Gone

One of my all time favorite shooters, passed away this week, Irving Penn. Sadly there are fewer and fewer of my industry hero's left in this world. He may have been the most emulated photographer ever. If you look at the YouTube link below, you can see the style dozens of photographers have taken as there own. His work will always be held in reverence, may his soul rest in peace. 

Irving, say hey to my dad when you get there.

Irving Penn Photography

Coming soon...I hope

I feel, and it's been suggested several times, that my Portraits are very serious and highly regarded and sometimes the rest of the blog, diminishes their importance. So it is my best intention to separate the the Portraits and the Commercial, sometimes whimsical, portion of the blog, into two separate blogs. Please stay tuned and please visit both blogs.

That's Rich

So, I have this client and yes, his name is Rich. Well anyway, he stopped by to go over a project he has been working on and I couldn't help but see an opportunity to collect another portrait. An outstanding designer and architect, he just looked the part today. Luckily he did have some time for this highly impromptu session. I would normally not shoot the subjects watch as it tends to distract from the face and the eyes but this was one cool watch. He said it was an Italian Diver's watch and that only added to the intrigue. Anything, well, almost anything, Italian, has a great appeal to me. Especially Italian design. I'm not much of a watch guy but this one I would most definitely wear.

And the "Greenie" goes to...

Todays "Greenie" Award goes to Tony Gaddis and James Schwartz, for a great video they did on the website for The Saint Louis Fashion Week. http://www.saintlouisfashionweek.com/FW_Oct2009/ Great little video clip. Very well done. I came across it while looking for the section on the website that featured Jeigh Singleton, a friend of mine, who is being given the Fashion Week Award for "Fashion Achievement". You might remember Jeigh from an earlier post. February 20th, to be more precise.
So congrats to Jeigh and our local guys for a job well done. I'm jealous of course.

This just in...

I've been told that people, concerned of my whereabouts, have filed a missing persons report. I thank those many concerned but I'm here and fine. Just took a little sabbatical from the old blog. Hope to return soon with a fresh vitality and sense of purpose. BTW I've been blessed with a new follower from Malaysia. Kamarul Shahrin and his blog, THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF KAMARUL SHAHRIN. Welcome Kamarul. Please check it out, I find it most fascinating.

Warholish

I recently had this simple little project with a very technical resolution. I have a client that needed to be able to show variations in color or various subjects. I launched into this tie exercise and it went swimmingly. One can change colors in Photoshop but I have never be able to do it up to my expectations. I do have another new (for me) software that is nothing short of amazing. The control is far superior and much simpler. As I pieced together the variations to send to the client, I began to appreciate the very nice graphic it created. Warholish if you would, only better. That's an unusual amount of Bravado for me. I do intend to do a master version to be printed and framed for mi casa.

So, it's come to this?

I may have mentioned in the past, we have gone through some great extremes to have a vegetable garden in our back yard. It has jokingly become known as the vegetable cemetery and the place that seeds go to die. Well, this year my wife, Kath, decided to grow carrots. We watched as they went through periods of trial and tribulation.
Slowly emerging from my beautifully prepared soil, then seemingly going dormant. Then again, shooting up just as quickly as they had languished before. Anticipating their maturity, we'd occasionally pull one and they would be the tiniest of sprouts. We waited and yet we still had gherkin sized orange tubers. So we kicked our patience into gear and waited some more. (Is that an oxymoron?) The green tops flourished but the fruit of those tops were stagnant. Finally someone told us, when the foliage starts to whither, then and only then would the carrot be ready for harvest. OK, so the time seemed at hand and I began pulling. This is the first of those plucks. Holy schmoly, mutant veggies. The rest have even more bizarre shapes and clusters...ooops, sorry, a client just called and I need to move on...to be continued...OK, back to the veggies at hand. See below.

And to think I used to laugh at Ripley's "Believe it or not" or "Our own Oddities"

Post Note: Speaking of believe it or not. The ad below from Google appeared in the edit window of my blog.

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Homegrown Vegetables

Grow healthy vegetables without a garden. No digging, weeding, hoeing

www.earthbox.comFini

The Weaver

I've tussled with this image for a while now. It is one of the few portraits that I've done on a plain background. I know it seems ludicrous but it just has never caught my fancy because that. I started with the modeled or Rembrandt background and without it, it seems wrong. People have commented that those backgrounds are so un-cool these days but somehow I think marriage of the new technologies and the old style feel somehow works for me. When you look at it, there is so little BG showing that you might wonder what is the fuss. Heck, I don't know, it's just a small splinter but it's annoying all the same..

New Clues for Watizit #4

I have attached new images to the original post. Helpful? Hopefully.
Do we have the answer? See below.

Silly Curiosity

Could someone please describe to me what milk taste like?

Sposa

It just occurred to me that I have shared with you my grandchildren, dog, Father and Father-in-law but not the most important person in my life. She inherited a certain stubbornness and cynicism but she loves to laugh and has so wonderful a smile. Here, she just seems completely happy and comfortable. It's one of my favorite images of her. I just recently unearthed it while sorting through some of my thousands of slides. Yes, film, remember that? Her given name is Mary Kathryn but is known by all as, "Kath". To me, she is my partner and the love of my life.

Watizit #4 (really, what is it?)

I have no clue as to what this is. It has been growing and growing in our garden for over a month now. The base plant has many stems and it's over six foot tall. These buds however, are maybe three inches across or one inch each. Please let me know what you think they are. Thanks.

Blossoms show little progress from original.
Stem Structure and hint of leaf
Now, WATIZIT?

Anonymous seems emphatic, that it's an Elderberry. Do we all agree?

Florence

This sweet woman is my wife's aunt and my favorite Aunt-in-law. She is a soft spoken, gentle person and is instantly easy to like. When I first began her session, I looked at her and I felt immediately at ease and comfortable. She has that pleasant and confident demeanor that one would expect from the most admired of teachers. I wanted to learn Spanish or Literature or anything from her.

For someone who had dreaded the deadly photo session, she seemed very much at ease with herself. I did let myself drift into this sepia mode because it just seemed to fit. The portrait itself is so simple and without any nonsense. Some might think it lacks the drama of some of my previous entries but I really love it because of what it really is, appropriate.

Watizit #3

This weekend's play shot. Know what it is? It's not that tough.

Admiration joins Marketing

Several years back, I decided I wanted to create an award called the "Greenie." Green as in jealous. For, I think, there is no greater compliment than one photographer being covetous of another's work. "I wish I had shot that". Over the years there have been hundreds of times I caught myself saying that very thing. So, the "Greenie" was to be an award that I would send to the shooter whose shot I envied. Now, it wasn't as one sided a thought as you might first think. I would truly award photographers the "Greenie" but at the same time I would be garnering precious free publicity. It's the reason many people or companies sponsor charity events. How many times in how many venues would the Jerry Tovo "Greenie" award be mentioned. Blah blah blah. Having gone a rambling, I now get to the point. A week or two ago the New York Times ran a feature about Lillian Bassman. I have attached that link for your convenience. Here is a woman whose work I truly admire. I wish I would have shot any one of the images included in the piece. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/17/arts/20090717-BASS_index.html

Please do not stop at this link. Take some time and explore Lillian Bassman. (see link: Femininity Salvaged within the Gallery page) What a terrific story.

Finally

I shouldn't let myself stray so far from my work of choice. I know it, yet it gets away from me from time to time. Stick with what you're good at. I love doing all the light hearted stuff on my blog but it's not as fulfilling as my Black and White work. Thanks to Lonnie Smith, I'm proud to post new portrait images.
Lonnie is a chef at one of my two restaurants here in the studio. Well, one of the two restaurants in the building which I call mine. A formidable man who has a work ethic that most people would wish to have. He has two other thriving businesses in addition to his culinary career. There are several more keeper shots from this session and I may choose to share them at a later date. I'm just glad he gave me his time to jump start my negligence to a craft I love.

8 Buck Rogers

Some months back I ran an image of young boy adrift in a sea of globes. That was from the City Museum of Saint Louis, the same facility let's you wander through the bowels of the building in what might best be described as from the era of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordan. This was shot with hardly any light. The weird thing is, when you are actually down there, you lose your orientation and they have done all they can to exacerbate that lost feeling, with hallways that just end and stairs to nowhere. Very freaky and frankly I found myself a bit panicked after a while.

Blown Assignment

Not the bubbles again. Well, yeah! I'm milking this baby. Actually I'm fascinated. Aside from the bubble caught bursting, I wasn't technically content with the previous effort. This got much easier with a second pair of hands and a masterful puffer. Trying to blow the bubbles, focus and capture them from a remote release was much more difficult than I anticipated. There turns out to be so many options that this could become a book. A book that some fried mind might find as entertaining as I.
I started with the white BG and changed to the black but then I became enamored with the spit between the two. Start rotating them and it becomes an exercise in proper orientation.

Then I tried stacking them. Don't think that didn't take a while.

The distortions became equally fascinating.

Simplicity

The FamilyI couldn't resist the concept of greyscale or black and white. Little Jewels.Totally Saturated, equal time, ya know.Enough for now, I have work to do. Check back later.

The Good Doctor

For almost 5 years, the good Doctor, Hayden Hucke (Huck ee), was our neighbor and friend. An incredibly intelligent lady who had a pension for rescuing animals. Birds, cats and dogs and who knows what else. I'll never forget Rudy, a monster Newfoundland, a black St Bernard if you would. We had a six foot high fence in one portion of our yard and one spring I was busily cleaning up the remnants of winter, not paying much attention and when I stood up I caught a glance out of the corner of my eye of something very dark. There I was standing nose to nose with Rudy, who offered a friendly lick to my forehead, but I don't know that I have ever been so startled in my life. My lord, what a bear he was. Alas, I wander. Even though she was less than mobile due to the severely arthritic conditions that plagued her, Hayden was quite an accomplished emergency room physician at one of the top hospitals in the country. We stayed in touch for a while after we moved but we haven't seen her of late. We really should take a moment to check in.

Follow Up

Earlier in the Spring I did a post of the granddaughters playing with the new super Bubble Blower. At that time I commented that I'd like to try the shot again in a controlled environment, so that I could slow the bubbles down, at least enough to get a good whack at improving the quality. This is only one of many images and I'll probably post more at a later date. I wanted to get this one up on the site so I could see just how it displayed in this venue. Catching one in mid burst was kinda fun.