We shot over 400 frames yesterday in Westport. Here is one of them.

Spencer is a voice-over actor, guitarist, track team athlete, and, his spare time, he attends Staples High School. We found this funky brick wall inside the building at Staples. It seemed perfect.

With that brick wall, I wanted to create a urban nighttime street scene effect in the photo, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. So I mounted my flash on top of an 18ft ladder which I stood up outside the building and pointed the light through the window. I had to do some serious color correction because of the green tinted glass.

Sheila Johnson and I met on a gray and gloomy day in New York City in a 5th floor walk-up studio on 28th street. Perfect weather to use a flash to break through the gloom! With the iconic building in the window, all I could do make sure it was part of the shot.

After way too long since updating my public web site, I started working on a new one. I was pretty psyched about it — it was a great display of some of my recent pictures. It was all written in Adobe Flash, and the cool part is that the pictures totally filled the browser window. That’s the way I like to look at them, so I figured I try to share them the same way over the web. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out. My site testers were confused on the navigation. And there was really no place to talk about the pictures. Sometimes pictures need a few words wrapped around them.

On top of that, there was no reasonable way for that architecture to have any kind of an archive element to it. It was great for 20-50 pictures, but I’m taking photos at the rate way higher than that. I might shoot 500 shots at a field hockey game — and out of that get 20-50 that I’d share to a close circle of my harshest critics, and maybe a 5 or 10 that I’d share more broadly. So I needed a way to accommodate this — plus a few more ideas I’ve got up my sleeve. Without a major programming effort, the flash site was a dead end. I learned a lot in that exercise, so it was not a wasted effort. Nonetheless, it is time to start over again.

So, here we go again. This is based on a Wordpress blog platform, so the blog is the first component of the new web site, and this is the first entry. Coming soon (with some luck) is a searchable public archive. If you want to search for my photos of, say, the Brooklyn Bridge, you will be able to do that. Dancer on the Brooklyn Bridge? Yes, I have a shot. The search will lead you right to it. There is a ecommerce engine built in, so if you want to buy the pictures to hang in your home or use in your marketing campaigns you may soon be able to do that too.

So… this isn’t just my blog… you can write here too. I couldn’t do that with the Flash platform. Your comments are welcome… that’s what the big space below is for.

About this picture: Camera clamped to the book case next to my desk. 24-70 lens. Yes, that wide angle thing sure is flattering, isn’t it? This is not a composite — the photo on the screen was the previous frame. Look close. You’ll see — the photo is not on the blog page in the picture on the page in the picture. Got it? That’s Hannah Marie in the background. I did a shoot with her of some ballet poses. More on her to come.