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Another in the air iPhone shot today. This is also a great time to break one of the classic rules of photography, the rule of thirds! Unless you travel for business weekly there aren’t many opportunities in which you are perfectly eye level with both clouds and the horizon line. As a bonus in this shot the cloud formation also looked like a mountain range way off in the distance. I artsy’d this shot up using Nik’s Snapseed and I quite like how it came out in the end.
I promise I am trying to get back into a regular blogging schedule, but in a good way work has been keeping me way too busy! But, I am going to try to hit all three days this week! That said here is today’s photo. I’ve said this in the past, when flying always grab the window seat and have a camera with you because you never know what you may be able to capture from 35,000 feet. I shot this and several others on the way back from Vegas a couple of weeks ago. We were above the Grand Canyon, my dslr was in the overhead, which I usually take out, but I knew ahead of time I was just going to snap shots with my iPhone and edit them right on the phone as we flew through the air. After seeing some presentations by Adobe Evangelist Julieanne Kost and what she was creating with her iPhone I knew I wanted to start doing more of it myself. First off if you’ve never seen her speak she is amazing, knows everything there is about Photoshop and is a true artist. That’s the key here, she isn’t trying to create the perfect photo, she is instead trying to create art from the photos she is taking with her iPhone. I decided while listening to her I needed to get back into that mindset. I am now a full time digital artist for my day job but when I pick up a camera my brain immediately switches from artist to photographer mode. That’s fine and all but I think using the iPhone with no worries about ISO, f-stops, shutter speeds and all the other million things that race through the synapses of a photographers brain, I will start to see both sides of the road at the same time.
I’m back! Last week I was out in the desert hanging with friends in Vegas during the Photoshop World conference. It was a chaotic week to say the least. I spent most of the time not in photography classes but this time rather design classes, it was a nice change of pace. The Westcott booth was rocking as always slammed with people shooting models. My buddy Erik Valind is a Westcott Pro and I ended up being his assistant for the week helping him with two expo floor classes and one conference class. In his conference class Erik also had Lindsay Adler as an assistant not a bad trio if you ask me! This is one of the few shots that I actually took while out in Vegas, I think I came home with only a hundred or so pictures total. I guess I way over packed! But, it wasn’t a total loss, I got to hang with my good friends Erik, Patrick, Damien, Jason and Corey and we had a blast all week, just blowing off steam. Now it is back to the grind.
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What a day Saturday was! These guys are seriously nuts. The platform you see here is 93 feet above Boston Harbor. To put it in perspective the highest diving event in the Olympics is the 10 meter platform which is roughly 33 feet for you non metric people. This is 3 times higher! An estimated 47,000 people lined the banks of Fan Pier and the ICA to watch the event, which got started an hour later then scheduled as they waited for the tide to come in. Boston has earned a special place in the sport of cliff diving. It is the only US stop on the tour and it is also the only place where they divers jump from a man made structure, aka a building!
Defending Boston champion Gary Hunt of the UK pulled out all the stops and repeated his top performance to become the 2 time Boston champion and closed in on the overall lead currently held by Orlando Duque of Columbia.
From a photographer/spectator perspective there were a few things I would of liked to have seen changed. As you can see from my photo there is a barge platform that the anchored in the water, this served as the officials/judging platform and it was the base of operations for the recovery team. What you cant see from this vantage point is the divers actually entering the water. Anthony’s Pier 4, where I photographed last years competition was not letting people onto their pier to watch from that side due to a private event. This meant all the spectators were all on the Fan Pier side and had no view. If Red Bull brings this back for a third year next year and I sure hope the do, I would like to see them switch the diving platform and judging platform so the most people can see and fully experience the event. I have loads more photos to go through, every dive I shot as a rapid fire sequence so I didn’t miss a moment in the air, it also lets me put together more composites like this one, which is always fun to see. Also a big thanks yet again to Joe Fallon and his Fan Pier group for helping put on another great aquatic sporting event! Two world class sailing events and two diving events, lets hope this trend continues!
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This photo single handedly sums up why I spend my August Sundays walking in the heat for 10+ hours a day. A grandfather and his grandson walking together with the procession of the Madonna, something this man’s father and grandfather also probably did. The Italian feasts of Boston’s North End are steeped in traditions that go back many generations, all the way back to the old country. The Fisherman’s Feast in Boston is itself 102 years old, in Sciacca, Sicily it is even older. I have made it my own personal mission to document these feasts with my camera, to record and preserve this history in photographs. I want to photograph at a minimum 10 years of the feasts, centered around my favorite the Fisherman’s, then I want to turn these photographs into something tangible. I’ve seen the wall adorned in the Fisherman’s Society chapel with all the old back and white photographs, these days everything just lives on hard drives and online. Well, I want to do something more with these photos, so right now my plan is to turn them, after at least the 10 years, into a really amazing photo book so the world can see what traditions really look like.
