3:24PM, 9/25/2009 - Outcast Bean

As always, there are many ways to skin a cat (bad metaphor – I have two cats), or should I say capture a bean.

If there is any one piece of advice I can give about shooting in the studio, it’s don’t quit when you think you’ve got the shot. Hey, it’s digital. It’s not like you’re going to run out of film or rack up a huge lab bill. You’ve already done that by buying a nice digital camera. First, I cover the preliminary set with a point and shoot camera, then shoot until the set has been covered top to bottom, upside down and backwards. It’s quick, it’s easy and there are hidden ideas floating around that get overlooked when burdened with a tripod and tethered to my iMac capture workstation. Then I hook up the big guns and get down to business.

This anthropomorphic alternate to Greenmarket in the Studio #4 was influenced by another photographer’s bean image I have seen in an on line portfolio, but can’t remember who or where. That photo was a group of bean tips simply plated in geometric formation. Well done and quite beautiful, that image has stayed with me, but not the photographer’s name (sorry! Maybe you’ll read this and set the record straight).

Anyway, enough with the beans. What else is out there to shoot?

3:04PM, 09/25/2009 - 3 Beans in a Bowl

Finally, my first Union Square produce photo shot in the new studio.

I was waiting to get settled before capturing these images of wax beans (crappy name, but that’s what the sign said), also known as yellow, heirloom or golden beans, and almost missed my chance. Except for the folks with the big ORGANIC banner, none of the vendors had them. Wax beans (yellow green beans as far as I’m concerned) have these really gorgeous yellow to green transitions at the tips. When I started to play around with the curved ones it looked like steam coming up from the bowl, so I went with it.  Maybe this will make it to the portfolio.

Who said legumes can’t be sexy…?

10:51AM 9/05/09 - Fennel in wooden box at Union Square Market, NYC

In a couple of days it’s back to business, having wrapped and packed and loaded up and moved and unloaded and unwrapped and unpacked and then moved some stuff home after moving it to the new studio ’cause it didn’t fit (<looks like a run on sentence, doesn’t it?).

The September email promotions and postcards are out and now it’s time to pick up the phone and make those calls for a little face time with Buyers. I’ve spent way too much time building this new portfolio and contemplating this move. So, it’s on to the phone calls, picking up an unlimited MetroCard, buzzing through the nearly always useless security checkpoints and showing up for my appointments. Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” I wonder what the other twenty percent is.

Just to make things interesting, after I wrote this entry, notcot.org, posted my scissor birds photo and it went viral with 800 hits so far in just 24 hours. Absolutely amazing! Three months of blogging and marketing finally start to pay off! So, the other twenty percent must have something to do with perserverence. And I thought it might be perspiration. Who knew?

10:35AM, 8/31/2009 Assorted Mini Peppers at Union Square Market, NYC

Done. I’ve moved in to the new studio. Six trips in Vicki’s Suburu Legacy station wagon with Vicki at the wheel. Without my girlfriend as driver and watchdog, not only would I still be moving, I’d probably have been to the tow pound on 12th Avenue as part of the deal. After all, who was going to stay with the car to keep it from being towed? Vicki. And who was going to keep an eye on the equipment while loading and unloading? Vicki. Who forgot to ask Vicki if she could help with the move?

Me.

Duh. Thank you, Vicki.

I’ve already started unpacking and managed to shoot two jobs over the weekend as well: one for Lincoln Center, and one for AJ, my friends, James and Andrea’s Jazz/Soul band.

Feels like I’m off to a good start.

Sugar Hot Peppers (Greenmarket in the Studio #3)

I’ve spent the last 6 years working out of a small studio inside of Graphic Systems Group on Union Square. It’s been a good run, but now it’s time to move on to something a little more, well, studio like. So it’s out and down to 12th Street, just two blocks south of my favorite greenmarket, although the market at Grand Army Plaza on Prospect Park is a favorite, too. Oh, yeah, then there’s Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge (one of NYC’s best kept secrets), and the markets at Testaccio and Campo di Fiori. But Rome just isn’t a daily event, so I’ve got to pull in my reins here and get back to the topic of moving.

I’m working with old friends in a crisp new space, oddly named, Cheeky Little Monkey Studio. They’ve invited me to join them and I couldn’t turn down the offer.

I had to pick a day where we expect rain…

Savoy Cabbage at Union Square Market

NASA Satellite Photo of Anchorage Alaska, February 16, 2003

What do Savoy Cabbage from Union Square Market and a Satellite image from NASA have in common? Benoît Mandelbrot’s mathmatical Fractals.

In the mid 1980s Jonathan Herbert and I were creative partners, owning one of the first IBM XT computers and diving head-first into pretty uncharted territory for photography at the time: computer generated graphics combined with traditional photography. He was the artist and I, the photographer. Although we were far, far from creating anything remotely close to what Mandelbrot had achieved working with the Cray Super Computers of the day (the Cray-2 and X-MP), we aspired to create something, someday that resembled the pages of our hero’s book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which, believe it or not, is still in print after 26 years. And, I keep discovering fractals in so much of what I shoot.

A detail of my Romanesco Broccoli from Union Square market- Also called Fractal Broccoli

So, where are we now? Jonathan Herbert has taken to fine art and I, to still life, back to the basics for both of us. The computer still figures in to our lives pretty heavily, but our desires are different.

And I have to admit after 25 years of computers, I can’t imagine living without my iPhone, MacPro tower, my MacBook Pro or my digital watch for that matter. By the way, the 2008 MacPro Tower runs about a thousand times faster than those old Crays.

I would never go back. Now, to sit down to Vicki’s French chicken and cabbage dinner…

Detail of Chard in Wooden Box

Union Square Market, NYC – 9/5/2009, 10:50 AM

I’ve most likely walked through the Union Square market a thousand times, yet it wasn’t until I started shooting for this blog that I discovered a market rarely seen. It’s the vendors who, unknowingly, set up my photos, so it’s a wonder that anything works at all. In the end, it is a market filled with the commonplace caught in the random and uncommon act of being in the right place and right light at the right time when I come along. Truly, there is a familiarity to so much of what I see, it’s not unusual to wonder if anything I do today can be any different from yesterday or the day before.

There is an elegance to the much of the stationary world that goes unseen. It is hidden away, out of view simply because it is surrounded by comings and goings, tables and pavement, laughter and silence.

I’m humbled by what the market gives me for my patience. I sure hope she never gets bored with me.