This morning I covered Justin Bieber’s appearance on NBC’s TODAY Show in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.
I had to arrive at the crack of dawn to wait, along with hoards of other press, while enduring the shrieks of Bieber’s diehard tween fans. I was in need of an Aspirin after this shoot. If headache is a symptom of Bieber Fever….I can certainly say I caught a case of it listening to them scream!
I quickly found that the press riser where many of the celebrity photographers lined up to shoot was not a viable option for me as I would’ve been crammed behind 40 other photographers. So I opted to shoot from the rear of the stage where nobody was shooting from. I really lucked out because I was able to pull off some nice frames shooting through the crazy fans. I like to stray from the pack and get something different….at least my photographs are unique versus everyone shooting from the riser getting the same canned shots.
I was also able to give Justin and his manager my prototype books containing the images from my all-access coverage at the Z100 JingleBall and they very much liked it, which made me quite happy. Perhaps a new project in the works!
A few weeks ago I was honored to receive a call from the 2010 CLIO Awards inquiring about exhibiting my street art photographs during the awards ceremony that took place last Friday at Skylight in SoHo. The images were projected by seven high-definetion projectors onto the venues 25″ walls cycling through the images.
I’ve only exhibited my work a handful of times. My first exhibition titled “Rebirth” took place at SB Digital Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village last year. My second and current exhibition (if you want to call it that) is a gallery of my Cuba work at Joe Coffee in theWest Village….which should be up for a bit longer, followed by another exhibit at separate Joe location in Chelsea.
It was truly an honor to have my work displayed in a room full of advertising creatives and executives. The evening was certainly a memory I won’t soon forget….they had some fun and tasty hors d’oeuvres and a stellar dinner! Oh, and Rob Riggle of The Daily Show and The Hangover hosted the awards!
Big thanks to the CLIOs for the honor and to all the winners!
I’ve always dreamed of becoming a jet-setting travel photographer commissioned to explore the world displaying my work in publications and galleries. And every-so-often the stars line up and I brush up against that dream. My most recent example starts with a little hustle and luck.
I was on the phone with my awesome photo editor over at the New York Times Travel desk soon after the earthquake in Chile. A separate client of mine had just reached out and was in need of a photographer in Chile to take a portrait and he’d love if he could hire me, but unfortunately his budget couldn’t cover the costs of physically getting me there (the pricey plane tickets, hotels, etc.), which is understandable considering the distance.
Thinking I might be able to kill two birds with one stone, I called the NY Times to see if they happened to need anything shot in the Chile, which would enable me to get down south. She took a look at her planner and informed me that there was nothing in South America slated for publication anytime in the near future, except for a few assignments in Colombia.
“I’ll take it!” I said, which resulted in laughter from both of us…then a bit of silence… “No, seriously…” I encouraged.
After chatting a while longer, I was able to arrange the timeline and budget to make it work and I was tasked with two separate assignments in Colombia slated to be shot April 5-11.
The first assignment I shot was Bogotá 36 Hours, a weekly Travel column that gives travelers ideas of places to see during a quick visit to random destination cities around the world. I recently shot one of those in Palm Beach, Fla. But, I’ll talk more about that one after the NY Times publishes the article….
After bouncing around Bogotá three days shooting my first assignment, I hopped an hour-long flight to the coastal Caribbean city of Cartagena. Cartagena’s Old City is completely surrounded with a mammoth cannon-studded fortress wall and a massive castle that once protected the Spanish port city from English pirate attacks in the mid-1600s.
My job was to illustrate a story about famed author Gabriel García Márquez who wrote many fictional novels, one of which won him a Nobel Prize. Nearly all of his novels took place in a cities heavily inspired by Cartagena, a city in which Márquez still lives. Cartagena is a truly beautiful city, has stunning architecture, vibrant colors, amazing people, and stellar flavors…a place certainly pleasing to all of the senses.
I must admit my favorite stop, though ever-so-short was to the Basurto Market that was mentioned in the article…it was a complete contrast to the tourist vibe in the old city and was a winding path of stalls that sold produce, meats, fish, grain, food, booze, and more.
I was fortunate to have a wonderful fixer, Dayro Reyes, who helped me along the way arranging transportation and my entire schedule so I’d be able to get to all the places mentioned in both articles. I tip my hat to you, Dayro. Thank you.
I had a total of 35 hours on the ground in Cartagena before I had to catch a red-eye flight back to Bogotá and sleep overnight in the airport to catch my early AM flight back to NYC.
I’ve neglected my blog for the last month or so, not because I have no content or dislike blogging, but because I’ve been busy building something I’m very proud of – The Photo Brigade.
About the time I was drafting my Haiti blog post is when the idea of Photo Brigade came to me. There are hundreds of photographers like myself who keep a blog showcasing their latest and greatest work, but it’s just so dang complicated and time consuming to keep on top of them all. There are tools like Google Reader that allow me to subscribe to blogs and see new posts come through on a timeline, but I still have to filter through many uninteresting posts to get to the good ones.
Other questions remained: How do I find the amazing blogs to watch in the first place? Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a single blog or website that featured the posts of freelancers like myself all around the world?
I first tested the concept by creating a Facebook Page called The Photo Brigade in which I simply linked to the work of photographers I enjoyed. Over the course of a few weeks I noticed that literally hundreds and hundreds of people began subscribing to the Photo Brigade feed by becoming a “fan” of the page and it was obvious to me that there was not only a desire, but also a need for a service like this.
At that point I began working with my web designer extraordinaire, Laia Prats, to develop the concept into an actual blog to do just that. The result was more than simply a blog, it became a community of photographers, editors, students, and photo lovers alike – all converging to one place to see the daily features of hard-working, freelance photographers from around the world.
I decided to exclusively feature the work of freelance photographers like myself for numerous reasons. For starters, it’s not a secret that the media industry has taken a huge hit with the turbulent economy and recession of the past few years, so not only have there been less and less jobs available, but also staff photographers have been getting laid-off by the truckload. Unless those photographers decide to choose an entirely new career path, their only choice is to become a freelancer on their own and their blogs are one of their greatest marketing tools. We freelancers have to be savvy businessmen (and women) and continuously keep our names at the top of our clients’ call sheets. No greater way to do that than by posting our latest work to our blogs.
But how do we get our blogs seen by the masses? As a blogger myself, I religiously keep track of the traffic and analytics my blog and website produces and wonder how I can grow that number. In my experience I’ve found the best way is by building my social network and filtering traffic through Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs, especially if those referring outlets have a large following. Simply put, as my network has grown, my traffic has grown – thus my bottom line has grown as a result. It would stand to reason that if freelancers as a whole were to build a large collective social network, we’d all benefit by the added traffic and awareness to our websites, and as a result we’d get more work and most importantly, some recognition. This is the model behind The Photo Brigade.
I took the concept one step further by creating the first three (of hopefully many more) regional Photo Brigade blogs: Ohio, Missouri, and Rochester. The concept is the same as the main Photo Brigade blog, to use social media to promote the work of the individual photographers we feature, but each regional branch will be focusing on promoting specifically the work and blogs of students, alumni, and faculty from each respective university. You can read more about the regional blogs in a blog post I wrote on Photo Brigade titled “Ohio, Missouri & Rochester, oh my!”
There are more features we’ll be rolling out that will prove to be an amazing resource for photographers and editors, so stay tuned for them!
I sincerely hope you support my effort of promoting the talented photographers we feature by bookmarking The Photo Brigade and also by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook, simply spreading the gospel, and most importantly by submitting your work!
A few weeks ago I was in Florida visiting my grandparents in Naples and was able to also squeeze in a “36 Hour” travel story in Palm Beach, FL for the New York Times. Every week the NY Times Travel Section publishes a column called 36 Hours, which highlights a different city every week and essentially gives a laundry list of thing to do and places to visit should one spend a quick weekend visiting the city. I was tasked with finding pretty pictures of the beautiful, quirky Palm Beach.
The NY Times article gave a brief history of the small island just off the cost Florida and also served as my tour guide bringing me to museums, restaurants, beaches, resorts, and bars to make pretty images. I had a very nice time and crammed a lot into the brief time I had in the city.
My next travel assignment will take me to Bogotá and Cartagena, Colombia in early April…and I’m certainly looking forward to it. If anyone has any advice prior to my South American adventure, please reach out and give me some tips!
About a week ago I was surfing the web on my laptop, as I regularly do before I hit the sack, and came across a N.Y.Times video regarding a relief organization called Corporate Aviation Responding in Emergencies (C.A.R.E.). They are a group of volunteers from the business aviation community that coordinate flights for critical transport during major disasters such as the Haitian earthquake. It was mentioned in the video how they wished there was more media attention for private relief efforts like theirs because they can be far more effective getting to the outlying areas.
I immediately shot an email to the president of C.A.R.E. letting her know I’d be in Florida for a week visiting my grandparents, as well as shooting a travel assignment for The N.Y. Times, and I’d be more than happy to volunteer to fly a mission with them to help document their humanitarian effort and give a hand in any way I could. Much to my surprise, there was a response in my inbox when I woke up saying they’d love to have me!
I woke up at 4 AM this past Tuesday morning, left my grandparent’s home in Naples, and drove to the Fort Lauderdale Executive airport where I met Sueanne Campion of C.A.R.E., who had arranged for me to fly with pilot Rich Pickett. Rich had flown in from San Diego and has been flying back and forth from Fort Lauderdale and Haiti transporting relief supplies, medical personal, injured Haitians, and newly-adopted orphans.
Most of the seats had been removed from the Pilatus PC-12 in order to accommodate the relief supplies we would be transporting (ranging from generators, tents, food, walkers, and penicillin). Once all the supplies were loaded, we took off heading straight into the rising sun and over the Bahamas – it was quite a view. As I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and Rich, who is an aviation instructor, gave me some flight lessons. He even let me fly the plane for about ten minutes! (He was sitting right next to me, and for all I know it was on auto-pilot, but it sure felt like I was flying the plane!)
Soon enough we descended into Port-au-Prince. Rich circled the city once for me to take a few aerial photographs before landing. Once we landed, Haitians at the airport quickly off-loaded the supplies and numerous relief workers on the ground gathered them up.
While briefly on the ground at the Port-au-Prince airport, I met another photographer named Stacy Bourne, who originally came to Haiti as a journalist but has since stayed as a relief worker. We spoke for a bit and she told me about her plan to start a photography program for the teenagers near where she is staying. I thought it was a great idea, so I’m trying to help get the ball moving on my end. Here’s a video I shot of Stacy talking about this program.
If anyone is interested in volunteering their time to come to Haiti and help – or if you have any old digital camera gear laying around collecting dust – please shoot me an email and I’ll help get it to Stacy on the ground. I, myself, plan to go back for a spell to help her get the program started.
After no more than 30 minutes on the ground, Rich and I hopped back onto the jet and headed to another nearby town called Jacmel. We again looped around the city so I could shoot a few photos, then landed on the beat-up runway of the Jacmel Airport which was under the control of the Canadian Army.
The mission in Jacmel was to medevac four children with severe injuries: two girls with amputated left legs, a boy with a badly broken leg, and a 17-month-old child with cardiac issues.
The first thing I noticed when I hopped off the plane was an IMAX crew filming us. I’d never seen an actual IMAX camera before and it was obvious it’s quite a setup, requiring a crew of about six.
I headed into the airport where the children were waiting for us and met Dr. Katie Gollotto who lit up the room with her amazing smile and personality. She introduced me to the children and their parents and I began documenting the process of loading them onto the plane.
Again the turnaround was quick and as soon as we had them in the plane we rushed back into the air because we had to not only beat a storm cell that was headed for Florida, but we also were meeting another private jet that would be transporting the children to Philadelphia for medical treatment.
The flight back to the U.S. with the group of Haitians was truly a wonderful experience. Obviously it was most everyone’s first plane ride of their lives, so for about 3 hours they forgot about their injuries and were simply normal kids again, laughing and squealing watching the clouds roll by. At one point they all started singing.
On our decent into Ft. Lauderdale, Rich announced that he had called ahead to have four McDonald’s Happy Meals ready for the kids when we landed. Welcome to the USA!
Beyond a little turbulence we safely landed at Fort Lauderdale where we met the connecting flight (the Philadelphia Eagle’s private jet)…and the kids were on their way to Philly for treatment.
I can’t express how taken I was by the amazing people who work day-in and day-out to bring relief supplies and support to the people of Haiti. Major props to C.A.R.E. International’s Operation Haiti which has conducted over 500 flights with 2400 passengers and 700,000 pounds of critical supplies. Over 85 aircraft have been activated for the program, flying more than $4,000,000 worth of flight hours.
To all the volunteers I met and worked with during my brief stint with you, thank you for this incredible opportunity. I truly hope it is the beginning of a long relationship working together!
I’m very excited to announce the launch of “Betrayed“, a short thriller co-written and directed by Joshua Grossberg and starring Seth Gilliam (The Wire), PJ Sosko, and Cara Buono (The Sopranos). Betrayed, one of the first narrative works to be shot on the Canon 5D Mark II, follows husband and reporter James Vance (PJ Sosko) who mysteriously disappears, but not before leaving a cryptic video diary leading law enforcement to unravel the crime of his demise.
The making of Betrayed begins about a year ago when I shot my first video (a music video of my younger sister, Etana) with the 5DII. As I was sifting through the raw footage, my friend/filmmaker Josh Grossberg happened to be in my neighborhood and stopped by for a visit. Excited that I’d just finished shooting my first video, I showed Josh some of the footage and he was blown away with the quality produced by the inexpensive DSLR. It was at that point we began to discuss the idea of collaborating to create a film.
Together we reached out to our friends and suddenly we had dozens of talented and eager crew members willing to volunteer their time to make this film. It should be noted that the overall cost was kept quite low, especially for film standards.
As a still-photographer, I certainly learned a great deal from this experience. Making a film is far more complicated than taking a still image and requires far more time, patience, and persistence to get to the end. The ambitious 4-day shoot involved numerous company moves which meant dozens of crew members had to work together to move all gear, props, etc. to multiple sites to shoot additional scenes….at times moving everything/everyone to different Burroughs throughout NYC all in the same day. Needless to say, after four 16-hour days with little sleep and nonstop work, everyone was exhausted by the end.
After the principle photography was wrapped in the Fall of 2009, there were numerous pick-up shots and scenes that still needed recorded. I also led visuals as part of a smaller crew working with the cast to record the remainder of the film over the next few months.
As if shooting the film wasn’t enough, then came another hurdle, post-production. After many revisions, editing of the short was finished in late fall; subsequently the trailer was recently completed. The short itself is being submitted to film festivals worldwide with the goal of raising the financing needed to shoot the feature-length version.
The past year has been full of adventure, learning – and much stress. I’m glad to finally be able to give you all a peek!
Hope you enjoy the trailer!
Here are some production stills I took while working on the project:
A few weeks ago I was approached by Josh Lehrer of Unique Photo asking if I’d be interested in taking part in a Nikon D3S vs. Canon 1D Mark IV shootout with my Nikon-shooting pal, David Bergman. Josh took us to a very dimly-lit sporting venue in Long Island where David and I shot side-by-side at the various ISO settings so he could later create a write-up.
When I was commissioned by the Los Angeles Times in Feb 2008 to take his portrait, it was for a critical essay by Dennis Lim discussing the ways in which the new crop of Oscar-nominated best directors are emblematic of the direction cinema is moving. I’d link the story, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere online!
Jason’s publicist squeezed the shoot into his schedule at The London, a fancy hotel in New York. I showed up about 20 minutes early in order to find the hotel room and set up a few different poses prior to his arrival.
The highlight was when I used one of my awesome jokes to try and get a smile from the director… ”So a neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender sets the beer down and says, “For you, no charge!”…
…but I only got pity.
Hey Jason, if you’re looking for a production photographer for your next flick…you know where to find me!
Normally, following around a 15-year-old boy for an evening wouldn’t be that exciting – unless the young man is the newest overnight pop sensation, Justin Bieber, playing his first concert at the “World’s Most Famous Arena”, Madison Square Garden.
When I got the call to photograph Bieber, I didn’t have a clue who the young man was. My editor told me that he was a star born and discovered through the magic of YouTube and subsequently R&B artist Usher took Bieber under his wing – so began his transformation into a star.
The concert at The Garden was actually a music festival put on by the NYC radio station Z100 called “Jingle Ball 2009” in which numerous artists, mostly those with the fan base of 12-16 year old girls, performed. Artists included Taylor Swift, John Mayer, Usher, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Kris Allen, Jay Sean, The Frey, and Ke$ha.
I was tasked to follow along and document the evening with Bieber and his entourage, which consisted of managers, his mother, another young friend, myself, Usher, and a bodyguard. To my astonishment Justin was one of the biggest stars at the venue, with young girls screaming and squealing at any glimpse they were able to steal.
Because of the number of performers at this concert, there were numerous dressing rooms for the artists. As I walked down the hallway and passed the other artists’ rooms, it was obvious that Justin’s was the one that all the backstage pass holders wanted to be around, clogging the hallway around the door. I even ran into Harvey Weinstein who brought about 5 young girls backstage to meet Bieber and Usher.
I also ran into Trey Anastasio backstage, lead singer and guitarist for Phish. Though he’s played the venue a number of times, this time he was here with his young daughters in order for them to meet their teen idols. Since I’ve been to nearly a dozen Phish shows, I couldn’t help but strike up a conversation with Trey and snap a photo of us together. (Trey actually lives in my neighborhood and I see him walking his big, white dog from time to time.)
As Justin’s set neared, his management cleared the dressing room so that he and Usher could start warming their voices. I, too, was kicked out, but managed to talk my way back inside because he and Usher’s relationship is exactly what I wanted to share with NY Times readers. They first started dueting Usher’s song “U Got It Bad”, which they were going to perform together later on stage.
Afterward they started warming their voices using traditional vocal exercises, which was also pretty fun to witness. I’d never realized the extent in which pro artists had to warm their voices prior to performing. Being there shooting stills, I wanted to capture what I was witnessing, so I took some video mainly as a way to listen back to the audio. But after watching all the clips I took, my editors at the NY Times thought it’d be fun to share the video with readers.
The walk from the dressing room to the stage was a significant trek that had us passing numerous other artists’ dressing rooms, crew, and fans with backstage passes in the hall trying to steal a glimpse of the stars. Moving quickly and flanked by his entourage and security escorts, it was hard to even notice Justin in the middle as we swooped through the winding hallways. But as we passed, everyone – especially the young girls – took notice and swooned for him calling his name and asking for autographs.
Once truly backstage on the floor of The Garden, Justin and his crew met up for a quick pow-wow and before I knew it John Mayer was coming off the main stage and was shaking hands with Bieber.
As Justin went onstage, I ran to the front and shot from the pit (the area between the stage and the first row). With young girls screaming in my ear and clawing at my back to get to Justin, I continued shooting as Usher came out and performed his song, “You Got It Bad”, together with Bieber.
Before I knew it his set was over and I rushed back around and caught my favorite moment of the evening – when Justin and Usher came off stage together. There was a true moment happening in front of me as Justin looked up at his mentor while walking off stage at his first show in Madison Square Garden.
After Justin’s set, I broke off from his crew and decided to watch and photograph Taylor Swift who closed the festival.
It was an unlikely concert for me to attend, but it proved to be quite an experience!
