Moving on

I've moved my blog to the tumblr platform, please check it out at:

brucepeterson.tumblr.com/

Toothpaste

I'm interested in the industrial design that goes into packaging, and I liked this little piece of sculpture that happened when I opened a tube of toothpaste. 

I wanted to keep the top as I found it for photography and took me awhile to get the time, so didn't recap the toothpaste...

April 15th...

I try to avoid getting these.

Lights, camera, action...

Anyone who has been to my studio knows that I've got a decent collection of old cameras. At one time I had hundreds, it was a bit of an obsession for awhile, picked most of them up at flea markets before ebay killed the flea markets - so that dates it a bit. When I moved in 2007, I had to downsize what I could keep. I held onto the kitchy consumer grade variety from the 50s and 60s, some European Bakelite beauties, and a few others. I've never shot any film with them, I just liked them as objects. 

Occasionally I photograph a few of them. I'm mainly interested in their "skin", the flat on view of the front, as you would see them if you were being photographed. Besides the industrial design and typography, I'm attracted to all the scratches and imperfections in them. When I processed this last batch I started messing around in Photoshop and came upon this negative effect - it's not a straight inversion of values, there's a bit more to it than that; but I liked the negative image, similar to what would have come out of these in their day.

Easter Candy

Tools of the trade

I've worked with one model maker on projects that require that skill over the course of my career. I love having a reason to go to his shop, he's got just about everything you need to construct something, and he doesn't throw anything away - the place is a wonderful organized mess. We recently worked together on a project where we needed to precisely bend and join small pieces of laser cut plastic. He showed up at my studio with this device - which I thought thought was an amusing custom tool. 

Back in Black

I've been shooting a few pictures on black, some are still top secret - so I can't share. The wraps are off Titleist's new ProV1 as of February, shot these and more right before the holidays.

Thank you. No, thank you.

I'm always impressed with how much you can stuff into these plastic bags without them breaking. 

Say hello to my little friend!

Pictured above is my new Sinar P3 that accepts my 39MP Hasselblad multi-shot back. It's not an inspired image, just to say I've got a view camera again. I had a Sinar P2 view camera forever, shot film with it and then converted it to accept 3 different digital backs. It worked great but it was designed to shoot film and was big, clunky and cumbersome by today's standards. I sold it a few years ago when I got my new Hasselblad. I soon discovered a problem with using a Hasselblad, and that is you're pinned to the focus ranges of their lenses. If you want to shoot with anything other than a 120mm lens and be closer than a couple feet, and get it in focus, you need a view camera. 

Most people don't know what a view camera is, a quick explanation: remember the big cameras with the cloth you put over your head - that's a view camera. They used to accept big sheets of film, this one is specific to a CCD sensor. Besides unlimited focus ranges, you can change perspective and adjust your plane of focus via the Scheimpflug principle. (I love knowing what that means, as well as "bellows extension factor".) Also have other adjustments with these beautiful pieces of Swiss made precision that you can't get with anything else. Very psyched to have a view camera again, especially a "small" one just for digital backs!

Holidays 2012

I've done pictures of my son with Christmas lights to send out as our personal holiday card. He's now 12 so this #13 in the series... He's been a good sport and it's become a fun tradition for us.

First Bike

I often get asked to shoot for Pro Bono clients, I usually do it as it's an easy way for me to lend support to good causes. This one came my way for cyclekids, click on the link for a description of the beneficial work that they're doing. When the Designer was spelling out the project, I shared an episode with my first bike - they came up with a visual and included it the final piece.

Drinks, cheese and different food.

A couple editorial pictures for Boston Magazine. Above is a representation of how many drinks they serve a night at Eastern Standard, there are 100 glasses... Below is the cheese cart at L'espalier. 

Below are ingredients that the chef from Bondir brought by the studio. And yes those are crickets in the lower left corner. Apparently they're a popular menu item. I finally succumbed to peer pressure and ate one, slightly crunchy and buttery....

I had heard of brown bread before we shot this, something to do with a can... Negative space on top and to the right is for type.

Violent toys

I still play with guns, metaphorically speaking in that I shoot toy ones in my studio. I find it interesting, if not alarming, that we have these violent objects depicted as toys for our kids to play with. My son got this one at the Topsfield Fair. It's a dual action device; pull the hammer back it's a laser pointer, squeeze the trigger and you get a electrical shock, actually a pretty good sting that kind of hurts, nasty little thing. He decided after everyone he was going to trick into getting shocked - got shocked - that it would be more interesting to take this thing apart and when I saw it lying there on our living room table it said photograph me...

Hidden Treasure

I have some toy soldiers my Dad had as kid. I've photographed them several times, but not for awhile - this one is from a couple years ago. Occasionally I'll just start messing around with different channels and blend modes in Photoshop and see what happens, this ended up as a pleasant surprise...

Social Security

From a quick, and I mean quick, editorial project where they wanted a Social Security Card with some 3 dimensional qualities...

Food and Drink

I'm not a food photographer, at least in the sense of creating make me hungry kinds of pictures of stylized prepared food. It's just not my thing. But, I was approached by the Photo Editor at Boston magazine to shoot some food items, he actually had to kind of talk me into doing it. I'm glad he did, had a good time making these and the butter breton pastries, shown above from Flour Bakery - are absolutely wonderful, not so much though if you count calories. 

Flour is actually close to my studio, we get food for shoots there all the time. The food scene around here is pretty good, besides Flour we have a couple other excellent options in the neighborhood. Several repeat clients have remarked they look forward to lunch here. There's a coffee roaster whose espresso beans I buy, cappuccinos and lattes we make at studio put Starbucks to shame. It's going to get better too, there are plans in the works for more highly regarded chefs opening places within walking distance. 

Recycling

A couple new pictures from my stash destined for the recycling bin...

Award Winner

I produced this project last year and it won a Manny Award for Best Medical Device Campaign. The agency, Lehman Millet has been a long time client and the very talented people there have provided some of my more interesting assignments over the years. I'm pleased that work we've done together has brought them some recognition. 

One thing of note on this project. When the Creative Director approached me about this I was concerned about getting a hornets nest, because if / when this happened it would become my responsibility. So I did a quick ebay search and voila, there was this beautiful, iconographic hornets nest available. It was a bit pricey, apparently these are collectable. I just bought it even though this wasn't a for real project yet. It became a piece of sculpture in my studio and then a few months later the project happened. It's still here in it's sculptural form, really an amazing object...

And for shooting the hornets, get this: we found a guy who does insect taxidermy...

Digital quality of life

I've been busy with commissions the last few months, not so much on my own pictures though. Some of that work will eventually find it's way for public display. 

Through it all I've invested in some new technology and made techno lifestyle improvements. The first being upgrading to the new version of Photoshop CS6. I tried the Beta version and never went back. In my view it's a substantial upgrade, one feature alone is huge for me and worth whatever the cost is. Saving in the background, that screen shot above is a welcome sight for me.

I work on big files. Routinely have layered 16 bit files over 1GB, often close to or over 2 and they can take awhile to save. Extra large psb files can take like 10 minutes. Now I can keep working while Photoshop saves those files, in previous versions when Photoshop was saving a file - that's all it could do was save. The new dark interface is pretty sexy, I'm kind of an interface snob so that appeals to me, patch tool now works on a separate layer with content aware algorithms... There are other features too, but saving in the background is much appreciated by me.

Like I said I work on big files, so I've had a RAID 0 for scratch and data files for years. RAID 0 reads and writes you data across multiple drives simultaneously - I've got a 4 drive RAID so each drive gets one quarter of the data. It's a lot faster than a single drive. I got a tip from Rick at Mac Gurus to stripe my disks across different enclosures - I've got two 4 drive enclosures for 8 total drives - and he was right, I did indeed get a performance upgrade. See my screen shot above for read and write speeds, pretty cool, and another lifestyle upgrade. 

I've also digested a new Mac Pro tower in the past few months. 16GB RAM modules are now available for it so I put 3 of those in it, big lifestyle improvement. While I don't have any pictures I can share right now as new, I can tell you  a new Mac Pro tower with 48GB of RAM, that saves Photoshop files in the background, striped across 4 drives in 2 enclosures is new for me and I'm pretty excited about it. 

Public display of affection

My son and I went to the driving range now that spring is here, upon walking into the pro shop was greeted by one of the ads I shot with Arnold for Titleist last fall. It's always fun to run into my work in public, more so when there's someone along to share it with...