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 clearly wonderful and a fantastic subject. This image was shot against a gray seamless background. Beauty dish and 580EXll shot through portable soft box 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, gausian blur on layer for soft hair and features and color/contrast adjustment layers.

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 free bird 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 well as give Masae and myself 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.

Janitors closet (abandoned asylum)

Abandoned asylum (building 138) Janitors closet

I recently had another opportunity to venture out to the asylum from which I have been putting together a series of works. A couple of good friends (and very good photographers) made the trip last week where we managed to roam the dark empty halls and rooms of building 138.

Its always exciting to discover these places and venture in, but from a photographers perspective i was a bit dissapointed with much of the photo ops, or lack of. Some spots are real gems while others don't seem to offer more than the peeling paint but I did come back pleasantly surprised by several images I took, especially after working on them later and realizing that I had something after all.

Here is one such surprise, the very small room called the janitors closet. As with most of my series from the asylum I shot this with a 17-40L 4.0 wide angle lens at approx 17mm. I try to line things up in such a way (camera height, angle/rotation)as to have minimal lens distortion. Later in post processing I will correct whatever distortion was there as best as possible. I do sometimes like the effect of the distortion so it really depends on the scene I'm shooting and what I feel I want from it then or later.

As with most all of the pieces in this set this was a 5 exposure HDR (high dynamic range)process. The window was exposed at 1/320 @f11 iso 200 while the room interior was taken at 1/6 @f11 and then three exposures in between.
The images were imported into Lightroom and converted to DNG files on import. The five images were then exported into Photomatix Pro and blended and tone mapped in such a way that brought out as much detail and smooth shadow/light transitions as possible. In this stage the image looks rather flat and boring. I think its not a good idea to try and get the image to look finsihed in Photomatix by tonemapping it into oblivion. I bring the hdr processed file into Photoshop where I bring out contrast and use dodge and burn techniques to bring back the mood and atmosphere of the scene. I will sometimes tweak the hues of various colors to obtain a sort of dreamy or cinimatic appearance. I'm not going for a documentary type realissm here but at the same time I do not want things looking unnatural or unrealistic. A good friend and fellow photographer George Argento described the finished processes as looking "hyper realisitc" as opposed to surrealistic and I felt that was a pretty cool way of seeing and describing it.

Cropping and lens correction adjustments are always the last thing I do, and I do them in Lightroom. Anyone familiar with Lightroom knows that adjustments you make there are only virtual adjustments and only applied to an exported image. the original is always left intact. This way, if I ever decide that I cropped to tight or needed to roate and tweak a bit more i still have the full image as it were in camera and will have the options to further tweak and/or open up the crop. The full image will always be there to work with.

There are a few more photos from this building that I'm pleased with and will post some up soon again.

If you read this far, thanks for your time :)

Abandoned asylum adventures part 1

Abandoned psychiatric facility (first level of building 122)
deadly corridor


Abandoned psychiatric facility (upper level room at rear of building 122)
lost souls

Abandoned psychiatric facility (basement of building 122)
darkness revealed

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 135)
resuscitator room

Abandoned psychiatric facility
Stairs and Corridor

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 136)
tea

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 136)
foreboding doorway

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 136)
draped

Building 136
Dark Empty Cabinets

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 136)
Open Cabinet Doors

Abandoned psychiatric facility (building 136)
long narrow lavatory




These images are from three separate trips to an abandoned psychiatric facility in New York which resides on a huge acreage and consists of dozens of buildings. The facility opened in the mid 1800's and expanded rapidly from several patients to several thousand. Thorazine, shock therapy and frontal lobotomies were part of the treatments for many patients but on the bright side reduced the number of which needed to be kept in restraints and straight jackets over time. Treatments eventually became better, more effective and more humane.
During the later years, patients were transferred out to other facilities and officially closed down in 1996, although a couple of smaller buildings still are used as homes and treatment centers for a number of patients.

The first building I ventured into alone, building 122. This was part of a group consisting of a few buildings where patients were housed. This group of buildings were in terrible condition from roofs that had collapsed allowing extreme water dame to set in over the years. The other buildings had already imploded and this one I went in was ready to collapse at any time. The first shot in b&w is of the first level corridor with many rooms on each side. As you can see, the floors are caving and much of the ceiling as well exposing the upper level corridor. Foolishly, I had went in here alone and while trying to make my way down to search some of the rooms, the floor collapsed and I found myself halfway through to the basement. Fortunately, I did not fall all the way through and was able to pull myself up and get back to safer flooring. Many of the rooms were without floors due to collapse and large sections of the corridor floors were collapsed as well.

The next image of the window and faces on the wall was taken on the upper level of this building in a room at the very rear. Getting that shot was extremely nerve wracking because the entire floor in that room was swaying with my weight and many of the images did not come out quite well because the tripod would move due to the floor movement. Thankfully I came away with this image, and my life!

The next image is of a room in the basement. The entire basement was practically pitch black due to boarded up windows but this particular room had a window uncovered and a nice lighting shining through.

The next set of images are from building 135 which was used as a convalescence for special patients recovering from surgeries or illnesses. There were two floors and a basement but only the first floor had light from no boards on the upper half of the windows. I ventured into this building alone as well, but it was in much better shape than the other and aside from being a bit spooky I was comfortable in that it was fairly safe.

The next set are from building 136 which was the first stand alone medical and surgical building on the site, built sometime in the 1920's.

Fellow photographer James Oligney was interested in coming along for this venture and so we hooked up and headed out armed with dust masks, plenty of water and much of our camera gear including tripods. James is a cool dude and one heck of a fine photographer. He is specializing in portraiture and headshots and you should have a look at his site and blog. Great stuff from James.

On previous visits I had found an opening to a basement window and thought we could access it from there but turned out it was a sealed boiler room with no way into the rest of the structure. We roamed about the perimeter for a while when James calls out that he found an opening through a window that had been raised. Actually, took me a minute to realize he was calling for me because he was using a bird call and he sounded like the real thing!
This building was quite large compared to the previous ones I had hit. Three stories but covering a large footprint of about a half a block deep and side to side. It resembles two opposing L shapes joined in the center by the main rectangular structure, so inside it appears vast and a bit confusing. We made note of where we entered and kept track of how to get back to that room eventually.

All of my asylum images have been done with HDR (high dynamic range) processing typically utilizing about 5 exposures per image. This is done to try and balance the exposure from the bright window with that of the darkest areas in a room or corridor. Doing this allows for correct exposure of the entire scene without losing highlights due to blowout or detail in the shadow areas due to underexposure.

I'm using a program called Photomatix Pro to blend the exposures that i have captured in RAW format. I try to process them to have a more or less natural look about them and not look over cooked.
HDR can also be processed manually by layering several exposures in Photoshop and manually blending them together using layer masks. I actually do a combination of both in some images. Photographs where there are foliage outside a window can sometimes be difficult due to the wind blowing the foliage around in between takes. This can cause problems when trying to blend the exposures together with a program like Photomatix. Although most programs have settings that help align and reduce the "ghosting" effects of moving elements, they are not always very successful. I find I can take the exposure that was correct for the window area and manually blend it into the otherwise finished HDR image thus eliminating the ghosting due to movement. There are many ways of doing things and sometimes the best way is a combination of a few together.