This is New York City. Click to enlarge:
Author Archives: admin
House of Hades
Filed under Photo, TOYNBEE IDEA, general
House of Hades tile in NYC. These tiles started in Buffalo a few years ago and are mainly centered in NY. They look nice, but don’t last long. All 3 Philly HOH tiles didn’t last a year. This one is at East 12th street and 3rd Ave.
Dropping in
Just dropping in to post a few intensely psychedelic macro oil and gift bag photos. More to come at some point. Click to enlarge:
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How To Shoot a Hallucination
Like a lot of people these days, I’ve been kind of stuck on thoughts of oil and water. Since the combination can produce some pretty cool looking flows and visual effects, I’ve been kicking around ideas of photographing the mixture. Late Saturday night I stumbled on an incredible set of photos created with a ridiculously simple technique.
Essentially you just put some water in a glass bowl, put something reflective under it and shoot it with a macro lens on a tripod.
Tech-wise, you use a fairly large aperture to get the surreal color blur under the bowl and a lot of light to ensure a fast enough shutter speed to capture the bubbles. You also need a macro lens, but that kind of goes without saying.
Aside from that, the rest of my supplies were a clear baking dish, tap water, canola and olive oils, some glittery wrapping paper and a couple of utility lights.
My first attempts were shot in a window filled (but little direct sunlight) room with 2 hardware store lamps outfitted with 100 watt daylight balanced compact fluorescent bulbs shining bare into the water. The shots below are enhanced very little. I haven’t even cleaned up the stray bits of debris that landed in the water. Here are the indoor shots. Click to enlarge:
Colliding bubbles of oil, slightly soft
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Small and Large Bubbles
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Olive oil is what created that oil slick look. Looks like a sun flare, or magnetic field.
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I just like this one.
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A little off balance, but I love the background colors.
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After reviewing the shots, they were softer than I wanted. I needed more light to get a faster shutter speed. Wanting to keep a low ISO, I decided to take my setup out to my front steps and into direct sunlight. With that, I could get the exposure above 1/1000th of a second:
I was whisking the bowl with a chopstick when I shot this.
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Plain clean bubbles
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Yet more bubbles
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Totally unreal
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Over/Under
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More strange shapes
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Looks like cell phone wallpaper
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At a point I'd made too many tiny bubbles, the water got too dirty and I had to call it a day
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The more I stare at these patterns, the more I see them wherever I go. I find them soothing.
9th Street Sausage Party
There’s an old saying that if you like sausage, you should never see how it’s made. That’s crap. Sausage making is actually pretty cool. On Friday night I met with some people from a local photo posse and we hit up 9th street after dark. The lights at Cappuccio’s Meats at 9th and Kimball were on with a man inside working away.
That man was Domenick Crimi. Cappuccio’s is a family business, but Domenick spent most of the last 20 years working as a professional photographer. Once hearing of the 8 or so of us lingering outside his store, he came out to chat and then invited us inside to shoot the exciting world of sausage making. Next week is the annual 9th Street Italian Market Festival and Dominick was busy preparing 70 pounds of sausage for it. I’ve had his sausages at past festivals and will absolutely have at least 1 this year. Below are my shots from the night. I’d link to the rest of the posse’s photos, but I don’t think any of them are up yet. Click to enlarge:
Domenick Crimi
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First you grind it
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Grind it
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Mix it
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Then you add the spices
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Add the spices and some water
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Then this:
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Pack it in the sausage stuffer
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Stuff them in natural casings
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Repeat late into the night
Shepard Fairey
Filed under Philly, Photo, TOYNBEE IDEA, general, promotion, street art
So every once in a while I’m sitting around trying to attach a SQL database to a laptop when a random request comes my way.
“Steve, Shepard Fairey is coming tomorrow and no one is covering it. Can you shoot it?”
“Yes.”
And with that I found myself covering a very small and almost completely unknown, but supposedly public Shepard Fairey wheatpasting extravaganza up on Girard Ave. It was me and a freelancer sent by the Fishtown Star.
The event itself was pretty awesome. Highlights included the fact that the man himself is a gracious, friendly and by all accounts decent human being… which goes against the norm with a lot of people of his stature and fame. Otherwise it was interesting to hear war stories from his collaborations with Banksy, witness a wheatpaste project from start to finish and finally fulfill my personal mission to ask him about the Toynbee tiles. That cuts my list by a third:
Shepard Fairey ✔
William Gibson X
Larry King X
For the record, he knows of them, but not much about them. My experience has been that most street artists that retain anonymity do so only outside their circle of peers. Within the club, they’re well known. Being completley anonymous has caused the Toynbee tiler to slip completley under the radar… even among fellow artists.
I did explain how non-labor intensive their installation was and encouraged him to explore the medium. I highly doubt anything will come of it.
All in all, it was a good event that totally blew my previous day’s meeting of Tony “no photos” Danza out of the water. Here are some shots from the afternoon. Click on any to enlarge.
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Speaking with Students from the Mural Arts Program
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Chatting with Mural Arts Director Jane Golden
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Real American Hero
If you ever have the chance to speak with a Tuskegee Airmen, take it. I recently had the opportunity to sit down (actually he stood for 2 hours… I didn’t.) with Staff Sargent Henry Moore. At 89, he’s sharper than I’ve ever been. He’s also done more, accomplished more, experienced more and persevered through more than I ever will or ever hope to do. I visited with a writing partner, who will more fully illuminate his story for a later article, but until then, here are some editorial photos of Mr. Moore in his Philadelphia home. Click photos to enlarge.
Henry Moore with airplane phone
At Home
Highest honor possible, the Congressional Medal of Honor
