A very large oak was uprooted by the wind and thrown across a stream. It fell among some Reeds, which it thus addressed: “I wonder how you, who are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by these strong winds.” They replied, “You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we on the contrary bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken, and escape.” - Aesop's Fable

For starters, a hero shot is one in which the product is showcased in all its splendor. Careful attention is placed on making the product look its very best. For this shot of Don Julio I knew I wanted to give the bottle some majesty by photographing it from a low angle. That low angle makes the bottle look tall, towering over the viewer and creating a position of dominance. Can't you hear the choir of angels singing in the background? I also knew that I wanted a rich, moody image with lots of darks. I am partial to darker images, which is surprising to most people because the majority of the work I do are images on white backgrounds. But that's another story. I also tried a lifestyle type shot with glasses and lime slices but I wasn't feeling it and ended up scrapping it. Again, that's another story.

A good friend, and fellow photographer, Letif Belcher (of letif.b.photo on Instagram) was in my studio recently doing some headshots for a young female actress client of his. The topic of New York came up and he mentioned wanting to take the trip in for some street photography. I love getting into the city with my camera and mentioned to him that it's been a while since I've been there. A couple days later and we had a trip planned to hit Central Park. Letif and I took the train into Grand Central last Friday and, cameras in hand, headed uptown to the park. As he'd never been there I planned out a few 'must see' spots to hit. Our first stop would be the famous LOVE art installation on the corner of 6th and 55th. Much to my dismay, the sculpture was "out for repair". Off to a bad start.

In this article I am reprinting a critique I published on photoMENTORIS.com regarding the painting entitled ' Census at Bethlehem ' by famed painter Pieter Bruegel , who was born in what is now the Netherlands in the 1520s. The first point I would like to say is that you first need to consider both the medium and the time frame of this painting. Being a painting, the artist has a certain advantage of being able to carefully direct the large amount of content presented to the viewer, unlike, say, a photo of opportunity of the street photographer (I strongly believe Pieter would have been the 'street photographer' of his time). Even a studio photographer, with the luxury of space and time, would have a hard time justifying creating such a complex composition. Where you would see this type of visual composition today would be in modern cinema. In particular, period pieces that rely on background elements to "sell the era" .  Secondly, the era in which thi...

October marks the beginning of the holiday season with Halloween at the end of the month. Seasonal items are being shuffled around and soon Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah will be upon us. Personally, I have been busy preparing for the cold weather and analyzing how to move forward into the new year. This got me thinking about many things; rescaling my marketing, updating my prices, expanding my services… you know, all the regular business stuff. It also got me thinking about my customers... actually, the customers I don’t have. What can I do to help them find me? Then it hit me, if they did find me, why would they care?  This month’s newsletter is about ways of connecting to customers in today’s age of information.

I have recently been doing some marketing research online and I have noticed a disturbing trend among small businesses -- Old, outdated and ineffective websites. If you have not done anything with your business website in the past year or two perhaps you are likely losing business because of it. Here are my findings and some solutions. Your website's content should have one goal, to convert a visitor into a customer. Recently I was shocked to see first hand how spectacularly a website can fail. Here's the story...

As online shopping grows, competition for new business gets harder. Customer loyalty is a thing of the past. People will shop for value and convenience above all else. Part of that convenience is good photography. One of the problems with online retail is the loss of tactile interaction with the products you're looking to purchase. There is no picking up, weighing, testing and trying on a product to get a sense of quality, of fit or just to get that emotional feedback. Online shoppers have to rely on the images retailers supply on their web sites to help them make their buying decisions. Frustratingly, many of these images fail to provide the needed information so customers can make an informed buying decision. The results is a loss of revenue to the seller, and what's worse is the seller may not even realize their images may be a major reason for the loss. Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, says there’s been a number of studies showing that people are more likely to bu...

If you own a softbox, or two, you understand how bulky and unwieldy they can be. Imagine owning several in different sizes. Storage becomes an issue. One solution is to break them down and store them flat, but that becomes a pain after the first few times struggling to put one of these things together. It is more convenient to just grab one "off the shelf" and go to work. Allocating shelf space seems like such a waste of valuable storage space. In my case I have two square softboxes, three striplights and soon two more rectangular ones. That's a lot of real estate. Time to come up with a storage solution that doesn't require floor space or shelf space. The solution I came up with is a compromise of an idea I originally had of hanging them from the ceiling on pulleys so they would be out of the way until needed. I still like that idea, but for now I will be suspending them from a wire rack shelf system in my studio. Here is what the system looks like.

One of the most commonly used tools in my photographic arsenal is the all purpose diffusion screen . I use it to soften light, create gradients and light fields or as a background. One of my current favorites is a metal framed 4' x 4' foot scrim with thick white artificial silk made by Matthews. I didn't think I would use it so much, being so large, but having borrowed it from a friend I really came to love it. The downside for me is the price. At just over $100 I couldn't really justify the cost, considering I want at least two of them. Time for a DIY alternative.

I'm not old, but I am older . My generation did not grow up with internet and social media and ecommerce. I still prefer being able to see and handle and try on the product I am looking to purchase, but it's getting harder each year to do so. Brick and mortar stores do not carry the kind of variety an ecommerce store is capable of. They are also carrying fewer of the more obscure items than they used to simply because it is becoming too expensive to devote shelf space to an item that doesn't move fast enough. Who can blame them. It's frustrating to someone like me who looks for the convenience of on demand shopping, and the tactile feedback, of actual live shopping. To add to the frustration, many of the online stores have dropped the ball and are working with outdated selling models. Let me explain.

My first camera I ever owned was a Pentax K-1000. One of the best no nonsense film cameras ever produced that didn't kill your budget. I was a teenager then so money was tight. My favorite film to run through that camera was Kodak Tri-X black and white film that I developed myself in the bathroom sink. There was a great sense of accomplishment when that developed roll of film came off the spool to reveal all my hard won exposures. Then the long awaited anticipation as the film was sent out for printing. That camera traveled with me on may hikes through the woods. A run off stream from the local reservoir ran along the property line of our back yard, providing a few miles of woodlands, a stream bed and plenty of solitude. It was my zen place. The world around me disappeared when I went into those woods. It was always my goal, back in those early film days, to try to capture the magic I felt amidst the dappled light of the leaves and the slick wet stones of the stream. A goal t...

This past weekend marked the 15th annual, and my third year photographing, the Great American Jeep Rally (GAJR) in Ellington, CT. This fundraising event draws hundreds of Jeep enthusiasts from as far as New Jersey as well as vendors and spectators. This year is also the first year this event has been extended to two days, a testament to this event's popularity. I became involved with the GAJR through my association with ECOJOCS, a local jeep club I am a member of. Our club supports the fundraising endeavors by providing volunteers to work the event. Three years ago it started out as providing help with the event's parking and our involvement has expanded to designing and installing an obstacle course, providing spotters on the rock pile and assisting with setup and breakdown of the event. Many our members have gone beyond the call of duty in helping this event be the success it is.

It is not often that people get to really see my DIY tilt/shift camera configuration, but when they do it is usually followed by a variety of questions followed by a glazed look of intimidation. After all, it's not your typical camera setup. Here is a quick rundown of my DIY conversion. Inspiration I originally saw this configuration being used by the amazing Alex Koloskov in several of his product photography videos. I was immediately intrigued and amazed at its capabilities. While it seemed like a lot of trouble and expense for a tilt shift lens, specially since there are dSLR TS lenses available, I knew, from experience, this setup had a far superior advantage over the standard TS lenses. The other plus side was that I could still use it as a large format film camera should I choose to.

Selection from "Looking Glass" Over the past several decades photography has undergone a massive transformation. Where once it took a certain level of skill and discipline, today's digital camera revolution has created an ubiquitous social tool where skill has been stripped away to allow the contrived vitriol of the masses, clamoring for attention, to create a deep cesspool of visual noise. Harsh, but that is the reality of today. To rise above this heap of useless imagery, a photographer looking to present themselves as worthy of attention needs to really swim against the current with more guts and gusto than ever before. Miss Julian Grey is such a photographer. I became aware of Miss Julian, a transgendered, biologically male person who refers to herself as she, through the photography on the net forum a little less than a year ago. I was instantly mesmerized and awed by the images she was posting in the forum. They had a raw quality, at first reminiscent of Ro...

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932 “Making a photograph means recognising, all at once and in a fraction of a second, an event and the exact organisation of the visually perceived forms that express and signify that event. It means aligning the head, the eye and the heart along the same line of sight. It’s a way of living.” Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) is credited for the expression, the decisive moment . The image at right, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare , has become one of the most iconic of his images to represent that expression because it succinctly captures, in a single frame, the whole of his teachings. While there have been many discussions both casual and scholarly, like the image at right, his teachings has been oversimplified and distilled down to a short definition that, to me, has lost a lot of its original meaning or, as in some cases, completely missing the mark. Rather than getting into a lengthy dissertation on what Bresson consider...

It doesn't matter if you are a portrait photographer, a still life photographer or a commercial product photographer, props are an essential part of your world. For the most part props are purchased on an "as needed" basis. Other times it's when opportunity presents itself. I have come to a point in my career that I subconsciously keep an eye out for items that may be useful as a prop. The funny thing is I never know when or where I'll find them, or what, for that matter. Recently I was at the supermarket and I happened to walk past a shelf loaded up with those classic mass produced Coca-Cola glasses. As they were on sale and I could always use glasses like these I decided to pick up a set of four... and here is where the sickness starts.

An ever going argument among professional photographers is how there are, "too many photographers!" I find it funny because the one thing always missing from this argument is the qualifier of what type of photographer they are ranting about. I've come to believe they are just ranting on the fact that there are so many cameras nowadays that no one needs the professional photographer for the more mundane documentation they were hired for two decades ago. Cameras, as we all now understand, are quite ubiquitous. We don't need statistics to know that almost everyone has a camera today, but what are the statistics? How far is the tipping point between photos taken by a 'traditional' camera and one taken by a 'cellphone' camera? I thought I'd find out from one place that serves as a one of the world's largest depository of public images, Flickr. While not the most scientific way of measuring tech usage, it does provide a fairly real world overvi...

The first time I saw a review for the Light Blaster I have to admit I was more than a little intrigued. If you haven't seen or heard of this nifty little gadget yet here's a quick rundown. The unit itself is a plastic housing that allows you to insert a speedlight into one end and attach a lens onto the other. A standard 2x2 inch 35mm projection slide is inserted in between the two via a special slide carrier. When the flash is triggered the image on the slide is projected on whatever the unit is aimed at. The downside to the Light Blaster is the price. Starting at $100 for what people would consider a simple plastic shell with a lens mounting ring, the Blaster has a few other accessories that will drive the price up. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on what side of the coin your personal philosophy is on) there is a less expensive clone version of the Blaster made in China by Hpsum. At about $60 it's still pricey but a $40 savings is $40 that can go to someth...

In my cellar I have a small half bath that is never used. I recently decided that it would make a suitable location for a small darkroom space. With a little preparation I was soon back into developing my own images. The nice thing about this particular space in my house is that it naturally resides in darkness. Being in the cellar there are no windows to worry about. What little light leakage there was, like around the door and in one small corner, was easily remedied with minor alterations. Another nice feature about this setup is that I have ready access to running water. A necessity for rinsing between development baths. I'll write more about that in a separate article. My decision for setting up a darkroom came about out of necessity for developing some new direct positive  paper from Galaxy Paper, a Kickstarter campaign I had supported. For my support I received a package of 25 sheets of 4x5 paper and the required chemicals to develop them. Now that I had the space it w...

Several years ago I purchased a used large format camera and had it modified to accept my dSLR camera (seen here). I basically turned a 4x5 view camera into a very large tilt shift lens. It serves its purpose. I now have a full range of movements not available in a standard tilt-shift. For one, a tilt-shift lens can tilt and shift or swing and shift. It just can't do all three. On my system I have tilt, swing, shift, rise and fall on both the front standard and rear standard. Now, if all this sounds like gibberish to you take a few minutes and google these terms. While this has nothing to do with the real subject of this post, it's always good to learn a little something in the process. In truth, I want to talk about putting my large format camera back to use as it was originally intended, to shoot 4x5 film. Or, as in my case, 4x5 photo paper (think pinhole cameras).