School

(Detail)

I got to work one morning an hour early. I took pictures out my office window as parents were taking their kids to school and people were walking to work. It put me in mind of both my childhood and taking my own kids to school.

Men and Women

I went down to the Boston Common before work to take pictures last week. I wanted to photograph people walking their dogs, but did this instead. I did another picture of men on the left, women on the right last year, but I wasn't happy with it. This picture took about half an hour to do and there are about 150 men and women as well as roughly 2 buses, 3 trucks, 6 dogs, and 14 birds (including a hawk, I think).

Done and Done

Chris's comment below (on May 9) asks, " If you're going for cliche, how about doing a composite of tourists with cameras?" Already done, Chris! You're on the right wavelength, bud!

Tulips

Another new picture. 25 minutes worth of pictures, maybe 30 layers in photoshop. At the PRC/Griffin portfolio reviews a couple of weeks ago, someone said to try some simpler compositions with fewer people. It seemed like a good observation.

Stalks

It's a good month. I went to the Griffin/PRC Portfolio Reviews last weekend (these events gather art and photo professionals to meet individually with fine art photographers, kind of like speed dating), and people were kind of nuts over my work, especially my squirrel picture. Also, I'm doing lots of new work, like this picture of stalks. Again in the Public Garden, about a hundred exposures in 20 minutes. The tourists are back and people are out with their cameras. Ideal conditions for me.

More Birds

When you are at the Boston Public Garden on certain days in spring, it feels like this picture, with birds swooping and wheeling everywhere. I would appear to be obsessed with birds, but I guess it's mostly formal (although my mother loved birds and so does my sister). I don't really care too much one way or another myself. What I like is that they are all over the place and at all angles, like some Constructivism. This picture has about a hundred layers and took the usual 45 minutes to photograph. The second image is a detail.

Shepard Fairey: Two Views

This is my comment on Greg Cook's photo of a "vandalized" Shepard Fairey hunk of graffiti on Washington Street in Providence. Greg Cook's blog is the excellent New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.

Detail

This is a detail of of the picture below. I try to make nice, bland-looking pictures that are crazy when you look closely. Crazy is in the details.

Swan Boats

One of my main artistic goals is to avoid cliche, but lately what draws me to the things I photograph is their cliche value. I really like going to these over-photographed tourist spots--the Boston Public Garden, Copley Square, etc. My reasoning: I should go out and attack gives me the creeps head-on. I don't want to be fear tulips, ducks, foliage, children and the beautiful Boston Public Garden anymore. However, the woman (above) carrying the small canvas, in my opinion, is shirking her duty regarding the cliche. And I love her for it.

The picture above is of the Public Garden last Thursday and is a composite of just over a hundred different exposures taken over about 35 minutes during my lunch break. (Click image to get a little more bigness.)

Public Garden

Here's a picture (plus a detail) I did this week, at the Boston Public Garden. Like my other work in this series, it's a digital composite, with people in their real positions. A kind of condensed still version of a time-lapse movie. I didn't know that I liked birds! (click on images to enlarge)

More Side Projects

It hasn't been a very productive winter, image-wise. But spring has been a boon and spurred me to do some corny flower pictures. Sometimes I like to think that my big project is going at the cliches of photography head on and seeing what I can do.