one of very few magazines I have worked for where I could drop by and feel like an insider and that my opinions and viewpoint actually mattered. I’ve been allowed access into some pretty amazing executive suites over the years…culminating in Ronnie and me getting to spend an afternoon in the Oval Office just a few months ago for our Obama cover story…and I’ve had the opportunity to produce some rather interesting work. I honestly can’t tell you how many covers I’ve shot for them, but it’s gotta be North of thirty by now, and through it all it’s been a wild ride. Now all any of us can do is see how the next act plays out…..
There is something so wonderfully Portishead-like about Phantogram. I dunno if it’s because the Lo-Fi scratchy intro and fuzzy synth pulses and echoing guitar reminds me of ‘Glory Box’, or maybe it’s how Sarah Barthel’s voice has a similar fragile, floaty quality to that of Beth Gibbons, but it might just be ‘cuz I’m just so desperately in need of some trip-hop that when I heard this today I was immediately drawn in by the unique strangeness, the minimal beats and the angelic arc of Sarah’s vocals. Phantogram signed with indie power-label Barsuk Records last fall and their first full-length album, Eyelid Movies, is due out next month. Show ’em some love and head over to MySpace and make friends!
One of the cool things about the blog is the ability to look at the stats to see exactly who is wasting time in here, and one sort of weird thing has happened in the past few weeks…suddenly I’m getting a lotta hits from China and the blog is being fed into translate.google.com for English to Chinese translation! The only problem is, when I see how what I post gets translated, I hafta wonder if Google is getting it right! ‘Damn Ugly Photography’ comes up as ‘Disgusting Photography’ and ‘The Home Of The Song Of The Day List’ results in ‘But To Date Name List Song Home Page’…!
I dunno…I should probably just be happy that there are people half a World away checking out what’s sitting at the top of my iTunes folder!
As the new era at Bloomberg BusinessWeek begins, so does a new stable of columnists, and one of the first new names added to the masthead is the revered television interviewer and journalist, Charlie Rose. We had the pleasure of photographing him in his TV studio…at the table…for his new column portrait.
Another year is over and another decade done and all that’s left for me now is to cook down the music I’ve served up over the past twelve months into an easily digestible, playlist-sized morsel. God…even after all the years I’ve been doing this, it’s still not easy. With all of the inspiringly good music that came out this past year, the wrap-up could have easily been 30 songs long, so I’ll apologize up front if you felt Carbon Leaf or Blitzen Trapper or Wye Oak should have been recognized, but I had to swing the axe on something, otherwise why have an end-of-the-year list at all?!! Surprisingly, none of my faves showed up on lists compiled by Rolling Stone, Spin or any of the other ‘big’ name music mags. Well…NME did have The Horrors ‘Sea Within A Sea’ at #2…does that make me a little bit mainstream?!! And it might sound melodramatic, but many of these songs have become touchstones to my life…they jog my increasingly bad memory and remind me of how I was feeling, who I was with and what I was doing. As I sat here editing down the list and listening to these all again, it was as though I was watching the year musically speed past me…bringing it all back again as the melodies filled me up. So here they are…my favorites songs of 2009……
There was absolutely zero chance this wasn’t gonna be my number one song this year. From the first time I heard it leap outta my Sirius while listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage channel I was sold. Ryan Karazija has been compared to everyone from Bono to Thom Yorke, but the simple fact is his voice is an amazing instrument all it’s own, his timing and phrasing are extraordinary and he’s backed up with three of the most talented young musicians I’ve seen in years! And the cherry on top was that I got to shoot them when they were in New York back in March! Their self-titled debut album came out in October and you can check them out on their MySpace page
The one thing that nobody should ever have to witness is me singing, but this is the one song this year that I find myself harmonizing with (horribly) whenever it plays! Rachel Stolte’s trembling, trilling yet powerful vocals send shivers up my spine and the wall of fuzzy noise that accompanies her gets me swaying from the jump. Great Northern dropped “Remind Me Where The Light Is” in April…check ’em out on their MySpace page
Yup…those three goofballs from Leeds who studied the Nirvana songbook easily grabbed the #3 spot on The List with ‘My Rock & Roll’, certainly the most glorious rock anthem of the year. I found ’em on MySpace…where else?!!
There’s a certain member of The List who has told me in no uncertain terms that if ‘Quiet Dog’ didn’t make the Songs of the Year List, I would no longer be welcome at her dinner table! Well…she didn’t hafta threaten holding back food to get me to put this thing on, ‘cuz when I saw Mos Def do ‘Quiet Dog’ on Letterman I was instantly maintainin’ the rock and I don’t stop! Mos Def is the King of Kool…and he’s on MySpace
Just imagine…if it hadn’t been for me tossing and turning from a wicked case of insomnia and then switching on Kimmel I probably never would have known who Anya Marina was, but even in my sleep-deprived state I knew she was the real deal and in an incredibly short time she has rocketed to the top of the indie pile with the kitten-sexy ‘Move You’. In fact, she’s so damned good that she stole the show from headliner Emiliana Torrini when they played the Highline Ballroom this Summer! ‘Move You’ is off of her second album, Slow & Steady Seduction, Phase II and you can hear more on her MySpace Page
So what if Metric are electronically-driven popsters from Canada? Every time Emily Haines’ pleading, raspy vocal cries, “Gimme sympathy!”, it pulls at my heart! It’s just one of those perfectly hook-filled pop songs that I find myself humming long after it’s over and what can be wrong with that?!! Head on over to their MySpace page and listen to a bit more.
Few bands blew up as big as Band Of Skulls did this past year. Besides touring the World in the summer, they also killed it at the Lollapalooza festival and just when they thought things might die down a bit, one of their songs was featured in the blockbuster movie, ‘Twilight – New Moon’…not bad for a group who last year at this time were still playing skeevy clubs in London and only had a couple of EP’s under their belts! Hit ’em on MySpace
Karin Dreijer Andersson’s solo experiment, Fever Ray, caught even the most diehard fans of The Knife off guard. Where The Knife could wander off into an electronic miasma of utter weirdness, Andersson’s icy-cool vocals, haunting melodies and slickly-produced musical constructions created a surprisingly approachable, yet intensely primal, world of minimalism and harmony…while still remaining pretty damned weird! Hear more Fever Ray on their MySpace Page or over on the Official Website
Kate’s new album, White Horses, isn’t due out ’til next Spring, but I’ve been giving out tastes for most of the year! A document of heartache, lost love and rebirth, it’s an intensely personal diary that she presents with an anguish-filled urgency that you feel from the first few notes. Kate’s a friend of The List, and I’m expecting you all to pre-order a limited edition signed and numbered copy of White Horses (Release date: March 2010), and Kate will send you a free gift! Just go the the ‘NEWS’ section on Kate’s Website for details, and then check her out on MySpace
The Idle Hands were basically unknown, but they turned a lotta heads at SXSW this year when they debuted a bunch of the new stuff they’ve been working on, including this Nihilistically re-worked version of ‘Loaded’, for an as-yet unnamed new album. All you Emo Boys and Backpack Kids can check out more songs over on MySpace
What’s a list without a bit of Goth?!! Sure, they wear a lotta eye makeup and they’re probably very full of themselves (I mean, just look at how they pose!), but so did Bauhaus and these guys are the closest thing to that late-great band there is! For those of us with a penchant for gloomy poetics, Faris Badwan’s vocals come across like the like the bastard-child of Peter Murphy and Ian Curtis…just the kinda thing you need to listen to as your life slips away from you…..visit their MySpace page or their website for more.
This was the very first Song of the Day when I moved The List from the e-mail distribution to the blog and it has remained one of the most-played songs I’ve come across all year. Seattle-based Eric Elbogen performs as Say Hi, recording albums out of his home, playing a majority of the instruments and vocals. He is often compared to such disparate artists as Belle & Sebastian, The Beatles, The Strokes, Interpol and Gary Numan and since 2002 has put out a pretty damned impressive body of work…visit his MySpace page to hear more.
I’m always fascinated by Sarah Negahdari’s voice…at times it’s like Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but then she’ll get all introspective and moody like Tanya Donelly from Belly and just when you think she can’t morph into something else, she’ll do a mash-up of Patti Smith and Yoko Ono!!! It’s her trilling, high-register vocals that drive this L.A.-based power trio like a buzz saw on steroids. Their new album, Spells, dropped October 6th, and you can head over and make friends on MySpace
Even more tough-girl vocals from Sarah Daly, the lead singer of London-based post punk pop band, Scanners. Daly’s femme fatale swagger…part Karen O, part Chrissie Hynde…fits in perfectly with the eerie vibe on ‘Salvation’, with it’s dark harmonies that overlay a haunting melody. They’re set to release their second album, Submarine, in February on Dim Mak, but for now, check ’em out on MySpace
It’s kinda fitting that we come to the end of a list of the year’s best songs with a band that doesn’t even exist any more. The Sun were a collective of crazy talented musicians from Columbus, Ohio who packed it in back in January, but before they left, they finished Don’t Let Your Baby Have All The Fun that you can download gratis over at their old label, Rock Proper. And if you like following dead bands, head over to their MySpace page and ask ’em to get back together again, but to maybe come up with a better name!
Well…that’s it for another year. I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves! As for me…Hell, I just wanna be a rock star…..!!!
It seems like in the past few years the overwhelming majority if the people who have stood before my camera have been businessmen….so much so that I’m beginning to have dreams of long lines of guys in suits! I have a bit of a backlog of recent shoots that I haven’t dropped on the blog, so before the holidays take over I figured I had better clean out the closet and put few of them up…
With the spinning off of AOL from Time Warner, I was sent to shoot CEO Tim Armstrong and his inner circle at the New AOL for a feature story in the first issue of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek…
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong
Jon Brod – Vice President of AOL Ventures
Jeff Levick – President, Global Advertising and Strategy
Bill Wilson – President, AOL Media
Brad Garlinghouse – President, Internet and Mobile Communications
IndexIQ for BusinessWeek
And finally, one more BusinessWeek story. For this one one, we went down to NYU and shot the principals of IndexIQ, a Westchester-based hedge fund with a former Time Inc publisher at the helm and an NYU finance professor at it’s chief investment strategist.
Seated: Professor Robert Whitelaw. Standing (L-R): Adam Patti, Anthony Davidow, Sal Bruno
Uh-Oh! Somebody must have broke into Kanye’s crib and stole his entire act…ummmm…I mean his AutoTune! Then they used it to put together a pretty damn catchy end-of-the-year dance mix that’s got me groovin’ at my desk! And thank God they didn’t forget that Lady GaGa occasionally dresses like Kermit the Frog…..Brilliant!!!
Damn Ugly Photography 