Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan has been turned into a skating ring for all to enjoy during the  winter months.  It is also the fabled pot of gold that Rich had never been able to find!  See we were shooting around Radio City I believe when Rich stops me point up and says to me, “I’ve tried like a dozen times to photograph the light coming off that building and I still haven’t nailed it” or something to that effect.  I asked him where or what it was shining on.  His answer, “I have no idea”  well after an hour or so if zig zagging around we ended up here at Bryant Park and sure as hell it is where the light was shining!

I was standing along the boards just watching the people skate, there were plenty of photo ops, but every lap that i watched these two skate by they were holding hands, slipping, laughing and having a good time.  I grabbed my shot of them and this was my only shot of Bryant Park.

Well the times they are a chagin’. I was watching an episode of “The Grid” a week or so ago when Matt Kloskowski had brought up something that has been in the back of my mind for some time. He and Scott were talking about print and whether it dying or already dead. Matt brought up a point about how we need to start thinking about the orientation we shoot and that shooting vertical is starting to penalize us.

It got me thinking, I love shooting in portrait format, but it is indeed starting to penalize me. Monitors are all widescreen horizontal now. When you post a landscape ratio photo it expands all nice and big, but when you post a portrait ratio photo the long edge goes up and down, which is the short edge of the monitor so it’s all compressed and small.

But where do we go from here? It isn’t ending with computer monitors. Print is indeed dying. When we as photographers shot in portrait ratio it was always to shoot for magazines, they are vertical, they required vertical formats to land a cover photo. Horizontal photos that were inside a magazine, unless double trucked are always smaller then their vertically shot counterparts. The world has flipped.

For those magazines who are trying to change with the times to stay afloat there are loads of things they are having to figure out on the fly. Do they simply create a digital version of their current print magazines like they do on the digital magazine app Zinio or do they start from scratch creating fully enriched and immerse digital mags like Scott Kelby’s “Light It” magazine.

If you are creating content for a new “digital” magazine how will the person be holding the device? For arguments sake, lets take the iPad since it is the most popular. I have one, I subscribe to both Zinio versions of traditional magazines and I subscribe to Light It. Right now both start out in a traditional format with the iPad being held like a magazine with the long edge in your hands. After the title page though where does the experience take you?

With both Light it and Zinio when you flip through the magazine they go page by page. However when you turn the iPad so that you are holding it landscape, then you see the two page spreads. The problem with this is that the pages and the content on them are now small. Just like posting vertical photos on a horizontal monitor. Maybe it is time we throw it all out the window. Instead of two individual pages making up a horizontal spread why not start laying out a magazine where the photos are horizontal taking advantage of holding the device landscape and placing content and copy within the photo.

Right now we are at the beginning of a long road of technical decisions that need to be made in the industry. We as photographers also could be in the unique position to help shape the new direction of this old industry. Why should we still have to flip our devices back and fourth based on the content on the page or spread?  Does a page really need to be a page like we know today or can it be transformed into something totally new.  These are just a few of the thoughts that were bouncing around in my head the other night, thanks to Matt and Scott for getting my brain thinking.

p.s. clicking on the photo gives you a nice large version to look at on your horizontal monitor!

At the point of capturing this picture WTC-1 is about halfway up. For some reason I really loved how construction elevator framed the edge of the picture. It almost looks like railroad tracks running up the side of the building. That’s all for today, nothing insightful, just a picture.

Just a quick post today. I had planned something more in depth, but well I haven’t finished writing it yet, so be on the look out for it sometime next week. But for now, I bring to you St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. I was standing on the sidewalk looking over the front of the church, the bottom was surrounded by scaffolding and I knew there was a shot to be had somewhere. As soon as I moved from the right side of the tree to the left it all came together framing the tree together with the upper half of the Cathedral.

Who ever thought you would have to read so many signs just to park your car in NYC. This was shot on 57th street as we were walking around. You gotta really want a car to have one in NYC, I saw a sign to one garage that said parking $8.50 per half hour! It really pays to take a bus or train into the city. Thats it for today, nothing really new or exciting to share today.

This weekend I headed down through a snow storm to NYC with Rich to do several things.  First there was a gallery exhibit of Vivian Maier, an amazing street photographer, which we both wanted to see and it’s ending this coming weekend so we said lets do it.  Turns out two separate galleries were having two separate shows of her work so we hit up both!  Also since we were going to be down there we thought we would visit the now open 9/11 memorial.  It is an amazing place that has been created.  The new WTC 1 is about halfway out of the ground and WTC 5 is now high in the air as well.  While we didn’t have the memorial to ourselves the amount of people there yesterday was probably way less then is there on a typical sunny day.

The memorial was our first stop after finally arriving.  After we cut through Chelsea Market, walked the Highline, and hit both galleries.  We grabbed some food then managed to get in a little shooting before getting the bus back to Boston.  Because of the time crunch we stayed in midtown and worked our way from 57th back to 34th were the bus would be.  We hit up Radio City, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s, Bryant Park, 5th Ave amongst other street scenes on our way to 34th street.  Stay tuned for some more photos from the trip.

Also I made this photo a lightbox so you can click it and make it larger to view.

Just a quickie today as I am eyes deep in graphic design work! It actually feels good to be putting my design talents to use, it has been WAY too long! Most of you know that sunrise and sunset shots to me at this point are well boring and over done. All I see is the same shots from the same people over and over again, nothing new, nothing interesting. I have no problem if you want to shoot them, but put some interesting element into the shot or give it a twist to spice it up.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a sunrise over Cape Cod, however it was taken out the window of the flight I was one, something you normally dont see. Today’s photo, I shot yesterday morning. It was sunrise in downtown Boston -however I took and shot it, with my iPhone because it was all I had with me- through the store front windows of a jewelry store. I mean literally I was standing on one side of the building and you could see the sunrise on the other side through the building, it was kind of cool and a new perspective, at least for me.

Keeping watch over the entrance to Boston harbor lies Little Brewster Island, a light house island that guides ships around the harbor islands and into Boston Harbor.  I am trying to get the blog back onto a regular posting schedule, but it has been hard this past couple weeks, first was the New Year’s holiday which always throws everything off, second is I am working on an award submission at the office, which of course they decided till the last minute to submit for.  I have a whole week to put together a “kickass” presentation for this competition.  Couple both those with I have yet to photograph anything new this year, well I have been struggling with things to post.

Welcome to the last year of the Earth!  Well that is if the Mayans have their way, but something tells me its not gonna happen and we are going to be around for a long time.  It is indeed a new year and I have yet to snap a frame so for today I had to reach back into the bag.  This is a Pano I did of Aria Hotel in Casino in Vegas.  It is just a wicked cool building inside and out, everything you can expect from Caesar Pelli.  Hand held of course because City Center is on you in like 3 seconds as soon as the first of your three tripod legs hit the pavement.  Like a lot of my photos, I ripped this through Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4.  I love that plugin, and the new version, V4 where you can stack filters within the plugin.  I have started to develop a trend with my work, where i start with tonal contrast and then add some glamour glow, to give it a little something extra.

Well here we are the last blog post of 2011.  It has been a long and great road.  Twenty-five thousand nine hundred seventy six.  That is the number of photos that I have in my 2011 Lightroom catalog.  Some people looking in from the outside may look at that number and think I am insane and why the hell did I take so many photos.  Those in the know, other photographers, I would hope see that number as yeah, he logged some good shutter time with his camera this year.  It is all practice, you don’t get to be a good photographer if you don’t log in the clicks.  Think of that number of shutter actuations like a person learning to fly thinks of flight hours.  If you don’t put in the time, you don’t get better.

Instead of including a top 10, 25, 50 or what ever photos that I have taken over the year I have instead chosen three pictures.  These three pictures are the ones that stick out in my mind the most from all the photos taken this year and they also represent a cross section of the photography that I practiced this year.  The top photo is of a diver during the Red Bull Extreme Cliff Diving competition in Boston.  The stop was the only one on the circuit where they jumped off a man made structure, this case Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art on the Waterfront.

The second picture was taken during he National Poetry Slams in Cambridge and Boston.  I was one of four photographer covering the weeks of competition, lots of work, late nights but it was a real fun time.  Getting to take pictures of other artists doing their thing while I did mine was great.  The last picture represents the largest section of my work, street photography.  Taken on a rainy early November night, I went out in full rain gear just to photography nothing but people with their umbrella and I got some really great photographs out of it.  It’s a subject I plan on continuing on with throughout 2012.

There you have it, some sports, some performance art/event, and street, urban life at its fullest.