http://jpgmag.com

ok, i haven’t written any posts in a LONG time but i figure i better get one in during december, before the new year is upon us. the reason for this absence is that for the past couple of months i have been totally addicted to jpgmag.com - and because of this, jpgmag.com gets my favorite time suck and social network of the year for 2009. woot woot!

in case you don’t know about it, jpgmag.com is a photo sharing social network site. the thing that makes it different from flickr or any other photo site is that the most popular and well accepted photos by vote make it to an actual printed magazine. in some old school analog way, that is way cool! the other difference is that jpgmag.com doesn’t want all your photos; they just want your best photos. of course flickr has some great photos and jpgmag also has some crappy ones, but when you’re asked to upload your best, it really makes one (and in this particular case, photographers) really think about what they will show the public. after all, we all want to get our best work published.

Sister mine. by edd carlile

so to make a long story short, i have spent hundreds of hours looking at and uploading photos -  and the truth is that i have spent most of that time looking at great work from some awesome professional and amateur photographers. i have probably viewed thousands of photos -  from amazing portraits by edd carlile to stunning abstracts by ina k to amazing landscapes by marc krutiak. but i could go on and on… anyway, you can find me here so sign up and vote for my photos (wink). i even got chris sofe to start posting there again. now to get dave schiliro to put up his abstracts.

a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

(more…)

LoveNY

as is usually the case i’m always running late and sept 11, 2001 was no different. by the time i was getting ready to leave park slope for my job on 11th st. and university in manhattan, the towers were hit and getting into manhattan was pointless. gina and i went up on our rooftop to videotape our view. we saw tower one fall a few minutes after we got up top. the plume of dust and debris expanded so fast that we could not see tower two fall. we walked around park slope and everyone was in a speechless daze. by early afternoon dust and ash fell from the sky coating everything in a light gray dust. later that day we saw people who had walked from downtown manhattan back to brooklyn. they were completely covered in gray dust. it was a very surreal sight

love

we finally got into manhattan a couple of days later to check on my apartment on attormey and stanton. manhattan was very solemn and eerie those first few nights. at the vigils in union square park gina and i shot a lot of video and photographs, partly to help us deal with it ourselves. we edited a small piece which was shown on a few cable channels. i’ll have to dig that up. the photographs shown here were featured in the ‘here is new york‘ exhibition and have traveled the globe. they are also in madame tussaud’s permanent exhibit as well as the planned permanent exhibit of the new WTC 9/11 memorial and have been re-printed in many magazines.

hope