From the Archives: Brooklyn Kid

Brooklyn KidFrom the early days of my love affair with photography. I was shooting a panorama of the outside of my apartment on Woodruff Ave when this little guy appeared and instantly improved what would have been an otherwise pretty boring shot.

SimonAbramsPhotography.com: It's Alive!

Olivia and Brian

I’ve finally put the finishing touches on my dedicated photography site, simonabramsphotography.com. “Finishing touches”, who am I kidding - I’ll be fiddling with that thing forever - but the point is, it’s up and functioning. The purpose of the site is to serve as a place to go to see my photography portfolio (and, by extension, battle my online photography schizophrenia), and to promote my fledgling kids and family portrait photography side gig (Reasonable rates! Call or email for more info!).

Stop by and check it out, and leave a note in the guestbook if you’d like. Also, if you’re so moved, you can purchase high-quality prints and other great photo products as well. Bonus: Use coupon code ITSALIVE to save a couple of bucks at checkout.

Project 365

Elias [8/365]It’s been a minute since my last post (or 146,044 minutes, according to Wolfram Alpha), but I just wanted to make a quick update to point you to my latest personal photographic endeavor. It’s called Project 365, and the basic premise is that you take a photograph every day for a year. There’s a dedicated site and community built around the idea, but I opted to go the Flickr route, where I created a set and joined a Project 365 group.

I’ve been having a ton of fun with this exercise, and I’ve also been learning about myself as a photographer. It forces discipline by making me shoot every day. Yes, I’ve often been caught at 11:50pm running to go and shoot a picture of my cat before midnight, but I still think that the quality of my photographs has gone up overall, simply because I don’t want to include crappy images in this project.

Wood Shingles - iPhone Wallpaper

Shingles

I spent the weekend up in the Catskills with my wife this weekend, and found myself snapping tons of pictures of all the wonderful country textures. This one of the wooden shingles that covered the side of the converted carriage house that our room was in, is my current iPhone wallpaper. I shot it with the iPhone 4’s camera, and tweaked it slightly with Tiffen’s Photo fx iPhone app. Feel free to grab it from my Flickr feed if you like.

Pro-tip: if doing a web search for images of shingles for comparison, be specific and search for “wood shingles”, not just “shingles” - unfortunately, Google’s fancy new image search doesn’t come with an “un-see” button.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Nerd

Self-Portrait

Was messing around with some new gear I got after being inspired by the wonderful and talented Syl Arena’s excellent Speedliter’s Intensive Workshop which I attended at Adorama a few weeks ago, and came up with this shot of me nerding out in my office. Aside from my super-shiny face (sorry, didn’t have a makeup artist or stylist available at the time), I really like this shot. The framing could stand to be a hair wider, but my 17-55mm lens is in the shop for repairs to the IS system.

Camera info: I’m using Canon’s EOS Utility to focus, change camera settings and shoot via Live View on my laptop (because even though Aperture 3 now finally supports tethered shooting with most modern Canon cameras, it only gives you a shutter button and no other control over the camera). You can sort of see my Live View display via Screen Sharing in the lower corner of the iMac in the background.

Aperture Hot Folder is feeding the images into Aperture on my laptop. Also visible on the iMac are some earlier tests I did in Aperture, while the camera was tethered to that computer.

Feel free to check out the photo in larger sizes and poke around in the metadata over on Flickr.