Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan has been turned into a skating ring for all to enjoy during the  winter months.  It is also the fabled pot of gold that Rich had never been able to find!  See we were shooting around Radio City I believe when Rich stops me point up and says to me, “I’ve tried like a dozen times to photograph the light coming off that building and I still haven’t nailed it” or something to that effect.  I asked him where or what it was shining on.  His answer, “I have no idea”  well after an hour or so if zig zagging around we ended up here at Bryant Park and sure as hell it is where the light was shining!

I was standing along the boards just watching the people skate, there were plenty of photo ops, but every lap that i watched these two skate by they were holding hands, slipping, laughing and having a good time.  I grabbed my shot of them and this was my only shot of Bryant Park.

Well the times they are a chagin’. I was watching an episode of “The Grid” a week or so ago when Matt Kloskowski had brought up something that has been in the back of my mind for some time. He and Scott were talking about print and whether it dying or already dead. Matt brought up a point about how we need to start thinking about the orientation we shoot and that shooting vertical is starting to penalize us.

It got me thinking, I love shooting in portrait format, but it is indeed starting to penalize me. Monitors are all widescreen horizontal now. When you post a landscape ratio photo it expands all nice and big, but when you post a portrait ratio photo the long edge goes up and down, which is the short edge of the monitor so it’s all compressed and small.

But where do we go from here? It isn’t ending with computer monitors. Print is indeed dying. When we as photographers shot in portrait ratio it was always to shoot for magazines, they are vertical, they required vertical formats to land a cover photo. Horizontal photos that were inside a magazine, unless double trucked are always smaller then their vertically shot counterparts. The world has flipped.

For those magazines who are trying to change with the times to stay afloat there are loads of things they are having to figure out on the fly. Do they simply create a digital version of their current print magazines like they do on the digital magazine app Zinio or do they start from scratch creating fully enriched and immerse digital mags like Scott Kelby’s “Light It” magazine.

If you are creating content for a new “digital” magazine how will the person be holding the device? For arguments sake, lets take the iPad since it is the most popular. I have one, I subscribe to both Zinio versions of traditional magazines and I subscribe to Light It. Right now both start out in a traditional format with the iPad being held like a magazine with the long edge in your hands. After the title page though where does the experience take you?

With both Light it and Zinio when you flip through the magazine they go page by page. However when you turn the iPad so that you are holding it landscape, then you see the two page spreads. The problem with this is that the pages and the content on them are now small. Just like posting vertical photos on a horizontal monitor. Maybe it is time we throw it all out the window. Instead of two individual pages making up a horizontal spread why not start laying out a magazine where the photos are horizontal taking advantage of holding the device landscape and placing content and copy within the photo.

Right now we are at the beginning of a long road of technical decisions that need to be made in the industry. We as photographers also could be in the unique position to help shape the new direction of this old industry. Why should we still have to flip our devices back and fourth based on the content on the page or spread?  Does a page really need to be a page like we know today or can it be transformed into something totally new.  These are just a few of the thoughts that were bouncing around in my head the other night, thanks to Matt and Scott for getting my brain thinking.

p.s. clicking on the photo gives you a nice large version to look at on your horizontal monitor!

At the point of capturing this picture WTC-1 is about halfway up. For some reason I really loved how construction elevator framed the edge of the picture. It almost looks like railroad tracks running up the side of the building. That’s all for today, nothing insightful, just a picture.

Just a quick post today. I had planned something more in depth, but well I haven’t finished writing it yet, so be on the look out for it sometime next week. But for now, I bring to you St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. I was standing on the sidewalk looking over the front of the church, the bottom was surrounded by scaffolding and I knew there was a shot to be had somewhere. As soon as I moved from the right side of the tree to the left it all came together framing the tree together with the upper half of the Cathedral.

Who ever thought you would have to read so many signs just to park your car in NYC. This was shot on 57th street as we were walking around. You gotta really want a car to have one in NYC, I saw a sign to one garage that said parking $8.50 per half hour! It really pays to take a bus or train into the city. Thats it for today, nothing really new or exciting to share today.

This weekend I headed down through a snow storm to NYC with Rich to do several things.  First there was a gallery exhibit of Vivian Maier, an amazing street photographer, which we both wanted to see and it’s ending this coming weekend so we said lets do it.  Turns out two separate galleries were having two separate shows of her work so we hit up both!  Also since we were going to be down there we thought we would visit the now open 9/11 memorial.  It is an amazing place that has been created.  The new WTC 1 is about halfway out of the ground and WTC 5 is now high in the air as well.  While we didn’t have the memorial to ourselves the amount of people there yesterday was probably way less then is there on a typical sunny day.

The memorial was our first stop after finally arriving.  After we cut through Chelsea Market, walked the Highline, and hit both galleries.  We grabbed some food then managed to get in a little shooting before getting the bus back to Boston.  Because of the time crunch we stayed in midtown and worked our way from 57th back to 34th were the bus would be.  We hit up Radio City, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s, Bryant Park, 5th Ave amongst other street scenes on our way to 34th street.  Stay tuned for some more photos from the trip.

Also I made this photo a lightbox so you can click it and make it larger to view.

Well where do I begin with this one. This isnt a picture, or is it? Over the last couple of weeks I have been eyes deep in creating an awards submission for a project at my office. I was in charge of the entire design layout of the presentation while others wrote the copy for it. Everything went great I was in the zone the whole time. My first idea for the theme of the project was met with it’s great lets roll with it which never happens in design EVER! Last Friday I had all the design work done, when I came in on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday) all I had to do was wait for the final copy to come in and put it in the layout.

Thats when it started. For the many that probably don’t know, I am dyslexic. It was acting up big time, and I am not a just mix up the occasional letter or word, I mix up lots of things letters, words, colors, I will read something and shift around entire paragraphs. It is just how my mind works, at times it’s a struggle, and this week it was that struggle. With no set deadlines and nothing really pressing, my concentration got lax, my mind started to wander, I just couldn’t get things in order.

Then came yesterday afternoon, I had spaced out for a couple minutes after reading an article in some trade mag when all of a sudden my mind started seeing all these colors and shapes and I decided to snap out of it by getting it down on “paper”. The “paper” was my iPad and I used Sketchbook Pro. What resulted is what you see here, I sketched dozens and dozens of starting lines only to clear the layer and start again. Then it hit me and what you see is what I was “seeing” at the moment a sort of organic set of colors and shapes all interacting with one another.

I think what drew me to photography at an early age and why I still love it so much is that I can see things in the everyday world that most people never even notice. When I shove my eye into the viewfinder of my DSLR it turns into a microscope for me and the world is just molecule that I am examining piece by piece.

Or do. I mean if you don’t how will you know what is on the other side! I shot this a year ago while out testing my new GF1 with my shooting partner Rich. We were out exploring the South Shore and we hit this gold mine of photo awesomeness! I did a quick edit to it testing out the new Lightroom 4. I really like how they changed around the develop module. Thats it for today, nothing new, it’s my day off for the MLK holiday.

Just a quickie today as I am eyes deep in graphic design work! It actually feels good to be putting my design talents to use, it has been WAY too long! Most of you know that sunrise and sunset shots to me at this point are well boring and over done. All I see is the same shots from the same people over and over again, nothing new, nothing interesting. I have no problem if you want to shoot them, but put some interesting element into the shot or give it a twist to spice it up.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a sunrise over Cape Cod, however it was taken out the window of the flight I was one, something you normally dont see. Today’s photo, I shot yesterday morning. It was sunrise in downtown Boston -however I took and shot it, with my iPhone because it was all I had with me- through the store front windows of a jewelry store. I mean literally I was standing on one side of the building and you could see the sunrise on the other side through the building, it was kind of cool and a new perspective, at least for me.