cary conover - blog

Eye on the Strand

2009-07-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last November I entered some photographs in the "Eye on the Strand" photography contest. The contest was a call for submissions from anybody with interesting, creative pictures taken inside or outside of the Strand bookstore. I entered on somewhat of a whim, but to make a long story short my picture of a woman carrying an upside-down baby outside Strand won second place in the contest. Co-sponsors of the contest were the Aperture Foundation and Pratt Institute, so along with a collection of over 50 photography books I will receive from Aperture I also get to enroll in a photography or computer class at Pratt this fall. Not bad for uploading a few jpegs! So if you're in New York in next few weeks I hope you will stop by the Pratt Institute Center for Continuing and Professional Studies Gallery on 14th Street in Manhattan to check out the exhibition. The opening is tonight, July 15th, from 6pm to 8pm. All are invited.

details:
Eye on the Strand
July 15 to August 26th
Pratt Institute CCPS Gallery
144 West 14th Street, 2nd Floor
(The gallery is open weekdays from 10am until 8pm; Saturdays 10am until 4pm)

Thoughts on LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph

2009-06-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a weekend spent down in Charlottesville, Virginia at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. It was my first time attending, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The festival, or just plain "Look" as it's known, is billed as "three days of love, peace and photography." I definitely think that description fits in with the festival's origins, which everybody knows is the legendary backyard slide projections hosted by National Geographic photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols. That small gathering has evolved into a full-fledged photography festival featuring the work of dozens of photographers in various exhibitions and nightly projections. The "3" in LOOK3 does not refer to this being a three-day festival, or even that it is in its third year. It refers to the fact that there are three "legacy artists" that are honored each year. The first year, 2007, featured Eugene Richards, William Albert Allard and Sally Mann. Last year it was Joel-Peter Witkin, Mary Ellen Mark and James Nachtwey. This year it was Sylvia Plachy, Martin Parr and Gilles Peress. Sadly, Look is taking next year off, the goal being to return in 2011 bigger and better than ever and with more funding. You can get the backstory on that here. I definitely hope to return in 2011.

It was very hard for me not to compare Look to Visa pour l'Image, which is a photojournalism festival I attended last year in Perpignan, France. Both festivals revolve around the centrally located area of their respective pedestrian/historic districts, with various exhibitions in dynamic venues and nightly amphitheater-style projections. Here are some thoughts:

--I went into Look knowing a LOT more people. I showed up at Visa solo, a total stranger. So for me, Look felt a lot more like a reunion with old photographer friends. Look definitely reminded me of one of the NPPA Flying Short Course events I attended in college and when working at my first newspaper job in the late 90s. At Visa, initiating conversation with folks was a lot of work. For me, Visa was just as much about sightseeing and being a tourist as it was about seeing great photography.

--For Visa, think "Castle near the River." Look is simply, "Main Street Pedestrian Mall." One is not better than the other, I'm simply listing this early on sort of give you a visual since I don't have any pics to post. Look was all centrally located, everything within a couple hundred yards. Visa was also centrally located but spread out more and required a bit more walking.

--I think it takes a while to get the feel of a festival. Both at Visa and Look, a big part of my experience was just getting to know the lay of the land. I really had to soak it in for a few days, I'm only just now able to sit down and reflect. There's no way I would have wanted to blog from either place. That being said, I could go back now to either place and know exactly where I'd have my first meal, where I'd stay, etc.

--In general, I was more impressed with the exhibitions at Look than at Visa. The exhibitions at Look were all pretty bold, I thought. Each one was totally different from the others. Many of them felt more like photographic installations than traditional photography exhibitions. Plachy's show, "Waiting," felt like it was in the art classroom of an old school. Parr's show, "Luxury," was in a high-end boutique showroom; Peress's show, "Natures Mortes," felt like it was inside a basement morgue. Nachtwey had a show about tuberculosis that was strewn with mosquito nets. I probably spent the most time at the World Press Photo winners exhibit, which was laid out very nicely. For the most part, the exhibitions at Look were roomier and airier whereas at Visa it felt very crowded, like hordes of people milling around looking at work in a museum. Even though the cafe/street scenery and narrow streets of Perpignan are charming, I still think Look's exhibitions were all a lot more up my alley.

--Conversely, I felt the nightly projections of Look came in distant second to those of Visa. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the Look projections. The work was good but I just think the projections lacked the technical sophistication of Visa's. At Look, there was a guy at a computer in the back and sometimes his mouse and finder windows would show up on the main projection screen by accident. Again, very enjoyable but noticeably less professional than Visa. Visa's projections featured overlaying images and montages, graphics, etc. with much, much more fluid sequencing and music, dissolves, fades, triptychs, visual effects, typography, etc. I have no doubt that when Look has been around for 20 years like Visa has, they'll have it more than perfected by then.

--One of the first big media companies that I think of when I think of Look is National Geographic. When I think of Visa I think of Getty Images. In general, I got a sense Look is more about celebrating the art and craft of photography, both documentary and fine art, and everything had somewhat of a folksy vibe. Visa is a lot more scorched-earth, hardcore photojournalism and photographers who've seen horrific deeds. Look I would compare to the romance of beautiful color slides projected through an old clackety projector; Visa is more like editing color negs on a light table.

--At both festivals, after I had looked at all the exhibitions, I found myself sort of wandering aimlessly in between events, talks, etc. This is why I wish there was just a designated area where you could just sit down and share your work and look at the work of others, shoot the breeze, etc. But there was virtually no (public) sharing of work that I saw at Look, and only a tad more at Visa.

--As for the Insight Conversations with Plachy, Parr and Peress, I would have to say Peress was my favorite. Well, first of all I should say that I unfortunately missed most of Plachy's, as I arrived in Charlottesville late, just as she was starting her talk (I had to leave in order to make the check-in where I was staying). Martin Parr's on Friday afternoon was thoroughly enjoyable, a real treat, and easily he got the most laughs. And I would say his exhibit in Charlottesville was my favorite of the entire festival. But there was something about hearing Peress speak, I guess all the things I've always thought that he brings to the table of photojournalism were confirmed. I could write a whole blog post about his talk alone (he was "interviewed" by MaryAnne Golon on stage). There's a passage of his I copied down from the Magnum Stories book a few years ago, his theory on four kinds of photographic authorship: that of the camera and the lens being used, that of the photographer composing the picture and choosing the moment to press the button, that of the viewer of the photograph, and finally that of the force of reality itself. There was one moment when he was talking about when he was younger and how Henri Cartier-Bresson had given him some advice. The room was totally quiet and as he said Bresson's name there was a rumble of thunder outside. Very powerful.

--In the end, I think, it's all about being bombarded with imagery for a weekend or a week, as is the case with Look and Visa, respectively. The intensity of seeing so much work by others really makes me examine what it is that I do, makes me wonder how I stand out from the crowd, if at all. Admittedly, it was a little hard to see other people wearing name tags that said "Artist" on them, whereas mine just said "General." My biggest regret is that I didn't act quick enough in trying to get my work shown in either festival, not that I would have gotten in if I had. But I certainly feel people would respond to what I've done over the past nine years in New York, and I would say it would be undeniably more rewarding to return to either of these festivals with some work being shown or exhibited. Some day. I am going to do some regrouping of my own this summer.

Times Square pedestrian mall opens (Update)

2009-06-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Before I change the topic away from Times Square I just wanted to add these two scans of the pedestrian mall. I didn't plan to do this before-and-after view, I just discovered I had them today while looking for something else. At any rate, I think this does a slightly better job of showing the changes to Times Square than my cellphone snap from a couple weeks ago.

Times Square pedestrian mall opens

2009-05-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

As far as I'm concerned, Sunday's opening of the Times Square pedestrian mall was a Grand Slam for New York City. We walked up there on Sunday to check it out and liked what we saw. The lawn chairs, people chilaxing, live bands performing, it all had a very airy, festive vibe. I will no longer dread all the overcrowded sidewalks filled with slow tourists walking three and four abreast. Indeed, I look forward to seeing what they do with it, and I hope it remains permanent. Now, if we could just get the High Line opened in the next few weeks.

Washington Square Park Reopens

2009-05-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Fortunately I won't have to publish a blog post that I had been working on about how long the renovation of Washington Square Park has taken. Because as of today the park is finally open again. It's about time. Nobody ever thought it would take this long (18 months). I decided to check out the park today while walking back from an errand and I was stoked to see, all the way from 11th Street, the central fountains spurting water. I think it had probably only been open a few hours by that point. I ran into my press photographer friend Michael Appleton and together with another photographer we were able to get an escort up to the top of the arch. So without further ado, here are a few symmetry-obsessed views of the realigned fountain plus one nice moment of some crusty characters getting a little wet. Welcome back, WSP.

Rooftop Weather

2009-04-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've recently acquired a set of keys for a building nearby in my neighborhood that has a fantastic rooftop. The views of the skyline, of course, are stunning. And it's a big relief not to have to deal with the rooftop of my own building, where a restaurant's fans are constantly spewing out hot and sticky grease-laden exhaust fumes. What's most important is that on this higher and cleaner rooftop I have a much more clear view of the horizon. And now that the nights are starting to get warmer, that's exactly where you'll find me watching the skies. Indeed, I've been continuing the work I began last fall of capturing moonrises and moonsets via time lapse. But this time around I've got the added magnification of a Meade telescope. Coupled with an adaptor for my Canon EOS camera, it's basically like having an 800mm lens fixed at f/11. As the pictures above show, I've been able to capture the moon in all its dramatic glory. A setting Waxing Crescent and a rising Full Moon (all six of the above are either one or the other) are my two favorite moon phases to photograph. They're the easiest to get because they occur right around the same time the sun sets. What I'm hoping to get soon is a shot of a rising Waning Crescent and a setting Full Moon. These two are harder because they require waking up before the sun rises, and I rarely go to bed earlier than 1:30 AM. But there are lots of other cool astronomical events I've got marked on my calendar, and I'm not simply photographing everything through a telescope. I won't get into the details of that stuff right now. But in the spirit of May's arrival, and with a beautiful new perspective on this amazing city, I wanted to share these images. Keep your fingers crossed for some clear skies this spring.

Recap of "Real Art For Real People" event

2009-04-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everybody who showed up on Sunday for the "Real Art For Real People" event hosted by See-NYC. Above is a quick time lapse of the event from start to finish. We had a great time (and even sold a few pieces). I'd especially like to thank Andrew Drossman, who I tracked down just days before the event. Andrew is the man I photographed riding his unicycle during the Blizzard of 2006. It was nice to meet him and his family. Below is a picture of me talking with him. (photo by Abdi Oday)

News Flash

2009-04-02T18:36:00.001-07:00

I will be featured in a small show this coming Sunday, April 5th at 288 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan. I am sharing a space with the Brooklyn-based painter and silkscreen artist Buster Black. The event will run from 3-11 PM. So please stop by if you're around. As a preview for the event, I was interviewed a few weeks ago. The transcript of that Q&A can be read here, on the blog published by the wonderful ladies over at See-NYC.

In other news, I was asked to participate in a fun feature on the blog of Blake Andrews, a photographer based in Eugene, Oregon. It's basically me writing about what I was thinking when I shot certain pictures. Take a look here.

Olympus Pen-F: Recession Camera

2009-03-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here it is already halfway through March and I've just now gotten around to posting my February pictures. Part of the delay in getting them posted is because I've been concentrating a lot on time lapse and telescope photography (which I'm just not quite ready to share with the world yet). But the real reason is that I've been rolling with a brand new (used) Olympus Pen-F lately and so I've been burning through about half as much film as I usually do. When shooting with the Pen-F, it takes me longer to get through a single roll. Therefore I have fewer rolls when I do a batch of film. Usually I like to have at least seven to ten rolls of film before I process; the other day I did a batch of five.

If this doesn't make any sense to you, it's probably because you're unaware that the Pen-F is a half-frame camera. So on a normal roll of 35mm film you can get about 72 pictures. On the Pen-F this is achieved by shrinking and rotating the traditional horizontal/landscape format prism system 90 degrees so that when you hold it normally and look through the viewfinder you're automatically composing in a vertical/portrait format. The size of the resulting frame is decreased by about half, so your negative is tiny (18mm x 24mm) and therefore a bit grainier when enlarged to normal sizes. It takes some getting used to, but if you can get your focus sharp and don't need an in-camera meter, working with this smaller format is a delight. Here are just a few quick examples:
What's more, with a 35mm scanner you can scan two pictures at once. I used to really work this "in-camera" diptych aspect a lot more when I had my Kodak 2035 scanner, but for the past few years I've been using a Nikon 5000-ED scanner and they just don't look as good.

If you've never heard of the Pen-F (or FT or FV), it's probably because they were only made for seven years in the 1960s. I first heard about the Pen-F in 2004 from my good friend Andy Cutraro, whose father had found one at a garage sale and gave it to him. Andy brought it to NYC and let me borrow it for a few months, that's what a nice guy he is (he also pointed out this great Cameraquest link about the camera). I soon bought one of my own on eBay, albeit a more cumbersome double stroke model, but that didn't matter because it only cost $100 AND it came with a sweet 40mm f/1.4 lens. I dropped it last fall and dinged up the body pretty good, but was too lazy and broke to see what the repair would cost. My wife got me a new one for Christmas and so I'm treating this one as if it's my last (I've since sold the broken one). With twice the amount of frames on each roll resulting in me shooting about half the amount of film I normally do, it really is the perfect film camera for this recession. In my most recent website update (again, February 2009), all but one of the vertical shots were with the Pen-F. See if you can determine which one wasn't. I'll leave you with some of those diptychs I was talking about, circa 2005:

1996

2009-02-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

Late in my final semester of college I got accepted to the Eddie Adams Workshop (Barnstorm IX, in 1996). It was easily the highlight of my senior year. I was just wrapping up four years at Kansas State University, which had nowhere near the amount of photojournalism students as, say, University of Missouri or Western Kentucky University did. So while K-State had a strong tradition of photography in its Student Publications department, I was relatively isolated from the larger world of photojournalism. So going to the workshop was a real eye-opener for me. Just being around 99 other photographers who were roughly close to my age and experience level was an invaluable experience. Thirteen years later, however, it's not so much my fellow workshop attendees that I think about as much as being able to meet icons like Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans and of course Mr. Adams himself (and many others). I've been digging through my college negs this past week trying to find an image to contribute to the 100th Anniversary edition of K-State's yearbook, the Royal Purple. But I've come across a ton of other pics and this one of the three aforementioned photographers is one I wanted to share.

Eight Years Ago

2009-01-21T10:48:00.001-08:00

Now that Barack Obama's presidency has been underway for over a full 24 hours, I have to be honest and ask myself if I don't truly regret going to DC for the inauguration. By all the accounts from the photographers I've followed, it was definitely a cold and crowded situation and it appears that just getting in and out of The Mall would have been a full day's work. I don't think I would have had the mobility or vantage point that I would've liked, but then again it definitely would have been cool to see what 1.5 million people looks like. At any rate, I'm not too upset by having stayed here (I watched/photographed the event from Times Square), and it was a real treat watching the recaps on television last night on our brand new high-definition TV.

This past summer over the 4th of July I spent four nights in DC, my longest stay ever there. Yesterday and today I've been recalling a lot of experiences from that trip in trying to gather my mental bearings of how DC is layed out, which direction is which, etc. But I've also been thinking a lot about one of my first visits to DC, in January of 2001, for George W. Bush's first inauguration. That was also a widely-attended event, not so much because of the inauguration as much as the protest to the inauguration. I've always said that experience was my first real taste of protest/dissent/activism. I had just moved to NYC five months prior and going to DC to cover the protests felt like a big assignment to me.
I overheard last night on ABC that the DC Police Department hadn't reported a single arrest throughout the day. Surely, I thought, there had to be some sort of protest where people were getting angry. I'm not thinking so much about angry folks protesting Obama's citizenship as much as anarchist types who aren't going to be happy no matter who's in office. Apparently there was one protest regarding Guantanamo Bay, but it was more of a call for Obama to close it. Quite an opposite image from the egg-tossing and angry banners of 2001:

I am pretty optimistic about the next four years. That being said, I really think there's only one direction we can go as a country. To me, this inauguration seems to have the vibe of one big three-weeks-delayed New Year's Resolution. I just hope we can start getting some traction toward solving this economic crisis and withdrawing troops responsibly from Iraq. I'm worried Americans are going to become impatient with Obama. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Hopefully, four years from now, we'll be in a vastly different position and hurtling headlong on a peaceful trajectory into 2013.

Pete Souza

2009-01-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

I'm a little slow in getting around to this topic, but I wanted to take a moment to commend the Obama Administration on the appointment of Pete Souza as Official White House Photographer. I can't think of a better selection for this post. I've had the honor of knowing Souza since the early 90s, when I was a freshman at Kansas State University. Souza was a grad student at K-State in the late 70s and he's remained an active alumnus ever since. In 2001, I volunteered alongside Souza and other former K-State photographers to mentor current K-Staters during an intensive spring break photography workshop in Salina, Kansas. The last time I saw Souza was 2004, when he was in New York photographing the lead up to the Republican National Convention. We met up for a beer and that turned into several beers and afterwards I foolishly convinced him to check out the view of downtown from my rooftop as a lightning storm was underway. The next day I was petrified when I discovered a few people had been killed doing the exact same thing less than a mile away.

My knowledge of Barack Obama is synonymous with the images of Pete Souza. With the title of National Photographer for the Chicago Tribune, Souza photographed Obama's first year in the Senate, including his first Senatorial trip overseas in 2005, to Russia, as well as Obama's historic trip to Africa the following year. And so it was no surprise to see Souza was there in Springfield, Illinois in early 2007, photographing Obama alone backstage as he collected his thoughts moments before announcing his candidacy. I can't wait to see the images Souza gets in the coming days as well as in the next several months, and I wish him the best of luck.

Cosmos

2009-01-08T08:56:00.001-08:00

For Christmas, I got the seven-disk box set of the Carl Sagan television science series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. A few minutes into the first episode, I thought the whole "Spaceship of the Imagination" thing was going to be totally cheesy. But very quickly I became glued to it. Watching five of the 13 hour-long episodes has dovetailed nicely with an another animated stills movie I had been working on throughout December, one that's based entirely on NASA imagery. Since I've already dealt with the moon a lot on this blog, the piece I want to show you focuses mostly on Mars and Saturn. A lot of the images from Mars are from Spirit and Opportunity, the two rovers on the surface of the planet (plus a few images taken by Mars Global Surveyor). And then it's on to Saturn, where the Cassini satellite has been snapping pictures of the ringed planet since its arrival in 2004. The movie comprised of all this awesome NASA imagery can be seen here.

"Cosmos" was created in the late 1970s, which was right as Voyager 1 and 2 were returning data from Jupiter and Saturn. Aside from all the science those two probes have radioed back to Earth, it really makes me ponder the size of the Solar System. I did a quick search to find the speed at which Voyager 1 and 2 are flying through space and found that it's about 10 miles per second. Light, on the other hand, travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is nearly 6 trillion miles per year. I looked up which star way out there is closest to us (the binary star Alpha Centauri, a name I quickly recognized from grade school) and learned that it's 4.37 light years away from the Sun. Now, even though neither Voyager probe is headed directly toward Alpha Centauri, it's utterly mind-boggling to me to realize that it would require over 80,000 years for one of these probes to travel such a distance. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on the calculation, but is that not just a totally daunting realization?

Portfolio Video

2008-12-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, over on Rob Haggart's website, I saw some links to a few photographers who had posted movies of their portfolios to the web. I don't own a video camera, so instead I used my 5D and took nearly 600 shots of myself paging through my portfolio. Then I used Quicktime Pro to create an image sequence, which is exactly the same process I use for time lapse. Here's how it turned out: http://caryconover.com/portfolio.mov

Kodachrome

2008-12-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

My friend Mike Hutmacher, photographer at the Wichita Eagle, sent this to me over the weekend. It's a story and audio slide show he did on Dwayne's Photo, a photography lab in Parsons, Kansas, about an hour east of Wichita. Supposedly, Dwayne's is the last lab in the world to process Kodachrome. I had always thought there were perhaps a dozen or so labs throughout the United State (or at least scattered across the globe) that still processed Kodachrome, but apparently not. Take a look at the slide show here and read the story here. Then, when you're done, check out my favorite scene from the first season of Mad Men, where Don Draper gives a presentation to executives from Kodak. It's when he pitches his idea of what to call Kodak's new circular slide tray.

(up top "Dancing in the Kitchen, Preston, CT, circa 1955," photo courtesy Carol Drong. From the book "Americans in Kodachrome," Twin Palms Publishers, 2002.)

Out on the Streets

2008-11-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take a moment to direct your attention to something I've been working on the past couple of weeks. After my most recent post, in which I talked briefly about homelessness, I searched through all my images just to see what came up. I was somewhat surprised to find I had over a hundred pictures for which I had keyworded "homeless" when saving them to my hard drive. Now, my background in journalism has kept me in check, forcing me to recognize that just because somebody is asleep on a park bench, that doesn't necessarily make them homeless. And how do you define "homeless" anyway? Still, in full disclosure, I sometimes cringe as I am keywording an image I want to save. One such image a few years ago I keyworded: "homeless man asleep sara roosevelt park sleeping bum gutter". Much more common keywords for my pictures in my archive include "bar" "couple" "cellphone" "Houston" "construction" "WTC" "hipster" and "nightlife".

When people ask me what kind of photography I do, I certainly don't say words like "social documentary" or "reportage" or "in-depth" or "long-term." Typically I say "Oh, just New York City imagery. Basically the crazy, quirky stuff you see walking around the streets." (I often cite this Inge Morath picture as being a quintessential NYC quirky photograph.) It's not that I don't appreciate the "Concerned Photographer," it's just that I don't view my photography as being a catalyst for changing the world's ills. That being said, and this being the week of Thanksgiving, I'm going to take a stab at generating some awareness toward our fellow New Yorkers who aren't as fortunate as most of us. Taking one picture of one homeless person doesn't seem like much. But when viewed as a group of images, as a theme I find myself revisiting, as a "body of work" if you will, I think it starts to make a bit of a statement. Click here to view what I am talking about, a short movie I put together using my pictures of the homeless. And when you're done, I would urge you to take a look at the Coalition for the Homeless website (and donate if you are able to) and educate yourself on the principles of harm reduction. At the very least, please try and dig a little deeper into your pockets next time you encounter somebody asking for a little help.

East 1st Street

2008-11-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

Here are two views looking down East 1st Street, from Bowery. One was taken in 2003 with a borrowed Nikon and the other was taken several weeks ago with my cell phone camera (I don't think I need to point out which picture was taken when). It used to be that homeless folks could pretty much set up camp anywhere near or on Bowery. With nothing on that block but old, abandoned buildings and empty parking lots, East 1st Street was pretty much anybody's for the taking. Same with Chrystie between Houston and Stanton, where there was an old refrigerator box that somebody slept in for what seemed like months.

There's a famous bumper sticker I've seen several places that proclaims "I Miss the Old New York." The first time I read that I'm sure I thought it was an arrogant, ignorant statement. But the longer I live in New York the more sense it's begun to make. I'm not so hardened a New Yorker that I can just walk past a beggar or somebody sleeping on the sidewalk and not have it affect me. Yet, anymore, I bet I'd be hard-pressed to find a homeless person anywhere along Bowery other than the breadline outside the Bowery Mission. Nowadays it seems there's nothing but limousines, people smoking outside bars and talking on their phones about how drunk they got two nights ago.

Moonlapse

2008-10-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

Back in July I was asked by an acquaintance of mine to bid on a time lapse job down at the South Street Seaport. The company that he works for, Obscura Digital, specializes in immersive, interactive multimedia environments for marketing events. One of things Obscura does is build planetarium-like domes that utilize sophisticated projection equipment to create 360-degree viewing experiences. Over the course of four days, the dome at the Seaport was host to a marketing event in which Canon was unveiling a new point-and-shoot camera. My job was to do time lapse of the dome going up and coming down as well as some photography of the event itself.

But I had never done time lapse before so I had to put myself through a crash course. I started by tethering my camera to my laptop and using some software to trigger the camera. But the clumsiness of that whole setup totally ruled that idea out. So I went to Adorama to pick up a Canon TC-80N3 remote controller. Immediately, I could tell it was a Godsend. The device is an intervalometer that triggers your camera at any interval of your choosing. Basically you just set it and walk away.

After a few days of experimentation with the TC-80N3, I felt ready for the Obscura job. My first night down at the Seaport I arrived around 7:30 and we put my camera up high in a manlift. I set the intervalometer at one picture every 60 seconds and that was that. About two hours into it, however, I was pained when I saw that a beautiful full moon had begun to rise behind my camera. Over the next couple days all my time lapses were during daylight hours. But on the night they brought the dome down, I had looked up the moonrise time and came prepared to capture it from the opposite side of the dome. After a little trial and error and geometry guesswork, I was able to incorporate about three hours of the moon rising as the dome came down. The building of the dome can be watched here and the dismantling can be watched here.
The next two weeks I spent in Europe. I noticed on a couple nights that the moon, as seen from Warsaw, Poland, was consistently much lower on the horizon–it never seemed to rise as high in the sky as it does in New York. One night the moon was so striking as it set over downtown Warsaw. We could only see it for a few seconds because we were in a taxi on a bridge and once we got off the bridge the buildings blocked the view of the moon.

Back in New York I was determined to harness my newfound appreciation of the moon using time lapse. I poured over moonrise and moonset tables and sent them as text files to my Blackberry. I relished in deciphering which nights would be the best for capturing the moonrise or moonset. It didn't take long for me to become completely obsessed with the moon's whereabouts on any given time of any given day. Whenever I'd leave the apartment I'd immediately start looking for it. It was always rewarding to find it looking down at me through the daytime atmosphere.
It's been fun to go through older pictures I've taken that feature the moon. One such image is the one above, showing the thin sliver of the moon in one of its early waxing crescent phases last October. It's from a friend's balcony on the Lower East Side above the FDR. You can barely see it, it's on the far left side of the frame in the middle, just above the bridges. Click for a larger view. Below is a shot looking east on Rivington during the Blackout of 2003:As for my efforts actually capturing that moon via time lapse, I've had some success. But overall, I still have a ton of learning to do. I've got the timing aspect down pat. But where the moon is is much more tricky to determine than when it's visible. From one day to the next, it never rises or sets in the same spot. I guess a compass would help me figure this out. I have to keep reminding myself that it's earth's spinning on its own axis that results in the moon's "movement." But when I compare the moon's movement as relative to a star in the background–they don't move at the same pace–that's when the gears get going in my head. That's when you can see, over the course of a several-hour time lapse, that the moon is orbiting us at its own slowed-down pace. It makes me think of hands on a clock. Whenever the minute hand passes on top of the hour hand, it always takes place at a different spot on the clock. Such is the case with the moon–whenever it sets we're in a different part of our spin on our axis. These images on the left show the difference in the moon's path from one night to the next.

There's just a ton of moon science that I have taken for granted. For example, the lunar libration is something that totally fascinates me. Also, the interplay of the earth's and the moon's gravities, their barycenter, is equally interesting. The earth orbits around the sun at 30 kilometers per second (almost 67,000 miles per hour) whereas the moon orbits the earth at a mere 1 kilometer per second.
I will leave you with the movie I put together this week showcasing the time lapse sequences I have done in September and October. I would guess it's around 30 hours of time lapse condensed into 2:23. The song is by Philip Sheppard, who wrote the score for the movie "In The Shadow Of The Moon," which I cannot recommend highly enough. The speech is from John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University September 12, 1962. It's also well worth your time.

Beck, Then and Now

2008-10-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

I've always said that I'm a complacent music listener. I have a great ear for music, and I know what I like, but I'm not somebody who walks around constantly plugged into an iPod. Far from it. My brother and I got guitars for Christmas in 1984, as well as guitar lessons from a man named Chuck Dooling. Nothing against Mr. Dooling, but I just wasn't into it at all. I think I probably lasted about four weeks before my mom realized that the lessons just weren't our cup of tea. About two and a half years later, however, I picked up the guitar again and started teaching myself, by ear. I remember the guitar lick from Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" was one of the first riffs I taught myself. A few years later I was able to play along with pretty much every track off Nirvana's "Nevermind."

In 1994 I bought an acoustic guitar, which I still play every once in a while. One of the first "real" songs I taught myself from start to finish was Beck's "Lazy Flies," off the 1998 album "Mutations." I say "real" because it involves a ton of wrist-cramping chord changes. So it was no surprise that when "Sea Change" (which features a ton of acoustic guitar playing) was released I started devouring those songs on my guitar. In February of 2003, after a last-minute announcement that Beck was to perform on SNL, I got the very last two tickets sold in Manhattan for a Valentine's Day show out at Maxwell's in Hoboken. Maxwell's is certainly one small venue, I think its occupancy is only 200 people. The photograph above is from that show, nearly all of which was comprised of songs off "Sea Change".

Fast forward nearly six years later, to this past Wednesday night, at United Palace up on 175th and Broadway. Yvonne and I went to go see Beck with our friend Mark Dantes and it was a really good time. I probably wouldn't have gotten the tickets on my own initiative but a different friend of ours was getting some and asked Yvonne if we'd like a pair. It was a totally different experience than 2003, a much heavier, rocking sound, and of course the elaborate setting that is the inside of UP's main theater was very impressive. Behind the band on stage was a giant curtain containing thousands of tiny LEDs that were synchronized and able to "project" moving images. It was pretty mesmerizing to watch. And the band's set list was quite varied to boot. For me it was quite interesting to take in how much Beck's repertoire has expanded since I last saw him. They played songs from every major album. They opened with "Loser," continued in that vein for a while before switching it up and gather at the front of the stage with headphones and electronic devices to play more "samply" digital stuff such as "Hell Yes" from "Guero" and "Where It's At" from "Odelay." Then they slowed it down and went into "The Golden Age" and other slower acoustic songs from "Sea Change" and elsewhere. I must confess, the one album I hadn't yet heard all the way through was his most recent, "Modern Guilt," and they played a fair amount from that, all of which sounded excellent. For their one encore performance they launched into two songs I hadn't heard, likely also from "Modern Guilt." But yet I felt there was something missing to the entire evening, a song that I couldn't believe they hadn't played yet. Thus, it was a no-brainer to end his show on it, and I immediately recognized it once the drummer started clapping his sticks together in a four-count lead into the impossible-to-miss riff from "E-Pro."

Paul Newman sighting at Perpignan

2008-09-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

One last note about the nightly slide projections at Visa Pour L'Image (as it pertains to, of all people, Paul Newman). This image was taken during my final night in Perpignan and is literally a screen grab showing a sampling of photographs from the Shaw Family Archives, which is distributed in France by the agency Roger Viollet. These images look to be either publicity photographs or behind-the-scenes pictures taken during the filming of "Paris Blues," which starred Paul Newman and Sidney Portier as American expatriate jazz musicians wooing American tourists Joanne Woodward (Newman's wife) and Diahann Carroll. Louis Armstrong is also in the movie, and appears here along with Duke Ellington (perhaps Ellington was technical consultant?). Something I am recalling now is watching the bonus material on the DVD for "The Hustler." Included on the DVD is an interview with Newman, talking about how he was in Paris for "Paris Blues" when he entered into discussions about being cast as Fast Eddie Felson for Robert Rossen's "The Hustler." Originally he had a contract to star in the movie "Two for the Seesaw" with Elizabeth Taylor after "Paris Blues" wrapped. But Taylor was working on "Cleopatra" at the moment and that movie was going into overruns with the photography and required her to stay on longer. This meant Newman was free to take the role of Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler" (Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine ended up being cast for "Seesaw.")

I was going to include this image in my posts about the nightly projections at Perpignan, but it didn't seem to show enough context. I'm glad I took the picture with my Leica and not my low-res cellphone camera. It's just a cool thought to think about a young Paul Newman playing a cool cat--surrounded by and working with the coolest cool cats ever, living legends Armstrong and Ellington--even before he was cast as the coolest silver screen cat of them all (at least in my book), Fast Eddie Felson. There is a long list of Paul Newman's movies that I haven't seen. And while "Paris Blues" doesn't seem to have attained the mythical status as some of his other roles, I think "Paris Blues" might just have to go to the top of my list.

Perpignan, part three

2008-09-23T10:07:00.001-07:00

My last full day in Perpignan was characterized by a somewhat renewed sense of energy and optimism. By then my body clock had gotten adjusted to the time difference and I had gained a pretty good sense of the layout of Perpignan. Plus, I recognized people–photographers that I knew who were just then arriving to the festival as well as some familiar faces from throughout my first day. I realized where I really needed to be was a venue I hadn't had time to get to, the Palais des Congrés. That's where all the photo agencies and wire services had set up booths in a very "trade expo" style, not unlike what you'd see at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. And so I made that the main purpose of my last day at Visa.

At 10 AM I was in line with a handful of other portfolio-carrying photographers outside the Palais. When they let us in I saw a bunch of people go straight to a table where they were passing out translation headsets. So I did just the same and caught the first half hour of a "Meet the Photographer" panel discussion with the photographer Cédric Gerbehaye. The presentation was all in French and it was pretty fascinating to listen to the broadcast of a person translating, in real time, the discussion that was taking place right in front of me. After a while I started to get a little antsy and decided to go see some of the agency folks.

The first room that I encountered was something that I had not expected to find in all of Visa, a room filled with representatives from smaller "boutique" agencies. Collectives, really. I found that most of the photography being done by these groups came the closest to resembling my own work. It was all a lot more stylized, a lot more artsy than all of the "scorched-earth" photojournalism I had seen in all the exhibitions. I showed my work to a woman named Madalena, who works for the Kamera Photo collective in Lisbon, Portugal. There were about 20 total groups represented in the room and it was nice to just go around and collect some of the promotional pieces that were being handed out.

Up in the main exposition hall were all the "big gun" agencies. AP, Getty, Corbis, AFP, Reuters, etc. It was not immediately clear to me who would be the best person to talk to. I wasn't so much expecting to nail down a firm contract with an agency as much as I simply wanted to begin a dialogue and get some feedback. European Pressphoto Agency had a booth that seemed fairly inviting and so I started with them. I was told to come back later and ask for Cengiz Seren, EPA's Editor in Chief. When I returned he warmly welcomed me and offered me a seat. I was telling him about my negative portfolio review the previous day as he opened up my book and started to look through it. He hadn't gotten three pictures into it when he said "You did a fine thing coming here." He kept going back to one of my pictures in particular, the first print of the portfolio, of a canoodling couple in a bar booth. He said it made him think of a Neil Young song. I thought that was a cool thing to say. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, he gave me some great ideas to pursue and we made plans to stay in touch. He suggested I also talk to Guy Cooper at Corbis, who ended up being equally welcoming and generous with his time. As for Cooper's response to what my reviewer said the day before, he said "No, you have absolutely every right to be here." His take on New York City is that it's "enduringly fascinating to the rest of the world" but we also talked about the "endangered species" that is photography in the vein of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, etc. We talked a lot about model releases and the difficulty that can arise by not using them when a client wants to license an image.

After I spoke with Cooper I went over to talk with Dominique Lecourt at Roger-Viollet, which I would describe as a vintage/boutique press agency that's been in existence since 1938. It's actually a reference historical archive and a lot of the imagery they deal with has been acquired from various collections. Because the agency is celebrating it's 70th anniversary this year, a lot of the highlights from its archive were shown at the previous night's projection at the Campo Santo. These images caught my eye because they were black and white portraits of jazz musicians in the 1940s, movie stars like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando back in the day, etc.

A little later on I found myself chatting with Ferit Duzyol of Sipa. I told him how much I liked Göskin Sipahioglu's images at the Eglise des Dominicains and I was pleased to discover how Duzyol had had a hand in making that exhibition. That was pretty much it for one-on-one reviews with people from the big agencies. I actually tried a few others but was told to come back the next day, which is when I was supposed to be flying out. I went back down to the collectives booths and talked to a few more people there before setting out to get some lunch. It doesn't sound like much but this was all spread out over the course of about four hours. I also got a lengthy tutorial on Aperture and was able to hop online, check my email and reserve my seats for my next day's flight to Warsaw via London.

After lunch I headed back to the Hotel Pams to see what all was going on there. I got a little turned around and had to resort to pulling out my map. A rail-thin fellow with a battered Leica asked me where I was going. When I told him he gestured to have me follow him because he ws going there as well. It wasn't until several days later that I realized it was Philip Blenkinsop, who ended up winning the Visa d'Or news prize.

Outside the Pams was a very long line of people waiting to get registered for the festival. I could tell the festival was really starting to get underway. I crushed my way through the main entrance and as I was getting a cup of water I saw a familiar face approaching. It was Lance Miller, the Triumph motorcycle man from the night before. He had taken a look at my booklet of 12 photographs, had been impressed, and thought I'd be a good candidate for an interview for the Canon Professional Network website. His proposal to me was basically, "You're an up-and-coming photographer from New York, this is your first time in Perpignan, we'd like people to hear your story. This could also bring you some attention and possibly help your career out a bit." Soon he was on the phone with an associate, saying "I found the New York photographer, his name is Cary and I want to send him your way." An hour later I was to meet a film crew on the rooftop cafe of the Palais des Congrés. Sure enough, two men come walking in with a bunch of video gear. It was Sean Griffiths working the camera and a sound man, Murray Clarke, recording me as I talked with Evelien Kunst. All three (below) were working as a crew for Red Dot, an Amsterdam-based production company working in Perpignan for Canon, trying to get a wide variety of festival attendees.I basically was asked to talk about my background, my current work in New York, my influences, my reason for coming to Perpignan, my plans for the future, etc. It was kind of a trippy being filmed as onlookers no doubt were thinking "Who on earth is that nobody they're filming over there?" They asked me to flip through my portfolio and talk about a few pictures in particular. In all, I spent about 45 minutes with them. We'll see if that footage ever sees the light of day. It's not important to me if it does or not. What is important is that I came to Perpignan totally alone and yet had managed to meet some great people and get some responses to my work. The entire experience had taken a complete 180-degree turnaround from 24 hours earlier.

Soon it was the long hike back to my hotel to drop off my heavy portfolio and take a quick nap. After cleaning up a bit, it was back into the center of town for my final night's projection. I had stopped at a cafe for a quick bite to eat and watched as people were making their way to the Campo Santo. I finished eating quickly and rushed over. There were about 20 people ahead of me in line when they had to cut off entrance to the inside, apparently it had reached maximum occupancy. Some people were were visibly upset, whereas my mind was already starting to wander ahead to the next morning when I had to catch a 7:15 bus. I almost decided to go back to my hotel and get a good night's sleep. But I figured somewhere there was another entrance. So as best as I could I sort of hugged the perimeter of the Campo Santo, just trying to find access from another area. Sure enough I found a smaller doorway on the east side being guarded by a police officer. A few other people had gotten there just as I did and I snuck in with them, holding out my Visa Pour L'Image name tag. As far as I can tell, I was the very last person allowed into the projection that night.

What followed was yet another amazing evening of dazzling visual choreography on the big screen. It was even better than the first night. The program closed with a spectacular medley of images commemorating the tumultuous year of 1968. Prague Spring, Tet Offensive, MLK and RFK assassinations, revolt in Paris, Black Panthers, you name it. It ended with the astoundingly apt "Earthrise" photograph from Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission on Christmas Eve of 1968. I was the first person in my section of the seats to begin clapping as the credits rolled.

Back over at La Poste afterwards I had a few quick conversations over a few quick beers before I decided I better not risk oversleeping and missing my early bus. So I decided to leave while I was ahead. On my way out through the grand arch of Perpignan's iconic castillet I ran into none other than festival director Jean-Francois Leroy. I said to him exactly this, "I just want to say this is my first Perpignan and I did it all wrong. I have to leave first thing in the morning and was only able to stay two days. But can I just say–the nightly projections were amazing. Totally blown away by them. The sophistication of the sequencing, the music..." and right then a woman had come up and interrupted us, an old friend of his. It didn't matter, I wasn't going to wait around for them to finish talking. I sort of patted him on the back and continued on my way. A couple seconds later I heard him say "Thank You." I looked back and he was waving. I gave him a peace sign and walked on.

Perpignan, part two

2008-09-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Walking to the Campo Santo on Tuesday night to check out the projection I felt a little better due to the fact that I wasn't carrying my heavy portfolio around like I had been all day. I still needed my map, as I was headed to a part of the city where I hadn't yet ventured. The Campo Santo is a 14th Century cloistered cemetery, apparently one of the oldest in France. For the purposes of Visa, it's basically set up like an amphitheater with stadium-like seating and a gigantic projection screen. Getting into the Campo Santo is kind of an ordeal. There's a massive bottlenecking of the crowd through a kind of winding alley, with only 50 or so people allowed in at a time, every few minutes, I guess to avoid a big crush on the inside. I got in line and slowly crept my way forward with everybody else. Looking around I was trying to find familiar faces but I didn't recognize a soul. Everyone around me was speaking French, and most of the people appeared to be just regular townsfolk (Visa attendees were easily noticeable by the red wristbands). After 15 or so minutes and only 30 feet from where I had started, I overheard a man and a woman behind me who were speaking what was very clearly American English. I wasn't listening to their conversation or anything, I was just sort of bored and getting a little impatient with the slow movement. When I took out my cellphone camera to take a "Hail Mary" picture of all the people in line behind me, I caught a glimpse of the couple. It was Eugene Richards and Janine Altongy. Knowing that they had been right behind me the whole time without me knowing it caused me to be somewhat flummoxed when I went to say hello. We chatted briefly, I told them I was just stopping through Perpignan for a couple days on my way to Warsaw and they said they had just flown through Warsaw. Richards said it was his first time coming to Visa in about fifteen years. I gave him one of my little promotional booklets and the three of us walked into the Campo Santo together.

Right away, my first impression of seeing the inside of the Campto Santo was one of amazement. It was much, much larger than I had envisioned. It's said to accommodate 4,000 people. That's a pretty big audience for a photography slide show. A few minutes after I found a seat up near the top, Visa director Jean-Francois Leroy came onto the stage and addressed the crowd. After that, two professional-looking emcees came onto the stage to introduce the first piece. Then the lights were turned off and the projection began. And I have to say the entire hour that followed was utterly astonishing. It was all in French and I was unaware at that point that I could have gotten a translation headset, but it didn't matter. Just the medieval setting, the stars in the sky, the absolutely perfect weather, the sharpness of the images on the screen, the sophistication of the sequencing, the very effective choices of music, all the French being spoken. Hell, even how everybody around me was smoking cigarettes–I just sort of bathed in it and let the experience wash over my senses. At some point I just felt a sense of "Okay, this festival is worthwhile." I was no longer annoyed by the portfolio review earlier that day, I was just stoked to finally be on the same level with 4,000 other people. It didn't bother me that I basically didn't know a soul, and of course I was still pretty jazzed about running into Richards on the way in. During the slide show I thought to myself "Finally, you've arrived in Perpignan."

After the projection was over with it was time to check out the famed "Café De La Poste." I just sort of followed the crowd and found it fairly easily. That's where I finally started to recognize some faces. Unfortunately, nobody that I knew personally but that was alright. Any time I saw a person with writing or an eye-catching logo on their shirt I would strike up a conversation. I saw a man with a Brooklyn Industries shirt and we chatted about New York. Then I struck up a conversation with a woman with a Timbuk2 bag like mine. Then I saw somebody walking toward me with the "Triumph" logo on his shirt. I said to him "So you're a Triumph man are you?" To which he replied, "Absolutely." Stupidly guessing/assuming that Triumph motorcycles are made in America, I said "Are you American then?" He looked at me kind of funny, said something about Harley Davidson and by then I could easily hear his British accent. Turning the subject to photography I asked him "So if your Triumph was a camera, what kind of camera would it be?" He thought about it and offered that it would probably be an EOS 1D Mark III. I said "So, what, do work for Canon or something?" and he said "I might." And then I said "Well that's gotta be one heck of a motorcycle you ride." To which he said "So where are we going with this, photography or motorcycles?" All kidding aside, I told him I had seen the Canon Ambassadors exhibition and that I really liked it. I told him I was more or less a lifelong Canon shooter, that my workhorse lens, a 28mm f/2.8, was a lens I bought my junior year of high school in 1991. I told him how it was my first Perpignan, and that it hadn't gone too well during the day. I said, "But after tonight and all that amazing work I just saw..." nodding in the direction of the Campo Santo. Then he more or less finished my sentence, "Now you'll be coming back every year right?" That was about it for the conversation. We shook hands, he told me his name was Lance, and I gave him one of my booklets. I walked back to my hotel pretty satisfied with how the evening had gone, and with a much better outlook for the remainder of the festival.

Perpignan, part one

2008-09-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

I've been back since Sunday night and have been slowly easing back into the rhythm of New York City. Warsaw was a great time, a beautiful city, and I met a lot of wonderful people there. As for Perpignan and Visa Pour L'Image, my experience there was equally positive and uplifting. But I will say that I really had to work hard to make it worthwhile. From the get-go, I knew I'd only have two days to get as much out of the festival as possible. I absolutely had to be in Warsaw on Saturday the 6th, so that meant I had to leave Perpignan mid-week, just as the majority of the people were arriving. But I definitely got a good sense of how the festival works and I look forward to attending again in the future.

My overnight trip to Perpignan, via Dublin and Barcelona, was a long and exhausting one. I landed in Barcelona at about 10:15 AM on Monday, September 1st. By then I was really starting to feel the effects of jetlag, especially after not getting any sleep on either of my flights. The real problem was that I had set up too strict of an itinerary for myself once I was on the ground. Once I had waited in line to get my passport stamped, then waited around for my luggage to appear and then finally gotten on board the Aerobus that was to take me into the center of Barcelona near the bus station, I knew I had cut it too close. I had planned to catch an 11:45 bus from Barcelona to Girona, Spain but I missed it by a mere four minutes. As I result, I missed my final bus, a 1:15 from Girona on into Perpignan. Long story short, I got to Perpignan around 8 PM instead of 3 PM. Fortunately my hotel was right near the train/bus station so that was convenient. I got checked in and unpacked at the hotel, washed up a little and set off into the center of Perpignan with a map to try to get my bearings for the next day. It didn't even occur to me that I could have made that night's projection at Campo Santo. But by that point I was completely spent and all I could think about was getting a good night's sleep.

The next morning I got registered at the Hotel Pams around 10 AM. Then I got signed up for a critique with a picture editor affiliated with ANI, Association Nationale des Iconographes. But that wasn't scheduled until 4 PM so I had plenty of time to check out all the exhibitions in the various venues around the old part of town. It's hard to say, I saw so much work, but probably the images that stuck out the most were Göskin Sipahioglu's images from Paris in May, 1968. These were on display in the Eglise des Dominicains, which just by itself is a pretty amazing space, but was made all the more impressive when lined with beautiful black and white prints.Around 3PM I went over and hung out in the courtyard at the Hotel Pams. I felt slightly awkward not knowing a soul, save for John Trotter, who I am surprised remembered me from so long ago. I recognized a few faces but for the most part I was a total loner.

Although I suppose it would have been perfectly appropriate to approach anybody sitting in that courtyard for a quick, casual portfolio critique, or even just shop talk, I wish it would have been more explicit. As in, designate one specific area of the courtyard and have it be solely for people who want to show their work around. I struck up a conversation with an Italian photographer sitting nearby, Eduardo Castaldo, and we looked at each other's portfolios. One of the last things he said to me before my ANI critique was something to the effect of "Now I know what I should have brought to show." I took it as a compliment.

Not knowing what to expect from my ANI reviewer, I went in with an open mind. But it didn't take long for the encounter to veer off in an uncomfortable direction. Basically, my reviewer said "You don't belong at Visa. Visa is all about hardcore photojournalism. This black and white is passé. You need to be showing color pictures, news pictures, reportage, tearsheets, etc." I am summarizing, of course, but that was the basic tone of it. I was slightly offended by how the reviewer didn't even look at every print in my book, and actually flipped through it three or four pages at a time. It was disheartening, and not because the person said Visa was the wrong place to be showing my kind of photography (in fact, that actually was somewhat close to what I had been expecting to hear). It was disheartening because at that point I thought it was going to be my one and only opportunity to show my work around to a professional. I had actually gone to Perpignan thinking I was going to be meeting with dozens of people. Eventually I just kind of relented and nodded a lot, with a lot of "Uh huh" "Yeah" and "Okay, I see." But it was a pretty uninspired review. At one point the person looked at their watch. "Oh, are we about out of time?" I asked. "No, actually, we've got a whole fifteen minutes left," implying that there was so much time to say so little. I thanked the person and left with ten minutes to spare and walked back to my hotel take a nap.

As I was lying around it was hard to resist the temptation to just stay in my room and sleep through that whole night, that's how tired I was. And I was seriously beginning to worry about getting back to Barcelona on time for my 1 PM flight on the 4th. One missed bus connection like I had on my way into Perpignan would have meant missing my flight to Warsaw. I considered leaving the very next morning, on Wednesday the 3rd, and just spending the whole day photographing in Barcelona. But then I'd have to find a hotel without doing any advance research, so I just decided to stick it out in Perpignan. I got out of bed, put on a fresh shirt and hoofed it back into the city center, still very much uncertain about the whole experience, not very happy with the way it was going.

Out of the office

2008-09-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

I am currently in Warsaw, Poland and will be for the rest of this week before heading back to New York on Sunday. Last week I spent a few days in Perpignan, France for Visa Pour L'Image, an international photojournalism festival. I will have many stories to report and hopefully some photos. But internet access has been spotty, and my morning routine as of late is nothing like my coffee-and-headlines mornings in New York. But I'm having a great time in Europe. Stay tuned.

Ryan Hilke

2008-08-22T10:30:00.001-07:00

I want to give a shout out to an amazing young photographer I had the privilege of working with last month at the Flint Hills Publications Workshop in Manhattan, Kansas. The photographer, Ryan Hilke, is a senior at Liberty High School in Liberty, Missouri, which is just northeast of Kansas City. First, however, a few words about the workshop.

The workshop has taken place on the campus of Kansas State University every summer since the late 1950s. It's an intensive five-day workshop that attracts about 300 high schoolers from about 15 states. The kids who attend the workshop are editors, reporters, photographers and designers for their respective high school newspapers and yearbooks. Each year there are about 30 students who enroll in the photography sequence of the workshop. I have been a photography instructor at this workshop since 1998, along with a rotating cast of usually two other instructors. While it is a grueling week of 13-hour days in the brutal, Kansas-in-July heat, it nevertheless is always the highlight of my summer.

It's a unique workshop in the sense that very little of it takes place in the classroom–we don't just sit around in the AC and talk about philosotography. Nope, these photographers are responsible for documenting the entire week 24/7 and for providing photographs for the workshop's three main publications. First, there's the Kedzie Krier Newspaper, which is a 16-page broadsheet that is printed on the last day of the workshop for students to read and take home with them. The Krier is like any regular newspaper with news stories, features, Op/Ed columns and even classified ads. Then there's the Wildcat Yearbook, which has more of a keepsake feel to it, like any yearbook. It's the publication that has all the group shots in it, and each spread is designed around the overall theme of the workshop (this year's was something semi-corny like "What's In It For U?"). The Wildcat ships out to all the attendees a few months after the workshop is over. Finally, there's the New Media class that puts out a DVD with a ton of videos and other interactive goodies that students have come up with. One aspect of this DVD is the end-of-workshop slideshow that is a showcase for all the photographers' pictures. This DVD is bundled inside and shipped along with the Wildcat.

The Krier and Wildcat both require that the photographers get names for their subjects and write detailed captions. Actually, we demand this for every picture in each photographer's "selects" folder. And I can't tell you how many times we stressed this point, daily, about getting the names of subjects. We'd give little prizes to the photographers if we saw them carrying a notebook around and getting names of people who they weren't already friends with from school. But getting caption information is a new idea for most of these kids and their excuses for not getting names ranged from "I forgot," to "I didn't want to bother them," to "Can't I just go out and get it later?"

Toward the end of the week we had to start thinking about giving out awards to the photographers. But it was kind of an "off" year, there weren't really any photographers that totally stood out or showed much improvement throughout the week. And we were plagued by these captionless photos. There was of course one exception to this and that's Ryan Hilke. When crunch time came on deadline night for the publications, Ryan's pictures were all captioned and ready to go. And they were great pictures. Some kids could barely muster five usable images from the entire week. But by Wednesday, Ryan had about 20 selects in his folder. Early in the week we had given the kids a little spiel about how, when photographing in dark situations in the same room as 30 other photographers using flashes, to try and capture other people's flashes using long exposures. Ryan took this advice and totally ran with it. From what I recall he had several pictures using this technique that were totally amazing. These two pics are his two favorite images from the week. I applaud Ryan for turning off his flash and for his experimentation. He was a natural choice for an award we like to give each year (but never refer to as) "Best Photographer of the Workshop." So we created a one-time award specifically for him with the most academic-sounding title we could come up with, "The Ryan Hilke Award for Excellence in Photojournalism." He was super stoked when we presented the award to him, I think mainly because he wasn't expecting it. But we'd like to wish him the best of luck this year at Liberty and to urge him to continue with his photography.