Exhibit 5a | Creative Disobedience

I don’t watch much regular TV these days. My couch time is spent watching streaming netflix or hulu, so when I watched Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel last night, I was shocked back into the world of commercials. I was watching because a friend of mine who I met teaching my lighting class at SVA last summer, Clay Patrick McBride was the photog for last night’s episode. It was kick ass (as it always is) to see someone you know on TV, and it was even more exciting because Clay was shooting on a kick ass set which included all kinds of kick ass pyrotechnics. Makes me jealous that most of my “large production” shoots are in offices with accountants.

Other than the photography part the show itself was pretty lame. Since the final four were three guys and a girl I figured they’d leave the girl in for balance, but then by the end it occurred to me that the demographic is probably mostly women, so having three men for finalists makes more sense. But the way that they mold this “reality” is ridiculous. For example they dressed the girl who was kicked off in the most unflattering dress I have ever seen, and then the designer (who is also judge) complained about how she looked in it.

Anyway, nice job Clay, nice to see you get some good exposure!

Photos ©Bravo

The best thing about Florida is the feeling of being at a resort while at the same time being surrounded by the inescapable feeling that things are just not right. The smoke belching factory on the beach, for example…

Yeah, yeah, I know, I haven’t posted anything forever and ever. The fact is, sadly, that I’ve not been doing anything interesting. I’m not shooting nearly enough these days and my time has been sucked up by moving, bachelor parties, weddings, guests and a myriad of other activities. And even worse, things have been slow at work, and I’ve been doing a lot more design work again, and a lot less photography work. Which sucks. Hopefully things will pick up again soon, and I have a couple of personal projects that I’m going to try to get started on once I get back from Florida this weekend (another wedding).

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a tearsheet – I shot the cover for a new alumni magazine Connect, which I thought turned out really well:

On Friday I went to a friend’s gallery opening which was amazing and inspiring and got me all fired up to stop k’vetching about my lack of work and actually start doing some work. It didn’t really hit me when I handed my business card to someone that I was a bit embarassed by my website which they’d no doubt go to check out. I’ve been working on a hardcopy portfolio lately and haven’t devoted any time to the website. Which is silly because I’m not actively looking for a job or for freelance work, so who am I planning on showing the hardcopy portfolio to anyway?

So I sat down on Saturday and took a long hard look at my site, and didn’t like what I saw. A few of the things that stood out for me were the following:

• I wasn’t happy with lots of the images that were on the site because many of the images were old, and since I’ve only been at this for a couple years, the old work is pretty bad. I’m sure I’ll say that about the work I’m doing now when I review it again in a few years, but there you go.
• I haven’t updated new work in a very long time
• Lots of the non-professional work, meaning various levels of personal work didn’t have a space on the site
• The design was fussy and didn’t display the work in a flattering manner.

So I spent the weekend doing a few things:

• I removed the work I didn’t like
• I added work that I do like
• I added a section called Stories as a venue for all the random work I’d like to share that doesn’t fall into my regular commercial photography portfolio. I should note here that my section called Stories is not meant emulate the great stories by Jonathan Saunders. His stuff is great, you should check it out.
• I streamlined the design.

Now that’s done I can get on with making more photography. So without any further yammering on, go check out my updated photo site. Feedback welcome!