Lorenzo

I had a test shoot earlier tonight with a guy named Lorenzo Jimenez. He had contacted by email after seeing my photographs somewhere.

This was one of the test shots...

Needless to say, Lorenzo and I will be doing a shoot in the near future. Hopefully this Sunday.

Christian

Christian, originally uploaded by michaelnyc.

I think the image speaks for itself! :-)

Recent Shoots

Some photos from some of my recent photo shoots...

A Great Holiday Weekend

Alaink ... from our September 3rd shoot

I worked with some amazing models this holiday weekend. I don't quite believe it myself, but I think I shot over 4,500 photos this weekend. On Monday, I shot for nearly nine hours straight. And I loved every minute of it.

Now I just have a hell of a lot of Photoshop work to do!

Nelson ... from our September 3rd shoot

If you ever want to shoot photos in NYC, READ THIS!

photographers, originally uploaded by seth_holladay.

IF YOU EVER WANT TO SHOOT PHOTOS IN NEW YORK CITY... READ THIS...



The Mayor’s Office of Theater, Film, and Broadcasting, which coordinates film and television production and issues permits around the five boroughs, is considering rules that could potentially severely restrict the ability of even amateur photographers and filmmakers to operate in New York City. The NY Times reports that the city’s tentative rules include requiring any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour (including setup and breakdown time) to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance. The regulation would also apply to any group of five or more people who would be using a tripod for more than ten minutes, including setup and breakdown time. - (Excerpted from The Gothamist)

If the above troubles you, please take action now. The city quietly released information about the proposed regulations on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend and many of us missed the notice and subsequent hearing. The office is accepting public feedback until August 3, and the rules could go into effect this summer!

New York Times article on the proposal.

Sign the petition by Friday, August 3rd.

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Angel in the Light

I know that lighting is everything. Bad lighting makes you look bad and good lighting makes you look good. And then there are a few times that lighting is just... well... everything...


This image was the result of an accident. As I was shooting Angel and he was looking all sexy, one of my studio flashes didn't fire. I looked at the image in the camera and immediately turned off the key light and kept shooting with just the side/back strobe. This is the result!

I love accidents!

Joel

Just got finished Photoshopping Joel's photos from the photoshoot. He's got such a great look on camera. This was his first shoot. With a little experience, he's going to go far...

Brooklyn Bridge

Creative as hell and funny! Watch....



Davey Dance Blog -26- BROOKLYN BRIDGE - Ace Frehley - from Pheasant Plucker and Vimeo.

Scary steam

Originally uploaded on Flickr.com by ~ Raymond.

Today's steam pipe explosion on the city's east side reminds us New Yorkers just what a scary time we still live in even almost six years after 9.11. But the television shots of steam, smoke and people running with debris on them brings back those 9.11 memories all too quickly.

Luckily, this looks like it's not terrorism related, but it's still scary.

Hero vs. Celebrity

“I feel sorry for kids today,” the late Red Auerbach once observed. “When I was a kid we had heroes; today kids have celebrities, and there’s a big difference. We used to admire performance. We used to admire class. Now we applaud glibness. Now we admire flair.”
That’s TV news in a nutshell, with its dazzling graphics, mawkish scripts and endless supply of Ken & Barbie reporters. Please. What good are straight teeth and gorgeous hair if you can’t pronounce Worcester, and how important is a pretty face if it’s wrapped around a vacuum where the brain ought to be?

Those couple of paragraphs are from an article in the Boston Herald "Natalie blazed trail with poise" on the retirement of long-time WCVB-Boston (ABC affiliate) anchor Natalie Jacobson.

I thought that Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald did a great job of summing up television news today, as he says, "in a nutshell."

In looking at the amount of airtime that's been devote to someone like Paris Hilton, it's a little disgusting. She's done nothing and yet she's a celebrity. No one would use the words "class" or "performance" to describe Paris... she's definitely more in with the "flair" and "glib" crowd.

This can't be good.

Angel

I worked with another awesome model on Monday by the name of Angel. He's originally from NYC and now a Buffalo University student that's in the city this summer working at Armani Exchange to make some cash for school.

We had such a great time shooting. We really clicked and talked about all kinds of stuff during our nearly 5 hour shoot... and we shot over 1,100 photos! (a new record for me)

The shots above were from when Angel went to flip up his hoodie and it ended up covering his whole face. You had to be there... but believe me, it was funny. And Angel's laugh is very infectious.

Watch for more photos of Angel soon.

Artistry

I had an amazing shoot today with Jason. He's a dancer with the Balance Dance Theater company. I've never seen a person move the way Jason was able to move his body today during the shoot. It defines the word artistry to watch him move. I only hope my photographs can capture a small part of what he's able to do.

Jason had just completed three nights of performances of Ibomba at the Kumble Theatre at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus. (and I made him get up at 9a for a shoot following his final show!)

I'm editing the 922 photographs that we took during today's session. It's going to be a very difficult edit because we created a lot of fantastic images. I'll post more soon.

Verizon Ad

I had a photo shoot with Joel (above) on Saturday. During the shoot he was using his cell phone as a prop for some of the shots. I made a comment that he looked good enough to be in a Verizon ad, soooo, I put him in a Verizon ad. Photoshop is fun!

And to take it an extra step, using some of the tools in Flickr and a companion site called Big Huge Labs, I was able to put Joel's Verizon ad on some billboards...

Studio 2F

Apartment 2F has now become STUDIO 2F

I've now transformed Apartment 2F into STUDIO 2F. Hmmmm... might be a name for a website, or a blog or a new company! :-)

The living room now is a studio complete with a portrait background (yes that same cheesy portrait background that they used for all your school pictures!). I've got a black background (if you slide the couch over next to the portrait background). And if you take down the black cloth... it turns into a freshly painted white background. I can also shoot against the white wall in my bedroom without having to take down the black cloth.

Almost like a real studio except I don't have to worry about all that cavernous space that a big photo studio has. My studio is "cozy" (New York City euphemism for "can't turn around in the space.")

Saturday Shoot with Darnell

Shot yesterday with Darnell. He's been modeling for about 5 years now and was so easy to work with. We took 649 pictures during the 4+ hours of shooting. It was fun. There was a lot of back and forth idea sharing and we came up with some good photos.

Two shoots on July 4th

I did two photo shoots on July 4th. It was a long day, but I had a lot of fun. Both models were really laid back and easy to work with.

I shot Christopher (top photo) in the morning. We've done one shoot together before, so we're used to each other styles.

In the afternoon, I worked with Eric. This is our first shoot together. Eric moved great, was easy to work with and looks great on camera. We shot for about four hours and took over 600 pictures.

Now I just have a ton of Photoshop work to do!

Happy 4th!

Macy's Fireworks 2006 Redux, originally uploaded by ~ Raymond.

Happy 4th of July!

Sunday Shoot with Dwyll

dwyll, originally uploaded by michaelnyc.

Had a fun shoot today with Dwyll. He's a "cash model" at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch store in Manhattan. A&F calls them "cash models" but most other stores call them cashiers!

We got some good stuff. I was please with the shoot. Here are a few more of the shots....

Saturday Shoot with Daniel

daniel, originally uploaded by michaelnyc.

I walked over to Riverside Park today with my friend Daniel. This was the first shot of about 300 shots we took this afternoon, and I think I like it best of all of them. I should have just stopped after this one!
:-)

Beautiful, sunny day in NYC. The park was crowded.

I'm still experimenting with shooting in bright sunlight. I've gotten a lot of good advice that I'm putting to use... such as putting the subject with his back to the sun and filling in the face with flash or reflector. In this case... I used a reflector on Daniel (blinding him at times!) but it came out like I wanted. It looks natural which is what I was hoping for.

Shhhhhhh NYC!

Now, how am I going to sleep at night if the city is going to be so quiet???

From the Gothamist.com blog...

NYC About to Get Shushed

A new noise code will go into effect tonight/tomorrow morning when the clock strikes midnight, and that clock better have muffled bells. It's the first comprehensive overhaul of noise ordinances in about 30 years and was proposed by Mayor Bloomberg three and a half years ago. It's mostly oriented towards bars and clubs, where a growing nightlife presence in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side has left many residents sleepless. The New York Times notes that noisy cars and motorcycles will be completely banned from the city, there will be a limit on how long dogs can bark continuously, garbage trucks will be required to stay at least 50 feet from residential buildings between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., construction noise must be mitigated (Adrienne Shelley was killed for complaining about construction noise), and ice cream trucks will have to go quiet when parked curbside. We wonder if this will have any effect on the creative siren-DJ stylings emanating from police cars. Either way, enforcement of the new code may be spotty because the Dept. of Environmental Protection only has 26 noise meters. The police have 80.

The New York Post reports that the stricter noise regulations are worrying Mr. Softee truck owners and drivers, whose livelihood is ensured by the incessant jingling siren call that beckons kids on summer vacation to their trucks. The Post's story quotes one ice cream distributor who predicted that the jingle-ban could melt ice cream sales by 30%.

The full and official new 25 page noise code can be viewed at New York City's site here (pdf). We didn't see anything about banning upstairs neighbors from clomping around in what sound like wooden clogs on hardwood floors very early in the morning.

Hot and sticky!

originally uploaded by ~ Raymond.

It's been a little warm in NYC lately. My flickr.com friend Raymond caught this classic shot in Brooklyn with kids playing in the water from a fire hydrant.

With the hot weather also comes some pretty amazing lightning storms at night. This shot was also taken in Brooklyn.

"Lightning Over Brooklyn", originally uploaded by Enjoy Patrick Responsibly.

Location shoots

kero, originally uploaded by michaelnyc.

Ran across a great location to shoot last week with the model I was shooting with at the time, Kero. It's an access way to the Amtrak train tracks that run under Riverside Park. It's just a big metal grate door (with a lock on it) but the entryway made of big stone bricks makes for a great location background.

You can see through the gate that there are some amazing graffiti-filled walls inside, but they're not accessible. Plus there are trains using the tunnel quite frequently.

We were looking for graffiti when we ran across this place. It's funny that it's very hard to find graffiti on the Upper West Side of Manhattan now. I'm sure if we went a little further uptown than the 70s and 80s we would find more, but in my neighborhood, very little graffiti to be found.

Omar

My friend Omar stopped by last night. It was good to see him. I hadn't seen him for several months. And of course we had to take some pictures! Omar is funny... as soon as the camera points at him, he starts posing. I'm not sure if he even knows he's doing it, but he goes into these classic portrait poses. But he always looks great on camera!

Omar is into photography also, so we were talking about my new studio light and umbrella that I've been using to

shoot portraits. In the shot below, he was convinced that the studio strobe (mono- light) wasn't firing. (It is a very quick flash.) So he kept looking at the light to see if it was flashing when I took the photo- graph. It was.

Back to my roots

Back in January 2007, I purchased a new digital camera... a Nikon D80. For me, it's a trip back to my roots. In high school and college, I was the photographer. I took pictures of everything. Then along came television journalism and I put down my film still camera for a television camera. Now 25 years later (yikes!), I've picked up a still camera again. This time it's digital and so much more versatile than the old film cameras. Now my darkroom is Photoshop and I don't have to deal with all those chemicals. Although I still think that's why Mr. Sittner gave me an 'A' in high school chemistry... because I could mix all kinds of darkroom chemicals and make a photograph appear out of a dark room!

So now I'm having a blast with shooting photo- graphs again. Through taking shots of friends, I've stumbled into portrait photography and helping prospective models with portfolio shoots. It's been great. I've got to work with some great models over the last few weeks.

Thanks to Josue, Daniel, Omar and Eddie for putting up with me taking photos of them all the time. They let me "practice" my craft on them and experiment with lighting and focus and exposure until I'm sure they were sick of it. But I hope they think it was worth as they've seen my photography progress over the last six months. As a matter of fact, Daniel asked me the other day when I was going to shoot him again "with good lighting" like I'm doing for the models. I took that as a back-handed compliment! :-)

Some of my recent photos...

More to come!