Category Archives: Organic

Oct 26 0 comments
Food, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #25

9:04AM 10/21/09, French Breakfast Radishes in Union Square Market

9:04AM 10/21/09, French Breakfast Radishes in Union Square Market

Some things look completely different from different angles. You wouldn’t expect that from French breakfast radishes since they’re more or less symmetrical and, unless you’re a radish, can tell the difference. So, here are two shots, taken less than two minutes apart. Diffused sunlight through the vendor’s white tent fabric and shot from this camera angle (Originally shot from the side and flipped 90º), this capture feels soft and nurturing.

This shot (below), however, I captured from the top of the stack (I flipped this upside down – clever me) and the radishes cast a shadow on themselves. A totally different feeling: dramatic, almost threatening in a scary movie kind of way. Alien. I like the top shot for the one radish rising about the crowd. I like the bottom shot for the drama of the tangled white roots rising against the receding shadow and gray pavement of Union Square.

9:06AM, 10/21/2009 French Breakfast Radishes Alternate

9:06AM, 10/21/2009 French Breakfast Radishes Alternate in Union Square Market

Why so different? It must be the light. Or maybe it’s the camera angle. Then again, if I’d not turned them, would they have been as visually compelling? Maybe not, as I passed these over at least three times in my editing before taking on a different perspective. Simply shooting from the hip is not always enough to get to an interesting shot.

Sometimes you have to stand on your head (metaphorically) to make things interesting.

Oct 23 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, NYC, Organic, Portfolio, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio #5

Sweeping Leaves, Mustard Greens

Sweeping Leaves, Mustard Greens

Now that I’m moving onto this dark thing…

Black backgrounds are so completely different to shoot on. The black just wraps itself around the subject matter. Where white is wholesome, clean, crisp and elegant, and never loses my subject, black is erotic, deep, surrounding and foreboding (but not in a creepy kind of way), and can swallow my subject like a black hole.

Recently a friend asked if I was tired of shooting vegetables and the market. No, not really. It’s challenging to find the interesting and unusual in the familiar; it’s not always easy. And what I find fascinating is, there is a front and a back to these studio subjects that I am sure is not intentional, but purely by coincidence. The most involvement I have on set is getting the produce to stand up. With very few exceptions (like Green Market in the Studio #4), I don’t style. If a stem is broken or a leaf torn or eaten by a passing insect, I don’t retouch it. It’s about real food, just as I bought it. The only difference is, I shoot it before I eat it.

If you like arugula, broccoli rabe and bitter greens, you’ll love this very simple recipe for wilted mustard greens.

Wilted Mustard Greens

1 bunch of mustard greens (about a pound or a 2″ circumference of stalks when tied with a rubber band – that’s about what I had)

2 cloves of garlic pushed through a press

3 or 4 tablespoons of dashi (at about 1:5 dashi to water) or vegetable or chicken broth

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 tablespoon of sesame oil

Okay, here’s how: Tear off the leaves from the stems and thick veins (and discard those guys)  and wash and dry them as you would lettuce. In a large frying pan or sauté pan heat up the olive oil on a medium/high heat and add the garlic and brown (about a minute). Add the dashi or broth to the pan and add the greens, tossing gently for about a minute or so (not much more, or you find it’s cooked down to nothing). Remove from the burner, drizzle on the sesame oil, add salt and pepper to taste and toss. Put it on a nice plate and eat. Serves 2 to 4, depending upon how much you love your greens.

And don’t forget to share.

Oct 15 0 comments
Food, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #23

8:51AM, 10/14/2009 Assorted Hot Peppers

8:51AM, 10/14/2009 Assorted Hot Peppers

There’s been a debate about this image. Should I have included the funky tomatoes tablecloth under these boxes hot peppers, or cropped it out. I have a couple of shots this week with tablecloths making their debut in my market photos (at least that I know of, I should go and look). The other one, oddly enough, has an assorted hot peppers tablecloth under three bunches of rainbow chard. A lovely, colorful image taken just a moment later, but chard has had it’s fair share of blog time and I didn’t want to post another chard photo. So I’m posting just a little detail for fun.

8:50AM, 10/14/2009 - Rainbow Chard #3 (detail)

8:50AM, 10/14/2009 - Rainbow Chard #3 (detail)

Funky tablecloths. Is it me, or is this is a trend?

Either way, I like them.

Oct 09 0 comments
Food, Fruit, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food

Shooting from the Hip #22

10:15AM, 10/07/2009 - Plums at Union Square Market

10:15AM, 10/07/2009 - Plums at Union Square Market

It’s been a long week and I’m off to Boston to do some cycling and check out the markets. There are some plans in my back pocket for new portfolio pieces and those should be under way next week some time. I’m thinking about moving on to a black portfolio, the white book is pretty well rounded out and it seems a good compliment. Anyway, fire looks good against black. Look for the test results, coming soon to a blog near you.

And, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. That should make his day. It sure made mine.

Now, if only he can get a decent healthcare bill through congress so freelancers aren’t penalized by the system any longer.

Oct 07 0 comments
Food, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #21

10:28AM, 10/07/2009 - Edible Pansies at Union Square Market

10:28AM, 10/07/2009 - Edible Nasturtium Flowers at Union Square Market

When fresh flowers, or any fresh fruit or vegetables for that matter, are placed into a clear plastic container or bag, they continue to breathe. They exhale carbon dioxide, creating condensation, vapor and water, becoming the artist’s thumb, smearing and distorting the under painting.

This isn’t the first time I’ve photographed edible flowers in boxes; in fact, I may have a few hundred shots like these from a half dozen attempts. This is however, the first time the contents have been right. The colors were right. The condensation was right. The light was right.

If at first you don’t succeed, blah, blah blah.

Oct 03 1 comments
Food, Greenmarket in the Studio, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Shooting from the Hip, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #20

Union Square Market 10/02/2009, 10:14AM - Accidental Still Life #1

Shoppers love to touch food. They touch for freshness and to smell and to taste. They touch for the sake of feeling something that is as essential as the air we breathe. They are the unseen human presence in my market images and constantly changing the landscapes I capture here.

What happened in front of my lens today is a real lesson in serendipity. Just a few seconds later, this tableaux was gone.

Forever.

For all the thousands of photographs I have taken here since I started shooting in the Union Square market (a quick count shows about 2300 since June), this image is a gift.

Sep 26 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Food, Greenmarket in the Studio, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Portfolio, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio #4

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

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…?

Sep 24 0 comments
Food, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #19

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

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?

Sep 09 1 comments
Food, Greenmarket in the Studio, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip (and from Outer Space) #17

Savoy Cabbage at Union Square Market

Savoy Cabbage at Union Square Market

Satellite Photography of Anchorage Alaska, February 16, 2003

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.

Romanesco Broccoli Detail - Also called Fractal Broccoli

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…

Sep 05 0 comments
Food, NYC, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Shooting from the Hip, Slow Food, slow food, Uncategorized, Union Square, Vegetables

Shooting from the Hip #16

Detail of Chard on Display at Union Square Market, NYC

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.