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Here’s some of my recent work in print, three from a local region magazine, San Diego Magazine, the other from a business magazine.  The one below is an advertisement made for a local casino, which I saw hanging on their wall last week. I wrote about this shoot here.

This last image, the cover of the current issue, was not a planned cover shoot, and that’s all I can really say about it. Here’s a couple images that could have run in its place, but, well, didn’t (dummy text laid in for visualization purposes):

On sale now!

Stumbled across this neat video that shows three Columbians who’s livelyhood is running an old 1929 printing press by hand. It’s nice to see old gear still in action.

Sports photographer Mark J. Rebilas (pictured below), tells in exhaustive detail how he made a Zoom photo (also shown below) that is running in the current issue of ESPN the Magazine. Interesting read here!

The website linked below calls it “a purported first” for a magazine to run a video capture as a magazine cover,  but I’m almost sure some of the news magazines have run video frame captures before: 911 comes to mind. Here’s a video grabbed magazine cover here. (Columbine).  But maybe this is the first for a planned shoot: a frame grabbed from video will be on the cover of the June issue of Esquire magazine. Read about the story here.

Photo by Mark Garfinkel

I talked to the photographer who shot this image about three years ago. In his own words, Mark Garfinkel tells how he made the image:

I waited a year or two to get a “contrailed” plane during the late afternoon thru a moon.

On the 2nd of January, 2001, I watched as many “high flyin’ international jets” narrowly missed the moon. At about 3:45 PM I left the vantage point where I was shooting (The Boston Herald rear parking lot). While driving to the front parking lot where my assigned parking space is, I noticed a jet in a different position. Entering the US East coast at Boston, this jet was a little more south than the others, so I rushed back to the original spot, knowing there was only a minute before it would come near the moon.

I positioned my lens, a 600mm with a 2x teleconverter, and an older version Canon digital camera (making it an 1800mm lens), against a jeep and held my breath when it seemed the plane was going to miss. I prefocused on the moon.

I had the Canon camera at 1/125th on shutter priority. That gave me about 1/125 at F8 at 400ASA. Then with about five seconds before it “hit” the moon, I looked into my camera and could not find the moon. I found the moon with a second left and the first picture I made had some motion blur.

The second picture is the one we are discussing. In the third picture, the plane is sharp due to a bit of panning and the moon is out of focus. I was shaking due to the pure excitement of the chance encounter the plane had with the moon. It was a beautiful sight. I drove back and walked into the Herald shaking. I had viewed the back of the camera in the car and all I needed to find out now was: was it sharp.

Well, I had a bit motion blur and a bit of the softness that one gets with the older digitals before the sharpening. I did sharpen it moderately. The problem that I had, was the white jet’s highlights tended to blow out in splotches. It ran on our front page.

The air traffic contollers in charge of Boston airspace called and asked what time I took the photo. They wanted to know which international airline it was since one controller had a bet with the others that it was a Virgin Airlines plane. They looked into their records and told me it was an Air India Boeing 747 flying from London’s Heathrow to NYC’s JFK at around 28,000 feet. The Associated Press picked up this photo and it went all over the world.

I had nice people sending me front pages from The Irish Times, The London Independent, The Houston Chronicle, Etc…over 100 newspapers. I was thrilled.

If anybody would like to check out the other photo (split second after this photo) it is posted on: http://www.airliners.net
You can search my name and press “show me the photos”. I have over 100 aviation photos on this web sight. I am an aviation buff……

Photographer Kerry Skarbakka got his 15 minutes of fame when he appeared as a guest on NBC’s Today show recently.

He shot a series of self portraits of himself falling: falling off a ladder, falling off buildings, falling off bridges. He said he used a harnesses and ropes to make the photos, then Photoshopped those things later.

Check out his video here:

New York, NY (April 20, 2009)—The 93rd annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board, were announced today by Columbia University.
The winners in each category, along with the names of the finalists in the competition, follow (after the break)…. you can also see the winners here. :

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Twenty-five years ago, when I was in the Navy in Japan, this singer named Randy Travis came to the radio station where I was working for a tour. He was a short little guy, seemed kind of shy. He went on to make a lot of music country music fans enjoy…. Anyways, I shot his concert last night, and he looked a bit different then he did when I saw him back in 1987.

After the concert I shot a small meet and greet backstage.  Afterwards, Travis, his producer, other band members and concert venue guys were talking about American Idol, and the singer from San Diego, who Travis said he kind of liked. I asked him if he saw the Susan Boyle video and he said no. I played it for him and his crew, about 15 people (most of them had already saw the video and told him he has “GOTTA watch it”). He appeared pretty blown away, and kept shaking his head. Afterwards he simply said “wow” in that twangy, deep Randy Travis voice…

Was in the studio a week and a half ago shooting a kickboxer and a lady doing yoga. For the background on both subjects I used sheet metal, galvanized flashing type steel that comes in large sheets at home depot. $14 per sheet times eight sheets. The confetti used was another $6, so it was a real high-budget, large scale operation.

I used my Mamiya tethered to my desktop computer, and images came up on the large flat screen monitor. These were shot for San Diego Magazine, who are doing a health and fitness issue. The lady running around is the art director, the guy doing video, and also appearing in it is Dave Good, who helped out with things. Have to wait before showing the kickboxing image. It’s still being worked.

The first yoga lady is an instructor named Laura Downing, and she could do some amazing things with her body.

More photos after the jump:

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