photoBLog

Last week, James Boo of IceCreamMan and TheEatenPath asked me if I wanted to accompany him on his ride-along with a “real-life superhero”. Never one to turn down an opportunity to practice some portrait photography, I jumped on the subway to meet James at Washington Square Park. We were to meet Dark Guardian at 10pm.

At a quarter past the hour, a compact man in protective motorbike gear came striding out of the darkness. After a short introduction, he was off. First order of the night was to patrol the premisis for any suspicious individuals who might be dealing drugs. I ended up chasing DG and James as they circled the park a couple times, all the while cursing myself for coming unprepared. So much for the idea of a simple portrait session. But still, this guy was a pretty interesting character.

After the park, we jumped in his car and drove uptown, stopping along the way to hand out water and granola bars to homeless folks on the street. On 5th Ave, got into a slight altercation when someone (understandably) took offence to me taking pictures of the blue-and-red-clad guardian doing his work. I apologized and explained that my subject was the man with the goggles on his head, and no one else - to no avail. A couple dudes who were camping out on the church steps saw me floundering and swooped in to tell me not to worry about it. They, at least, were grateful to the amusing looking man on this face-freezing night. So we went on our way and James continued with his interview.

Dark Guardian, who is a Staten Island MMA instructor by day, wants only to give back to his city, to stand up as a foil to the antipathy towards drugs, vandalism, and decay that many of us just see as the spice of city life. It felt weird to tag along and take photos of this idealistic man. Weird, but cool. At the end of the night, we ended up taking some portraits on Broadway. You can see them on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boboli/tags/darkguardian/. James’ profile will be appearing in the upcoming issue of Off the Wookie.

The week was mostly an uneventful one. I’ve been trying my hand at looking for work again. This time with my sights a little lower, looking for any design-related internships paid or unpaid, as well as looking at some part-time possibilities in retail.

After having a good time shooting last weekend, I went out again a couple more times to see what I could shoot. What I found wasn’t that there was more or less stuff that was worth photographing, but rather that I really missed shooting with my 50mm lens.

I kind of swore off it a while back because it was doing some weird stuff, optically, with bright highlights that was not normal and was ruining alot of good shots. I’ve since decided to try and live with it, to shoot with the defect in mind. All the wonky stuff works in the LC-A and Holga shots, so why not with the D80? Anyway, I was able to save the above shot, thankfully, in Lightroom. The guy is playing Weezer’s “Island in the Sun” by the way.

Then I got to thinking, man, do I miss shooting with the FT2. I kind of stopped using that thing too, because of a defective/old shutter that was getting stuck and sometimes leaking light. I miss it’s heft and the way it made that satisfying CLACK with every shot. It may be time to bring that old Nikon back out of retirement.

I finally spent an afternoon outside, shooting street scenes. It’s been a while since I last took to the streets of New York with camera in hand and I feel a little out of practice.

Sub 30º weather usually keeps me from reaching around to my bag and pulling out my camera, but on this day I was determined to keep shooting. In the end, I got two or three decent shots. Not too bad. The above shot was taken on Fifth Avenue.

Also, later that night, I randomly stumbled upon a new storefront that the Lomography company has set up near NYU. According to the worker there, they just opened this week. A pretty spiffy spot. They’re hiring too…

The past few months have been kind of weird. Apart from the vacation, most of my time has been spent stressing over graduate school apps. Decided last summer that enough was enough. It was time to comit to what I really wanted to do, which is become a designer.

What that meant was I spent a couple months learning Illustrator and InDesign and also brushing up on my Photoshop along the way. Then came the portfolio work. But that consisted of about 80% procrastination and 20% work. It wasn’t really until I had a week or so left to finish my applications that things started to materialize.

And after all that was over, i found that I had alot of time on my hands. I couldn’t afford to go out, so all my creative energy has been funneled into the internets: opened a twitter account, started two new tumblr pages, restarted the clickclickclick blog, and spent crazy amounts of time on facebook and flickr.

The photo above was taken about a month ago. That is basically exactly what I look like for 80% of the day. It’s time to get out of the house.

So I spent the holiday break in London, visiting Jess. The weather was nice and everything was pretty chill. 6 days turned out to be a pretty good amount of time to take in the city.

On this day we tried to catch the changing of the guards by Buckingham Palace. It was crazy packed, but it was still cool to see from a distance those wonky hats. Hearing the band was pretty awesome, too.

Afterwards, we walked through St. James’s Park. The main draw were these huge pelicans. What really took my breath away, though, was the view of the city in the distance. From this angle, everything just looked so goddamned unreal.