This is one of my all time favorite photos that I have taken here in Boston. So, I think it is fitting to use it as the photo to go with my last blog post here at Tamagini Design. It has been a up and down four years, with lots of photos taken and shared. For the last several months it has been more down then up. But down in a good way my new job as a digital artist has eaten up a lot of my time and I haven’t been able to get out shooting on a regular basis, so new content has been sparse at best around these parts. So with that said, I am closing up Tamagini Design. The original intent of the blog and portfolio site was to not only showcase photography but also product, industrial, and branding design work. It morphed quickly into a photography only blog and that was perfectly fine by me as I had tons of photos to share.

Fear not, I am not going away. In fact, I’ve come to many realizations since the fall about my work and how I was sharing it. I also decided it was time to rebrand. I am still very much a photographer and a digital artist, I have also started to become involved with film. I have dropped all the other design elements in my life, it’s too hard to be good at it all, and as much passion as I have for all design it was time to drop some stuff and streamline.

Without further adieu I give you my new home on the interwebs, Tamagini Visuals! The site is about 98% done, there are few tweaks and bugs I am trying to work out, but back when I did my new years post I gave myself a goal of redoing all this and internally I gave myself a goal to have it all done by March 1st and it is done. In fact almost everything has been rebranded, the only things left to do are create a new flickr site and to make up new business cards.

I will say that the one bug that is the most annoying is the back button on the Special Projects pages. Once you click on a photo to bring it up in a light box and start going through photos, if you close it and hit back, you will have to keep hitting back for the amount of photos that you looked through. For some reason the lightbox is putting code into the url and you need to back out of all of it.

That is all I’ll say over here, but head on over to the new site and go do some exploring!

Good bye from Tamagini Design but HELLO from Tamagini Visuals!!!

Well back to work after the madness that was the blizzard Nemo. After all was said and done we in Boston got 2 feet of snow, which is now piled into giant 6-8 foot high snow banks on all the sidewalks. That means a lot of dangerous walking in the streets for us city folk. Friday and Saturday I had camera in hand for some blizzard photos. This is probably my favorite shot from the storm. It was very early into the start when I took it, there was maybe an inch on the ground at the time, but come on, not one but two hot pink umbrellas! This is not a selective color photo. This photo is full color but with everything snow white these umbrellas just pop right off the frame. The double whammy this shot is also a perfect keeper for my ongoing umbrella portrait series, where I take candid portraits of people out in the rain or in this case snow, walking under their umbrellas. If you want to see the rest of my shots from the day you can check out my flickr page here.

Many people have a disdain for winter. However I love the winter time, and there is actually something special about winter in Boston. One of the highlights about winter in the city is ice skating on the Frog Pond. There aren’t many thing more picturesque then an evening on the Common with the Back Bay skyscrapers as a back drop. I shot this the other night on my walk home from work doing some street shooting with my new camera. I was out testing the high ISO capabilities when the twilight sky just sang. I picked out a spot atop the hill looking down onto to the rink and shot a bunch of hand held frames. I have said it before this camera rules at high ISO. This shot also served as a scouting test as one of my scenes in the timelapse that I shot will be of the skaters. That’s it for now, there wont be much time left for this blog as I got a real good start on my new website over the weekend. Now it is the fine tuning phase as it is a drastic difference from this current blog.

Illustration By Patrick LaMontagne

Well look at that, it’s me! This is one of the extremely rare few times that I will ever showcase someone elses work on my blog. My buddy Patrick is an amazing illustrator and cartoonist from Canada. Back in September he and I were having lunch in Vegas when he happen to see how my face was being lit by my iPad and he asked to take a photo of me. Patrick does some amazing work, but he also creates amazing portraits of people right on his iPad, no computer, just an iPad and he wanted to use me for his next iPad painting. I said hell yeah. This weekend he finally found the time to finish it and I think it came out great, so I figured I would share with everyone. But also please head over to his blog to check out his work it is pretty killer stuff, especially his animal totem paintings, all digital all done in Photoshop. Keep in mind, he does not paint over a photo or manipulate a photo and turn it into a painting. These are 100% from a blank canvas while a reference photo or photos on his other monitor guide his creation.

So go check out his work! HERE at Cartoon Ink

Well it is a new year and I am going to try to get back to some sort of regular blogging. I have still yet to determine what regular means, I had been blogging regularly 3 times a week, I don’t know if I will be staying with that schedule or not but I will be blogging more regularly.

I just became the proud new owner of a Canon 5D mark III, so I will definitely out shooting, breaking in this beast and putting it through it’s paces. Back in March I had the brief opportunity to shoot one when my good friend Beth bought one, I coaxed it from her for an hour of so while she was showing me around Georgetown in DC. I knew then this was a badass camera and yep I was right on. First off, finally a professional AF system for a professional camera. My 5D mark II has a pitiful 9 point AF that was like a decade old technology and resigned to the consumer level cameras. Now the mark III has the same 61 point AF that it’s big brother the 1DX has in it.

The other awesome thing right off the bat is that this camera can basically see in the dark! With my 5D mark II my ISO limit that I felt comfortable to shoot was 3200, now I can be comfortable shooting all the way up to ISO 10,000. In fact this photo above, one of my first shot with the mark III was shot at ISO 8,000. An amazing feat in engineering technology. There is still some noise in the image, but it is small and all the edges hold their detail. I have yet to scientifically test it but I believe the noise I and seeing at 8000 is about what I was getting at 3200 on the mark II.

The next few weeks and months of putting this camera to work are going to be fun. I will be pushing the limits on it and I am looking forward to seeing the results.

Well, Happy New Year! Like always a new year brings new beginnings, a chance for a fresh start to anything and everything. Things around my world are no exception. As most have you that actually follow this blog, you may have noticed that the last four months or more have been very sparse in terms of new photos and posts. I have explained before that I got a new job, well that new job has been amazing, it has really jumpstarted the creativity in the rest of my life that for the last several years has been stagnant. It is an amazing office filled with amazing talent and I am truly proud to be a part of it. My days are filled with creating digital art. You can’t ask for more then that as a creative, I am getting paid to create art every day, art that is different then most. Being that the company is an architectural firm, the art that I am creating will eventually be turned into a physical building, art that you can actually walk around in, touch and experience.

But, all that new found success and happiness hasn’t come without a price. As a result of really sinking everything into turning this new venture into a success my photography has taken a big hit. It used to be that my photography was my outlet to stay creative it has unfortunately taken a back seat of late. I haven’t been walking the street with a camera in my hand, doing what I do best, being a street photographer. I have had a few paid gigs here and there to shoot events which is always fun, but the real meat of my body of work, documenting everyday life in cities hasn’t really been there.

My goal for the new year is to strike more balance in my life. I want to make sure I am equally creative outside my office as I am when I am in it. I have already started to take several steps in that direction. I have some new gear coming this week, which I hope will help step up what I am able to create. I have had several ideas stewing in the back of my mind for the better part of 2012 that I now plan on acting on and turning into a reality. First and foremost, Tamagini Design is slowly going to go away. Fear not, I’m not going anywhere, I am slowly rebranding and starting up Tamagini Visuals. In fact, I got a good initial start this weekend. I have rebranded my 500px account and my Tumblr account. I will be creating a new flickr account and starting it from scratch and of course my website and blog will be rebranded and put onto a new domain.

As a start here are links to my newly branded 500px and tumblr, please rebookmark this sites so you don’t miss out on anything.

500px – http://500px.com/tamaginivisuals

tumblr – http://tamaginivisuals.tumblr.com

Another project that has been stewing is, I have wanted to shoot time-lapse, but I want to really do it right and my goal is to create a time-lapse film around Boston to really showcase it. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I think it will be that good kind of work. It will also put a new spin on some of the things that I shoot annually like the 4th of July fireworks, Head of the Charles Regatta and other things like that.

I want to take loads more portraits, but I don’t want to just take portraits. I want to create really interesting, fun, creative portraits in different locations around the city, seamless is boring I want to take advantage of some of the amazing backdrops we have.

I want to photograph more performance art. Besides street photography, shooting performance art is probably my favorite thing to photograph. As a photographer, I am an artist. Poets, dancers, musicians these people are artists that put themselves and their art on the line for the immediate judgement of the general public. That takes real balls, something I’m not sure I could do, so I like to give back by photographing them doing their art and in turn they get to see themselves how they probably have never been seen. Luckily the National Poetry Slams are coming back to Boston/Cambridge this summer and I have already been tapped to be one of the main photographers again. I’m hoping to take the months leading up to it to test out some ideas and techniques so that when the big event comes the bar will be raised and some true art will be born out of it.

There is a ton more that I have started to think about but these are the ones that I have really worked out in my head. It is going to take a lot of doing to keep everything in balance and zen like, but it really needs to be done.

Before I forget, the photo above was taken last night during First Night Boston. It is one of the giant ice sculptures that we have every year. I have several that were taken at street level around the sculpture, but then I said hey jackass, get up above it all and shoot the whole scene. I also ran across the street to that Walgreens you can see in the background for a flash light so I could light paint the bronze statue in the foreground. In the end it took about 5 exposures that I then hand blended in Photoshop in order to get the final result.

That’s it for now, I promise that I will try to get back into a regular blog posting habit. Fingers Crossed!

HNY

JT

Sometimes we as photographers do some pretty stupid things in the name of getting a picture. I have seen shooter hang over the edge of cliffs, inch closer and closer to the sidelines of a sporting event for that unobstructed shot or as you can see here, stop on the a busy highway on a bridge for a photograph. Yes, indeed this happened. Luckily traffic was slowing down and no photographers were injured in the making of this photo. I guess this takes street photography to a whole new level.

Well, this past Sunday I shot another 5K race for Cambridge 5K. This was the annual Yulefest 5K, a holiday road race through Harvard Square. Just like the Oktoberfest race that I shot back in October the runners were encouraged to dress in costume and have some fun hamming it up while running the race. After the race there was the traditional craft beer block party that they have come to be known for at Cambridge 5K. As you can see from the photo some costumes were now completely thought out. Sure this woman looked hilareous while out on the course running, her problem came after the race. Her present costume was so big that she had difficult lifting her beer to her mouth and she needed a little bit of holiday help from a friend.

Well here we go again. Shorten days, blistering cold wind, and snow. Yeah snow. I shot this a few weeks ago on a walk home while working on my umbrella project. The storm was supposed to be all rain in Boston, well that rain quickly turned into several inches of heavy wet snow. This is by no means the first time someone myself or one of another million people that have passed through the Public Garden have stopped to take a photo of the George Washington statue. But it was one of those instances where the atmospherics danced in the light in such a way that I had to stop to take a photo of it. Tis the season to start taking photos of things that every other tourist out there is taking photos of, the snow, twinkling sparkle of the Christmas lights, all that holiday stuff. Get out there and document it, it is you job as a photographer to do it, but do it a million times better then those ordinary people and tourists with their iPhones. You have the tools and knowledge at your disposal, get out there and make some magic of your own.

I love this! When ever I am out in the elements working on my umbrella project this is something that I hope I get to see. That moment when someone is walking down the street, huddled under an umbrella to keep as dry as possible. Just then a gust of wind whips around the corner of a building and pop goes the umbrella, and the person under it quickly struggles to try to rebuild their rain shelter. I have gotten some of these great moments over the last year and I hope to get some more over the coming months as the cold driving rains and snows of winter start.