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.

Well where do I begin with this one. This isnt a picture, or is it? Over the last couple of weeks I have been eyes deep in creating an awards submission for a project at my office. I was in charge of the entire design layout of the presentation while others wrote the copy for it. Everything went great I was in the zone the whole time. My first idea for the theme of the project was met with it’s great lets roll with it which never happens in design EVER! Last Friday I had all the design work done, when I came in on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday) all I had to do was wait for the final copy to come in and put it in the layout.

Thats when it started. For the many that probably don’t know, I am dyslexic. It was acting up big time, and I am not a just mix up the occasional letter or word, I mix up lots of things letters, words, colors, I will read something and shift around entire paragraphs. It is just how my mind works, at times it’s a struggle, and this week it was that struggle. With no set deadlines and nothing really pressing, my concentration got lax, my mind started to wander, I just couldn’t get things in order.

Then came yesterday afternoon, I had spaced out for a couple minutes after reading an article in some trade mag when all of a sudden my mind started seeing all these colors and shapes and I decided to snap out of it by getting it down on “paper”. The “paper” was my iPad and I used Sketchbook Pro. What resulted is what you see here, I sketched dozens and dozens of starting lines only to clear the layer and start again. Then it hit me and what you see is what I was “seeing” at the moment a sort of organic set of colors and shapes all interacting with one another.

I think what drew me to photography at an early age and why I still love it so much is that I can see things in the everyday world that most people never even notice. When I shove my eye into the viewfinder of my DSLR it turns into a microscope for me and the world is just molecule that I am examining piece by piece.

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.

As the sun rises over Cape Cod on an early late fall morning, glowing with the last hints of warmth in the sky, it is also getting ready to set one last time on the year that is 2011.  As I said last year I am sure, most people sit around and look back one what happened over the year.  Sure it is nice to do, but don’t dwell on it, it already happened.  Use this down time at the end of the year to start thinking about how you are going to make 2012 exponentially better then 2011 was.  Did you make a list of things you wanted to accomplish in 2011?  Did you get them all done?  Chances are you didn’t, I know I didn’t, life just gets in the way some times.  Take those things you didn’t get to do this year, and put them at the top of your list of things to do for 2012, but also start thinking about how you can make them even better then what you were thinking of this year.  Maybe you had some big elaborate photo shoot idea in your head you wanted to try, but deep down you just weren’t ready for one reason or another.  But now you have practiced more, had more time to think through the logistics, it is time to make it happen in 2012.

Well Sunday is Christmas, so Merry Christmas to all my blog onlookers.  I took this last week in Faneuil Hall of the giant Christmas tree.  I worked this tree from near and far, wide angle and telephoto.  Ultimately the telephoto shots from midway worked best.  It was one of the first times in a long time I had most of my gear with me, that means backpack with multi lenses, tripod and accessories.  I really wanted to get people in motion and I think it is accented well by the two women standing still looking at the tree.

Just after I took this photo I was just hanging around waiting for my buddy John who was down the street shooting City Hall and I was approached by a guy and his girlfriend.  He said, “You look like a professional photographer, could you take out photo with the tree in the background?”  I smiled and I said I guess you could call me that, said sure and he handed me his Nikon D5000.  Not that it matters but for those that don’t know it is Nikon’s entry level DSLR.  It was set to full auto, popup flash the whole nines.  I wasnt about to fiddle with the settings for two reasons, first I shoot Canon and I have no idea where all the Nikon settings are, and second I didnt want to screw it up for the guy if he just said thanks grabbed it and left before I had a chance to change it back.  Anyway, I take a picture, to me, it horrid, bad on camera flash etc, but it is of him and his girl during the holidays and that is what matters right?

I say let me take one more, I get down low and shoot upwards to get more of the tree in the background.  Just as I am about to take the picture, he gets down on one knee pulls out a ring and asks her to marry him.  I can’t make this shit up!  So in that instant I have to snap into “professional” mode.  My camera is 10 feet away, so I am left with the gear I have in my hand, in this case someone elses camera.  I do my best snapping away about ten frames, I got the kneel, the shaking, him putting the ring on her finger a big kiss and her all teary eyed.  All pop up flash all full auto nothing “pro” about it.

I tell you this story because over this last week and a half of the year, it is not about making perfect pictures.  Sometimes it is about capturing those moments for other people.  I don’t even remember their names, I doubt they remember mine, I never gave them my business card, but they will always have and always remember the photos that the “professional photographer” took for them that night in Faneuil Hall the night he proposed.  So this weekend, when creepy Uncle Frank asks you to take his picture with his horrible reindeer antlers and inappropriate Christmas sweater, just do it, because you never know what it might really mean to them

Another shot from the Venetian lobby, this is the main lobby, with the entrance on the right and the registration desks just out of frame on the left.  Light from the opening in the dome just floods into the space creating this really warm glowing feeling.  It is one of the few places where you actually get a glimpse of natural light, the rest of the time you are inside with no sense of time.  The very first thing you notice when you walk into the Venetian though isn’t the architecture or the opulence but it is the smell.  They pump a perfume into the air that at first waft is overwhelming to the senses and while it does become a background element like much of everything else it is still always there.