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!