Boo! Happy Halloween!

I have always made Jack-O-Lanterns for Halloween. Every year. Since forever. Didn't get a punkin' until late yesterday afternoon though! Whew! Cutting it too close. Then forgot that it was in my car, and only remembered at 1 AM, so that's when I cleaned the punkin' out and carved the face. It is not all that creative, but that's fine with me. I am after all, a traditional kind of guy. I can't tell you how much it warms my heart to go out on the front lawn and look back and see this wonderful glowing face looking out at me! Do yourself a favor and click on the image, which will open the original larger photo - the color is SO much better!

A Special Place

Today's assignment was to photograph several rooms and a home, designed by a woman who came to the US from Poland about 25 years ago. She has a lovely sense of design, and the rooms have what I would call an old world richness to them. The home was her home, and she was a gracious host. I spent several hours at her house, and saw things that I would not usually see on an architectural shoot - in this case, bright sunlight streaming into some of the rooms from skylights. So I was shooting for the paper, and looking for something special for me. That's why I took this photo - it is unlike most home shoots, in that it is a detail, and the lighting is dramatic, and the overall photo is fairly dark. Too dark for newspaper reproduction, but it looks pretty good here on the blog.

Windows and Doors

I photographed this while doing one of the real estate stories about what kind of house you can buy in a community. This is a "Starter" house. I loved that the house was empty, and decided to do a really wide-angle shot, and include as many windows and doors as I could in one shot. I think this looks more like some kind of strange stage set than a home.

Eights

I seem to be making a lot of photographs lately on the way home from work. This is a photo of 2 eight man shells out for a practice with the coach following in a motorboat They are almost completely in synch and appear to be only one boat. I was trying to make a nice weather photo for the paper, and I followed the boats with my 200mm lens, looking for something in the background or foreground that would make the photograph something special. At this point, there was the reflection of the sky from the waves in the forground. It was something, but I would have liked something more dramatic - more graphic. Maybe if I had a longer lens with me...

Two Hundred!

I hope you won't consider this excessive, but this is a portrait of me. When logging in to post on the blog last night it told me that last night's post was the 200th in my blog. I am kind of proud of that, that I have kept at this, each day, for 200 days. I am kind of driven to do this project, which is not a bad thing, and it is rewarding, keeps me on my toes, and keeps my "radar" running all the time, always looking for new ways of seeing things. So I thought that there might be a couple of new readers who don't know what I look like. Well, now you know. Wish you didn't? :-) The portrait, by the way (credit where credit is due) is by Karen Stabile - the "Quilt Lady" who I photographed a couple of weeks ago in the studio with one of her quilts. I asked her do to a shot of me while were there, and this is what she came up with, and I like it a lot! OK, no more wreched excess... tomorrow I am back to posting real photographs...

Two Sisters

My assignment was to cover a group of Grumman Corporation retirees visiting the American Airpower Museum based at Republic Airport on Long Island. It was the 40th anniversary of their retiree group. So I photographed individuals who worked on the F-14 "Tomcat" after the writer interviewed them. But I needed something special, so I would park myself in this spot from time to time, and hope that a group of people would be walking by at once, to add some contrast to the individual portraits. Suddenly I noticed these two white-haired ladies coming around the nose of the aircraft, and I ran over to my spot to wait. "Oh please, oh please, oh please walk down here to the center of my photo" I kept saying to myself! And they did! Then they stopped for a minute and talked to each other about the aircraft. It turns out they were sisters, and one worked in the Grumman office, and the other had a husband who worked on the airplanes. I think it is the contrast in both age (This Tomcat was manufactured in 1992 - and is the second-to-last one made) and the difference in size that makes the photo so interesting to me.

A Slice of Pink

I was within a mile of my house, as I drove along Hempstead Harbor and I was admiring the dark gray cumulus clouds overhead when I rounded a slight bend in the road and first caught a glimpse of the slice of pink in the sky just above the water. So I quickly pulled over and spent a few minutes composing this. I try to stay away from sunsets. (Well, yes, there are a few posted on the blog in the past 9 months or so...) But this seemed more about the sky and the clouds. But it was that slice of pink that made all the difference for me. The frustrating thing is that the colors of this image as posted on the web don't begin to do justice to the colors in the original file. I did upload a larger file than normal, so if you click on the image, a larger photo will open in a separate window, and the color of that image will be much better.