skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I went meandering through the sweet neighborhood of Manayunk, in Philadelphia. The trees were budding, the sky was blue, algae was amassing in the canal... It was a brisk and beautiful day! Manayunk is a cool little area with lots of adorable shops and cafes - it reminded me, oddly, of Seattle combined Ann Arbor - or perhaps just of a time in my life when I lived in Ann Arbor and visited Seattle. In my journal, I wrote
"Something funny about these little town-like neighborhoods in the U.S. - like they're trying to be something, and they're partially succeeding, but one isn't sure exactly how or what they're doing right or wrong. It's kind of cheesy, yet sweet, and makes you think of moms having lunch dates and older women buying colorful jewelry and college students buying incense and ironic posters." The vibe is that of a sort of a safe-feeling liberalism, where art is appreciated and they very strictly enforce the parking meters.
In any case, I had a lovely day there. I bought the paper for the sun prints (below), and a cute pair of new shoes; I strolled along behind the shops where the Manayunk canal flows next to an old train line. The sun was shining and everything was bursting with new life. Cheesy? Perhaps. Adorable? Pretty likely.
FOUND ART (sort of)
When Kyle and I were in Buenos Aires last year, we found a little family-owned camera shop where they were selling old glass plates. In the photography timeline, glass plates were what preceded plastic film as the fixture onto which an image was formed within the chemicals - this is how a photo was recorded in the old days before digital was invented. (Nowadays I sometimes have little kids come up to me when I'm shooting film and try to see the back of the camera, saying, "Let me see!" and looking completely blank and awestruck when I tell them there is nothing to see - the image isn't fully formed yet.)
In any event, I was delighted to find them selling these old glass plates - some of them were 3x4 and some were 5x7 inches large, and we got a couple of each. They weren't expensive, and I would have bought the lot if we didn't have to worry about how to fly back with them. I don't really have any idea how old they are, although glass plates originated in the mid-1800s, and plastic film was being used for motion pictures by the 1880s, so it's possible they are quite old, indeed! (Or that someone was using an old technique some time later - still cool.)
For over a year now, I've been wanting to take the plates to the darkroom to make black and white prints out of. The cool thing about such large negatives is that you can make a contact print with them, and what's even cooler about the glass plates is that you can set them right onto the paper and the image makes contact with the surface of the paper - all of this gives you a very sharp image (the 19th-century equivalent to high-res).
Maybe it's laziness, or maybe it's too much time in front of the computer, but I haven't rented a darkroom in quite awhile. It seems like a lot of work, even though the quality of a hand-printed photo is undeniably beautiful. As un-jaded as I strive to be, even I like the speed and ease of the digital age, what can I say.
Wouldn't you know, a fun - yet analog - solution came along! While I was in Philadelphia last weekend, I found a little science store called Spectrum Scientifics, in the adorable shopping district called Manayunk. The science store sold paper for sun prints! This paper allows you to create, essentially, a very simplified version of a cyanotype (see sidebar for definition by Alexander Zolli), with the paper pre-coated with a blueish light-sensitive chemical. All you do is place something on it in the sun, and the paper inverts negative into positive. So Kyle and I could make contact prints at home in 3-and-a-half minutes! (All you do then is wash the prints under running water - highly recommend this for young, budding photographers who want to know what it's like to see an image take form on the chemically-enhanced paper. There's NO clean up!)
Although forgoing some of the sharpness and nuances available by properly fashioning a print in the darkroom, it was cool to finally see the glass plates in positive form. There is a portrait of a man, a portrait of a girl who appears to be blind, the front of a theater in the rain, and amazing shot of a flooded city - with a boat floating down the road! Of course, you could kind of tell all of this from the negative images on the glass plates. But it was a lot of fun to see the positives take form on the paper.
It was like my 17-year-old-dream-come true! Renowned docu
mentary-style photographer, and dear friend of mine, Angela Cappetta did me the honor of photographing me. When I was in high school and in the beginning of college, I had always wanted to be model, but ended up pursuing a career behind cameras instead.
It was interesting to have a chance to be on the other side of the camera - you really do have to concentrate to be a model! Thank goodness I've been doing yoga, because you have to have excellent posture, and they ask you to stand in all kinds of bizarre manners. It really was tiring! I'm not just saying that to be in agreement with popular modeling reality TV shows.
We had great talent on this shoot in addition to Angela, and I want to thank Nan who did make-up, 
Emily the stylist, and Enrique the art director who helped round out a talent-packed collaborative team. I felt beyond glamorous, thanks to all of their efforts and skills.
Angela was as much a blast to work with as she is to hang out with. Her fun, easy-going manner and general hilarity kept me in good spirits as I was poked, prodded, belted, mascara'd, and glossed over and over. I loved watching her work with her personally-fangled camera-mounted bulb flash (with diffusive-cap). It was so inspiring! And, it is part of art school to have to model for someone else's project from time to time, so it fit right it with my endeavor to educate myself.
These photos are the copyright of Angela Cappetta, and may not be used in any way without express written consent. (Click on her name to view her website.) Thanks to Angela for making this whole shoot come together, and for letting me post the photos in my blog!
My amazing friend and former roommate, Julian, let me and my crew take over his Manhattan penthouse for a test shoot with child models - in the theme of "Copa Cabana." We had so much fun!
I want to express my gratitude to Julian for the full run of the place for an entire day, to my assistants Dana and Victoria, to the kids' groomer Thora, to the assistant stylist Irem, and to all of the models. I also want to thank Amanda at Product Model Management, and Olivia, for connecting me with such fabulous child-talent! Fashion photography is truly a collaborative effort, and it was great to see all of this talent come together and produce good work. It made me realize how lucky I am to have so much good energy and so many gifted people in my life.
We shot the photos all over the colorful apartment, and decked the kids out in equally colorful clothes. Julian even let the kids stand on his tables and jump on his beds - I asked
them if they got to do that at home, and they all giggled.Another fun element was Julian's cats trying to get involved with the production. 
At one point, a cat jumped inside the softbox that I had just put on the ground and we could see her brushing up against the sides in little circles. Julian pulled her out by the neck, and all the kids thought that was hilarious. (I breathed a sigh of relief, assured that the equipment would be returned to the rental facility intact.)
It was an epic adventure in photo-making, with a lot of shots packed in. Next time, I hope it will be nice enough to shoot more out on Julian's terrace and roof-deck! Click here to view more photos.
I was extremely lucky to be given the task of designing the new EP album art for Sputnik Sweetheart, with pretty much full creative freedom.
First, under the band's art direction, I took one of my shots from Vegas, and created the front of the album - the image was of the curtain in the hotel room at the Bellagio, with the pool dimly sparkling behind it. The curtain made a lot of sense because of the band's album, called "This Drama." (It refers to a snippet of song lyrics that go, "This drama is just like a cop show.")
Next, on the inside, I used the same curtain shot for the front of the actual disk. For the inside insert, I used a shot from the same Vegas series - this time a shot of the pool without the curtain in front of it. For visual continuity, I adjusted the color so that it was similar to that of the curtain shot.
For the back cover, I wanted to make a further play on the line, "This drama is just like a cop show." So I took the image of the curtain and burnt it onto a DVD. Then we took the DVD to our friends Caleb & Laura's very hip apartment, and played 
it on their flatscreen, and I photographed the shot on the screen in the living room with some fun props, including a globe, a can of Spam, and Caleb & Laura's cat, Fattie.Finally, I used a font the band selected to add all of the album details to the layout. I had to give myself a refresher in Illustrator, but it was a lot of fun, and I am proud to say that I have officially conceptualized and designed a CD! (In addition to shooting the photos.)
In a highly -- well -- experimental experiment, I decided to buy some disposable cameras in Honduras, and see what would happen if I stuck them into the ocean.
Lo! Some crazy things happened! First of all, I could hear little bubbles glub-glubbing up into the camera, and amazingly, I managed to press the shutter a few times while bubbles were passing through the frame.
Second, the salt water must have swirled the emulsion all around, because the images recorded came out completely abstract. I got big, beautiful swirls of color - some colors that weren't even in the frame at the time!I used parts of the rolls above water, to see what effect the salt water would have on the rest of the film in the canister. The results were pretty funky - they ranged from bordering on abstract to very grainy to having a reddish tint like an old vacation slide that wasn't stored properly.
The abstract batch is online at this link to my flickr site: Abstracts. You can see the rest of the funky shots in the mix with the Honduras photos on my flickr site under Roatan.
P.S. If you decide to try this experiment for yourself, do NOT use a disposable camera with a flash! I found out the hard way, that, while you likely won't be electrocuted, you definitely will short circuit the flash and not be able to use its function. Also, odds are that you would encounter a small but very threatening POPPING sound - like a Barbie doll with an automatic - which is not fun, particularly if you are in a kayak in the middle of the ocean at the time.
Posts
