Exhibit 5a | Creative Disobedience

I shot an event one of the event spaces at the Rainbow Room on the 64th floor at Rockefeller Center last Friday night. The whole place has the feeling of past opulence that has gone to seed. Everything seems like it was totally posh in, say, the fifties, but hasn’t been upgraded since. The wallpaper is faded, the doorways scuffed and dented from years of bus-carts bashing into them … overall the place just seemed worn out and sad.

One of the most distinctive features that I noticed was the sash-style windows. Clearly at some point these windows would have had the ability to open, but they have since been covered by solid glass. Rather than removing the now useless sashes completely, they have been left, I guess as an architectural homage to the original design. The overall effect of these window treatments is that they highlight how old everything is, and in many of my shots the windows in the background resemble warehouse windows rather than a high-end ballroom. This is made even more apparent when I watched the staff tugging on old school spring-recoil window blinds. Did those things ever work, even when they were new? I remember struggling with those as a kid at my parent’s house. Add on to that the fact that the sashes are all crooked and are layered with peeling paint.

At one point the wait staff was running around the room pouring water for everyone…chic chic bottled water no less; after all, this is a high class establishment. One of the waiters set a tray of perspiring bottles on the windowsill right in front of the Empire State Building 20 blocks south. I grabbed the shot above which over the last few days has really grown on me.

The room itself may be kind of busted, but you can’t beat seeing New York from 700 feet in the air…

I have been having a lot of fun at my lighting class - there is so much to learn. Last week we broke out into groups earlier than before and I was kind of disorganized with my group as far as breaking up the time appropriately. I guess I was having a hard time getting my head around the idea of making good final images and was more focused on learning how to use the lights. As our instructor said, we’ll be creating sketches mostly, rather than finished art.

Each of us took a turn at setting up the lights in a particular way, and then we shot. The above shot is one of the instances when one of my classmates was shooting. My shots were ok, but not overly exciting. I fell prey to one of my biggest faults in photography - shooting too fast and missing some details. One of the shots I made had placement of the background light nearly parallel to the background paper, which showed the texture of the paper seamless. Clay mentioned that a sure sign of an amateur photog is seeing texture in the background paper. Good to know.

For the next class I’m going to spend more time building an image and will hopefully have something more interesting to show.

“A dispute over a missing camera at a wedding reception escalated into a 100-person brawl that left two people with stab wounds Saturday night, police said.”

Sheesh.

Last year I was shooting almost exclusively on white seamless for my firm - the type of advertising we were shooting for was all actual employees for a people first campaign. This year the style has changed dramatically, and while I’m glad to be doing a wider variety of work, I still kind of miss the seamless stuff.

If you want to get into some seamless stuff, here is an excellent tutorial that I came across today which is excellent. Zach tells you how to go through the a bargain-basement set too. As always, I’m jealous of the studio. Why can’t I have a nice big studio?

/whine

As many of you may know, I have been mainly self-taught with regards to photography. Having been taught the fundamentals in college back in the day has certainly helped my ability to learn at a quicker rate, but nearly everything that I’ve applied in a practical sense as a professional in the industry I’ve learned by reading, researching, and good old fashioned hands on, under the gun experience.

However, I’ve also been a big fan of getting other people to tell me how to do shit. It’s that simple. When people talk to me (assuming I’m interested) I usually am able to remember what they say. For some reason this doesn’t work in social situations, but generally works pretty well in a classroom situation. Which is one reason that I enrolled in a lighting workshop course at SVA. The other reason is that I want someone to show me how to use a Profoto pack without electrocuting myself.

After the first class, here are a few impressions. First, the instructor is a photographer named Clay Patrick McBride. He’s a working photographer (in fact he’ll be missing next week’s class because he’ll be off shooting Metallica somewhere) and seems to know his stuff. He’s approachable and enthusiastic and I dig his work, so I’m looking forward to the next few weeks. I’m hoping he has the chance to take a look at my work at some point, I’d love to get some feedback him.

Second, I’m probably the most experienced shooter in the class. I’m the only one shooting professionally, and from the quick introductions we all gave, I’m the only one with any lighting experience. This could be both bad and good. Bad because I have a natural tendency to show off, and could waste my time in the class regurgitating everything that I already know. It could also be good, though, because I’ve often found that when someone new explains something I already know how to do, they often give me one little tidbit or extra piece of information that I didn’t know, and clears the whole thing up for me. And, of course, Clay has tons of stuff to teach me that I don’t know - hopefully we’ll get to some of that stuff without going too fast for the rest of the people in the class. At one point he set up a beauty dish, handed me a tethered 5D with a 24-105 on it, and had me take a shot. It was beautiful. Not the most amazing shot I’d every taken, but beautiful in it’s own way. Here was a camera I use, with a lens I use, taking a near perfect shot using Clay’s light. That in itself is quite a lesson.

At a bear minimum, I’ll be working with other photogs for three hours once a week, and the resulting creative burst will be a big help. After the first class I wanted to run out and blow all my savings on renting a studio so I could start shooting famous people with Profotos and making great photos. All in good time I suppose, but man, I was all fired up. Makes me want to shoot every day.

Soon, I hope. I’m looking forward to the next class!

I had a few minutes this weekend to finished puttering around with the new stylesheet I’ve been working on for Exhibit 5a. I wanted more sidebar space to play around with (I now have a whole lot more) and I wanted to expand my main content space to make a few of my more common photo-posts a little more streamlined. It still needs some polish, but seeing as the last time I changed any of the visuals on the site was over two years ago, I figured it was about time.

If you see anything major that’s broken, drop me a comment. Oh, and for the time being I’m keeping comment moderation on. I get hundreds of spam comments a week otherwise.

As a proud and mostly satisfied owner of an Apple TV, I was pretty excited about being able to order movie rentals directly through my Apple TV. It’s like having cable on demand without actually having to pay a monthly fee for cable. The system is pretty simple to use and relatively inexpensive. Movies run from $3.99 to $4.99 depending on whether you get regular quality or HD quality.

The system is set up to work like this: First you browse through the available movies - and it should be noted that this list continues to grow. It doesn’t contain every title, but usually when I rent I’ve found something that I want to watch, including new releases. So you choose your movie, hit the “Rent” button, and the fee is charged to your iTunes account. The movie is then added to the Rented Movies option in your menu and the download begins. A few minutes later, once the video has started downloading, you get a notification that the movie is ready to be watched. You have the option of watching it immediately (streaming while you watch), or you can watch it any time within a 30 day window. Once you start watching it, you have 24 hours to complete watching it before it expires.

In theory, this system is pretty sweet, when it works, like say, nine in the morning on a Sunday. Works like a charm. Want to know when this system is broken? Sunday night, at, say 7pm. Apple does not have the bandwidth to handle all of the people renting movies on a Sunday night. Period. Instead of the system working, here’s what happens:

You choose a movie, hit the rent button, you wait a few minutes, you get the notification that your movie is ready to watch, so you hit play (and so start your 24 hour expiration period). Works great for about 10 minutes, then the movie freezes for a minute or two, and the you are rewarded for that wait with another 30 seconds of the movie before it freezes again. The Apple servers simply cannot keep up with the download rate. And for the record, I checked my internet connection to make sure that it isn’t on my end. While this was happening I was pulling down nearly 9mb per second, which is as fast, if not faster than most cable hookups.

Here’s why this sucks: Despite it’s inability to serve up the data fast enough during high traffic hours, the ATV tells you that it’s ok to start watching your movie. Because you’re told it’s ok to start, you press play and your 24 hour expiration timer clicks on. But here’s the kicker: the movie doesn’t download enough to even watch half of it over the course of several hours. You can’t stay up all night waiting for the movie to download, and you can’t skip work to watch it the next day. If you unsuccessfully try to watch your movie at, say, 7pm on a Sunday, it will expire on Monday night at 7pm whether you’ve watched it or not. If you get home from work at 6:30 you’re pretty much screwed. You’ve lost your $4.99 rental price and now you’re all pissed up because you’ve watched just enough of a movie to want to know what happens, but you’ll have to wait for it to come on Netflix to see how it ends.

What really burns me is that, ok, your servers can’t handle it. That sucks, but ok. So why does the system say that it’s ok to watch your video, when in reality the servers can’t deal. If the system said that there wasn’t enough bandwidth, then fine, I wait until it’s fully downloaded and watch it at my leisure sometime in the next month, no harm done. But because I’ve pressed Play, I’ve activated the 24 hour expiration period for a product that I don’t even have yet. By my estimation, 3:10 to Yuma will be downloaded somewhere around 2am tonight, which is obviously a little late in the day to start watching a movie.

Apple needs to fix this problem and fix it soon. I’m going to harass their customer service department for a refund. What the hell am I going to do with my Sunday night now?