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Nadine and her family celebrated her bat mitzvah last weekend, and it was an awesome day. This was the second b’nai mitzvah I’ve photographed in her family (the fourth in the extended family!) and I have really enjoyed all of them. Her family made me feel like part of the festivities, which I always appreciate. Sadly, it’s the last b’nai mitzvah in the family, so I guess now I’m stuck wait for the first wedding in the family (just kidding, Mom!).
I am the official photographer for the enormous Cisco LIVE! conference in Orlando, Florida. These gigs are an interesting departure from my other types of work. Among other things, I get to listen to incredibly smart, well-informed technology people talking about the very latest issues and news in the world where I used to travel. So I stay at least well-informed enough to stay one step ahead of my own kids!
I am well-known among my friends, clients and colleagues as an über geek. I live, breathe and think in gigabytes, terabytes and redundant storage. Of course, that is all secondary to my creative pursuits these days. But a working image maker in the modern, digital world can not afford to ignore the realities of the technological rats’ nest that is known as “media storage”. Years ago, a photographer or film maker’s biggest storage challenge was keeping his negatives, slides, film and videotape dry and fungus-free. In today’s unforgiving world of digital media, one slip-up can lead to a disaster on par with having your studio burn down years ago. So what’s a creative guy who’d like to believe he’s moved well beyond the geek world do? Fortunately, my training an experience has held me well. The horrific list of hard drives you see in the picture is actually what I use. I have almost a dozen hard drives, each responsible for holding my work, a backup of my work, or an off-site backup of my work. Everything I do is in multiple places. And at the moment, if I do the math (ouch!), I have about nine terabytes of hard drives. And a fairly complex manner of mapping exactly what is where.
So be kind to your friendly neighborhood digital image maker. He or she probably has a headache. All the time.
Babycenter.com continues to delight me with challenging and fun assignments. This week’s task was do create some “tableaus” for a baby clothes closet. Babycenter’s online store art director, Susie and I worked together to think through something fun, stylish and appealing for parents and others. We came up with a simple story, but of course creating an illusion of simplicity in a photograph often involves great complexity.
This photograph is no exception, but the end product is clean and direct, and will hopefully entice their customers to outfit their kid’s (or grandkid’s, or nephew’s or niece’s) closet with all this cute and fun merchandise.
From a technical standpoint, these were shot in my studio using my regular camera gear. But for lighting I decided to give my new Kino-Flo “Diva” lights a go. These are 400 watt, daylight-balanced fluorescent lights. They have some advantages over flash heads and halogen lights. But the main reason I went with them today is that they’re nowhere near as hot (temperature-wise) as my other lights, and it was about 95° yesterday in Burlingame.
Jack celebrated his bar mitzvah recently, and because his shabbat service was conducted in a very observant manner by the local Chabad rabbi, I was unable to photograph the family at the site of the service. Therefore, we re-convened today with the “ganse mishpucha” all dressed up again (great job restoring the wardrobe, Linda!) and did some fun family shots. I love this one. They’re such a fun bunch!
I am working with my awesome team of Susie and Kim this week to grind out over a hundred product photographs for my client’s website. These are far more complicated than they appear to be, and if you saw the Rube Goldberg contraption that I rigged to shoot them, you’d either be very impressed or you’d be rolling on the floor, laughing. Or both.
Here are a couple more examples…
