mike ricca photography

the year of gettin’ sh-t done

mike — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:23:01 +0000

There must be something in the air this year, because all around me I see friends and colleagues kicking butt left and right. People are going back to school and writing books and exercising and taking stock in their health (both physical and mental) and taking on all sorts of Big And Amazing Projects™. All those "I'd really like to do this but I can't right now" goals they'd been putting off for so long, they're finally tackling. For my part, I'd made some minor accomplishments in the areas of eating well and exercising, and I'd started the planning stages on a few photography projects I'm excited for, but it wasn't until today that I actually did something.

The benefits of black & white

mike — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:29:22 +0000

A recent conversation with photographer buddies made me realize that there are a number of photographers out there that don't work in black & white at all. A number, I'm sure, that's rapidly growing. However just because you're not familiar with (or even like) black & white photography, it still pays to dabble in it every now and then, for a number of reasons. Not only will it be good for your photographs, it'll be good for your photography.

tha police

mike — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:09:53 +0000

My dad was a cop. One of New York's Finest. He served for eleven years before retiring as a Detective Lieutenant (Auto Crime) when we moved to the Philippines in '82. Whenever someone would ask what my dad did when we lived in New York, there was always a sense of pride in my reply. Every kid thinks his dad is Superman, but how many of them actually threw people in jail? How many had guns and dress blues and medals?

The Easy Button

mike — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 04:10:29 +0000

Overnight, Lightroom became king and Photoshop became the tool I brought out once in a while for more involved retouching. I even avoided taking images into Photoshop after developing them in Lightroom (a common process) simply because Lightroom's simplicity made Photoshop look positively arcane. At least, it did. I may be rethinking my stance after playing with the PSKiss Toolkits.

trick or freeze

mike — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:09:31 +0000

It snowed today, the earliest New York has received at least an inch of snow in recorded weather history. I'd write more but honestly, not much else really need be said. Besides, after a night out (like a little bit of snow is gonna stop anyone) I'm in dire need of some thawing out.

animals and children

mike — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:28:00 +0000

While on my two-week sojourn back to The Bay, a friend and ex-coworker reached out to me. I'd shot her son's first birthday a couple years back and as the family had since increased by one, they were hoping for some family portraits. I was more than happy to oblige.

only happy when it rains

mike — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:51:15 +0000

It's raining out. Despite the fact that she isn't even here yet, Irene has officially taken hold of New York City. Stores stripped bare, the streets so empty you'd think the Ascension had happened while you were napping. At home and bored, listening to the rain pelt the streets outside, I decided to hop into a ZipCar and do a little cruising.

The Good Kind of Profiling

mike — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:56:15 +0000

I recently got my hands on a copy of the PSKiss Skin & Scenery Color profile and preset pack, and while I'm not much of a preset kinda guy (aside from a few home-cooked ones and a small handful of black & white presets), I was impressed enough with the camera profiles that I figured I'd talk about it some.

Edumacation

mike — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:45:02 +0000

While sorting through photos from a recent road trip through the Southwest a couple of weeks ago, I came across a photo that wasn't good enough to keep but made a perfect candidate for a quick demo of the salvaging power of RAW images. I cooked up a quick before/after shot (not unlike the one above) and shared it on Reddit.

500px is worth a thousand words

mike — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:20:42 +0000

For those not yet familiar with it, 500px is a relatively new photo sharing site that... okay, yes. I know. Another one? But this one is a little different. Whereas Flickr is meant as a sort of "socially-oriented photodump" and SmugMug is meant as a sort of "pro-oriented photodump," 500px is more of a "pro-oriented online portfolio" than anything else.

hot couture

mike — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 23:15:45 +0000

When I had arranged my last trip to San Francisco, the very first thing I did after booking my flight was send out an email to Paciano Triufo, Ann Borja, and Roczane Enriquez, photographers and make-up artist (respectively) extraordinaire and good friends from my theatre days with Bindlestiff. I'd always wanted to work with on a shoot but had never had the chance, so when the chance presented itself, I hopped right on it.

the perils of being a wallflower

mike — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 04:48:55 +0000

One of the most important yet rarely-mentioned traits you need to be a good photographer is shamelessness. How far would Steve McCurry, Nick Ut, or Dorothea Lange gotten if they had said to themselves "I'll just stand over here and politely wait for a photo to present itself. I don't want to be a bother." Fortune favors the bold, Photography doubly so.

the man who wasn’t there

mike — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:56:05 +0000

I had another shoot just last night, this time with a coworker and friend who wanted some good photos of herself. We had planned on hopping over to a park and getting some nice fun little shots in the sun. The weather, however, had other ideas, for which I'm eternally grateful.

will work for money

mike — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:36:29 +0000

I've never been good at self-promotion. Chalk it up to something from my childhood or my upbringing or a million other possible reasons, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same thing: I'm about as deft at tooting my own horn as a lipless trumpeter.

natures in man

mike — Wed, 04 May 2011 04:09:23 +0000

It was gorgeous out on the last weekend before I left for Boston (in case you were wondering why I haven't updated in a while) so naturally I decided to spend that day indoors at The Met. While wandering the floors of the museum, I happened upon The American Wing which. As I stepped out into the open square where most of the statues were standing, I noticed something that hadn't registered with me before.

sara’s miles

mike — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 06:26:26 +0000

I restarted my couchsurfing involvement after an almost two-year hiatus, and not a moment too soon. As much as I'm absolutely loving New York, my inner vagabond is starting to get antsy for the road and being around travelers helps sate the wanderlust, if only vicariously.

And we’re back!

mike — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:57:27 +0000

A rare, text-only news item just to point out the obvious: I’ve updated the site. In the five (!) years since I started this blog, my photography’s grown a fair bit as have my needs from a website. When I first started, the “blog” was all of a series of single-image entries with maybe a [...]

ashley

mike — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:44:08 +0000

I've started using my ModelMayhem account more these last few weeks. I signed up over a year and a half ago, but I never really did anything with it. I had enough to keep me busy that I didn't bother exploring it much. Lately, however, I've been itching to do more and more shoots, and as I was starting to run out of people to photograph, I figured being a little more active on MM couldn't hurt.

taz @ 5ptz

mike — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:08:27 +0000

Last week, comrade-at-arms Tasayu (previously) approached me to do some head shots and portraits over at at the "Institute of Higher Burning" and graffiti landmark 5 pointz. Never one to turn down an opportunity to check out new locations (and just explore), I was in from the word go.

terresa revisited

mike — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 06:27:21 +0000

I got together with Terresa again on Tuesday night for a second shoot, this one a glamour / nude shoot. And just as the shoots with Joyce and Jorge Luis gave me an opportunity to run my home studio through the ropes, this session with Terresa gave me a chance to see how many other locations I could milk out of my apartment.

variations on a theme

mike — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:49:11 +0000

I like having the different outlets because they all reflect different parts of me and it's nice to keep them compartmentalized sometimes. I already get enough of my work life spilling into my personal life which is stepping on the feet of my love life which doesn't realized it just knocked over my creative life ... I see enough of that in my day-to-day. It's nice to be able to send them to opposite corners every now and then, especially as each has a very specific role to fill.

confidence men

mike — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:10:10 +0000

You'd likely get a variety of answers if you were to ask different photographers to name the most important trait a photographer should have, but I think we'd all agree that confidence is pretty high up there.

stu-stu-studio

mike — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:10:53 +0000

Photography can be a pretty expensive endeavor, especially when you're still starting out and slowly building your arsenal. "Do what you can with what you've got" becomes your mantra, and "DIY" quickly joins your panoply of other photography acronyms. My little in-home studio won't work very well for more than one person, and living with a roommate means that I have to set and strike it whenever I need to use it (rather than just keep it up 24/7), but for what it is, it does a pretty good job. And for one-person shoots, it performs admirably.

new york frame of mind

mike — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 02:31:21 +0000

Like most people who grew up outside of the States, I grew up with a very specific view of the country that lead the world, which I developed through exposure to its greatest export, popular culture. The only difference was that my view was time-shifted by a few decades. And while I recognized that America was made up of fifty states that were home to millions of people living in thousands of cities, it only ever came down to one of them: New York.

the acoustic duo of destruction

mike — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:06:25 +0000

Though I've known Herb Manila and Mike Hanson (aka Herb & Hanson) for well over a decade (indeed, it was I that built their website, many moons ago), we'd never done a shoot before. We'd just never gotten around to it, I suppose. So when they suggested doing a shoot while I was in D.C. last weekend, I was completely on board.