One view into the commercial photography business...
In the spirit of the new year, I asked Rabbit to go thru the blog photo file from this past year and pick out his favorite behind the scene image from the last 12 months. I told him he would have carteblanch with no reprisal.
He could have chosen anything… Dangling from a Coast Guard helicopter, riding on a tank, diving in the Caribbean… Nope, he chose to poke fun.
So here it is. Rabbits pick of 2009. Me, in pink, riding a pink scooter. Dont ask…
Back from another trip…
I can’t seem to help myself, and please… don’t ask Rabbit his opinion Re: my roadkill obsession cuz he was perturbed when he had to wait for me again as I laid on another roadway shooting God knows what.
This time I made Rich hold the SB900 and snoot the light. I never use flash on these shots, so I thought I’d give it a try. It isnt portfilio material, but alas, its good blog content.
I’m off again to the West Coast next week, so maybe I will see something good whilst driving… Keep an eye out.
(for more of the Roadkill series, check the website under personal work)
Enjoy!
Here is the latest in our series on Investigator Profiles for the Research Lab of Electronics.
This is the first in a series of Web commercials for one of our clients Work N’ Gear. The commercials were modeled after a spot shot for Dickies. The film was shot on location in Lawrence MA, and features our own CB Kearney talking about his fine woodworking business.
The spot was shot, and posted in a weekend.
Thanks to Rabbit (editor,) and Gary (Designer) for the hustle in turning the project out on a super fast deadline!
Paul from Panopticon
This year for the holidays I decided to have a bunch of my fine art images from the archives printed as gifts.
Hillary is flumoxed after all the photoshop work I had her do...
To do so, I needed to find a new lab (as the economy has wiped out most of the good pro labs here in Boston.) About 10 years ago, I had a company called Panopticon do some B&W work for me. At the time, they were located in Boston near Boston University. Our paths drifted apart, until sometime in the summer when the owner Paul stopped me on the street after seeing the truck. He told me that they had moved, and that they were now only about 3 miles from my house.
Printing both color and BW images...
I have been looking for a project to try them out, and this seemed like a good fit. Paul is a master printer, and specializes in museum quality large format digital as well as traditional printing.
Large test prints from my colored clay series hanging in their shop...
Working with Paul and his crew has been an outstanding experience. They bent over backwards in order to fill all the last minute prints I kept asking them to do. Not only did they do my printing, most of which was at least 36″ wide, but they matted and framed it as well.
Mark can't quite figure me out...
Over the years, I have never really been interested in the fine art side of photography, always tending to look at myself as a commercial artist. But I have to say, working with Paul on this project, and seeing some of my work (especially the large panos) has really inspired me to look with new eyes at what it is I do for a living. Who knows where this new perspective will take the work….
Thanks to everyone over at Panopticon! Looking forward to doing more work together!
Paul finishing some last minute matting from my order...
Not posting… yeah I know. Just not interested in social media these days. Canceled Facebook, canceled Twitter, gonna scratch Linkedin… The blog still gets lots of traffic, so I guess I am a schmuck and should get off my ass… New Years rez?
That said, I saw something this afternoon that got me really inspired. I went to the barber (same barber since my first haircut) today to get all pretty for the holiday, and I bumped into this really cool older guy. We yapped for a while about his time in the service and his knowing Chinese. I asked him if he lived in town, and he said yes and that he had moved here in the 70’s. When he asked him if he had kids, he told me yes, and then told me his sons names. Lawson and Penn he said. I smiled a big smile, and knew why the man looked familiar. Penn was younger then I, but Lawson and I went to school together. When we were both sort of starting out, Lawson and I had a joint show where he screened his film, and I hung a bunch of images.
At any rate… Both Lawson and Penn are now in the business. Penn is over at Partners and Simons, and Lawson (from Arnold) is now working freelance. His dad told me about Laswson’s new website and the buzz around it, so I had to check it out…. It’s totally worth checking out. My kind of humor.
Make sure you also check out his work. Lots of funny creative stuff!
Kudos Lawson!
Siemens MRI
Sometimes life is just too strange with the coincidences… Three weeks ago, we were shooting MRI machines (kind of scary because of the giant magnet that will suck your gear inside the doughnut.) What I didn’t know was that a couple of weeks later I would be laying in one myself. But not as a photographer, as a patient. I got up today and couldn’t even put my arm in a jacket nor close the door to the truck.
I think the cases are getting just too heavy. (Partial tear in my left rotator cuff.)
Ugh…
Man alive have we been slacking with this blog thing. Oh well.
The good news is things have been off the hook. We are full swing in AR season, and have been enjoying the road. Lots of science and technology work, lots of manufacturing, and some biotech. We also have a couple of aerial jobs booked. (looking forward to the flight.) I’ll make sure to post about those shoots.
Heading back out tomorrow for a week for a client outside of Rochester, NY. I will try to post some picks of the side show, however we have been mostly under contract lately to keep the clients on the DL when it comes to the blog.
Got some cool new shots for the “Road Kill” project. We shot some porcupines up on the tip of Cape Breton, NS at Meat Cove. Very cool up there.
Lately the big problem is the wear and tear on the gear. Totally blows. Almost all of the glass in the bag is out with Nikon now because of one bit of damage or another. Thank God for NPS (Nikon Professional Service.) One quick eMail, and a loaner 17-35, 24-70, and 70-200 were over nighted so we wouldn’t skip a beat. Thanks to Carrie over at Nikon for your help and fast turn around!
Here’s a quick image we grabbed of Rabbit in his proverbial test subject roll. I really like the feel of the shot. We did it in a tiled hallway in a ordinary coridor. The real shot (which I am not allowed to show…) had an engineer standing in the hall with a gizmo in his hand. We used the Profoto Octa just above his head. It’s cool what you can do with one light.
Rabbit posing again...
Shot some more video interviews the other day. I think interviewing is one of my favorite parts of working with video. Its such an amazing chance to sit with brilliant people and get the chance to learn!
A good interview makes or breaks a film. It is the basis for a solid story, and is the narritive that drives the film along.
Stay tuned for another of our finished films. You can also check out some of our video work on YouTube.
Behold! Rabbit reads!
We were sitting patiently yesterday whilst waiting for subjects to miander into the room for their portraits when the peace and quite was broken….
“Did you know.. That the sea otter has the densest hair of any mammal known; 130,000 hairs per square centimeter of skin by one count….”
Fascinating!
I have been trying to talk a lot about volunteering on this blog in order to stress its importance. I think as artists, we have been given more than our fair share (both in good and in bad…)
Once or twice a year we try to shoot photos for the Mass Adoption Resource Exchange Heart Gallery Project in order to try and help place foster kids with parents. Each photographer gets assigned one child. Its a good outfit that does important work.
I urge you…. get out there and volunteer!
“To whom much is giving, much is expected.” (Luke 12:48)
Here is the latest film in our Investigator Prifile series or IP’s for the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT.
Hope you enjoy!
So far it’s not looking good for Data Robotics and their new DroboPro product. (see last post)
First let me explain how we intended to use the new DroboPro…. In a nutshell, I don’t think that the DroboPro is nearly fast enough to use as a primary storage device for professional use. Even when you can speak to a Data Robotics expert, they will admit that hands down transferring data via an internal bus (i.e. and internal RAID such as in our MacPro’s) is leaps and bounds faster than via an external bus such as the DroboPro.
Knowing this, we decided to upgrade all the internal Macintosh RAID’s from 1TB drives to 2TB drives. This would effectively double the internal RAID capacity from about 1.8TB to somewhere in the 3.5TB range for each workstation. With respect to our “EditOne” (the main video work station which has both the internal Macintosh RAID as well as a 3Ware Sidecar,) upgrading to all 2TB drives would effectively raise the internal RAID capacity from around 3.8TB to roughly 7.5 or 8TB of primary editing space.
To make this move however, we would need to first move the data off the existing RAIDs, upgrade the drives, and then transfer the data back to the new, larger arrays. (getting confused yet?)
This is where the DroboPro comes into play. The idea was to set up a 16TB array, temperarily park the data onto the array, and then move it back to the newly expanded internal RAIDS. Once this was completed, we would hang the DroboPro in the rack with the XServe, and have it act as a TimeMachine back up of both “EditOne,” as well as “PhotoOne,” (my primary photo workstation.) In effect, this would give us double redundancy. All data would be protected on each workstation via a RAID 5 array, and then it would be further protected via a TimeMachine back up on the network. For data storage above and beyond the local RAIDs, we would count on the rock solid reliablity of the Promse RAID connected to the server. If the DroboPro seemed to work out, a second unit would be fitted in the rack for even more storage space.
Any time we get a chance to do some shooting out on the water, were gone! Don’t have to ask us twice!
One of the current video projects we are involved in is a promo for a summer program called TOPS, and we took advantage of the only nice day we had this past weekend and headed out on the water to shoot some “B” roll.
Another cool treat was having my little brother Chris work as my assistant. Chris used to work as my full time assistant a number of years back, and it was good to have him back on the job. He has the summer off from biz school, so you might see him on jobs from time to time.
My little brother Chris
The coolest part of the day had to be going through the locks from Boston Harbor to the Charles River.
Heading toward the Cambridge locks from the river toward the harbor
Stay tuned for the finished TOPS film in Aug.
Rabbit loves when we share these photos with the world….
For those of you who are interested in the on-going saga of young Richards facial inventions… I give you some of the outtakes from the other days photo shoot.
Ever since we started shooting video we have been in a constant battle for storage space. It seems like every time I turn around I am ordering more drives. First 500’s, then 750’s, 1TB’s, and now 2TB’s. In the studio we have two editing suites set up for HD video editing, and one workstation for still photography. Between the three, there is something crazy like 25TB of storage, most of which is RAID 5. Most of the RAIDS are set up with 1TB drives, and I cant even begin to try to count just how many there are kicking around to in order to create the total storage volume.
The good news is that there are some really big video projects in the works right now, but the bad news is that we are pretty much maxed out and need to find another storage solution.
Richard sent me the info on the new DroboPro from Data Robotics, and we are going to take a chance and give it a try. We have three of the first generation Drobos in the studio that we use for back ups and such, and they have been pretty much bomb-proof. Their big downside has always been that they are VERY slow! Even with the Firewire 800, they are dogs. Forget editing video with them.
We shot some portraits in Cambridge this week. It’s important to remember that portraits dont always have to be serious. Sometimes you can just have fun!
We’ve done stuff like this in the past, and its always great fun. These shots were for an undergraduate program that brings in aspiring physic teachers from all over the country in order to give them experience teaching middle and high school students in a summer program
Shooting them this way embodies all the emotions experienced over their six weeks in the program. (we also shot them in a nice smiling pose as well.)
Shot this at a conference in Upstate NY the other day… Thought it very peculiar and worth sharing….
