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...

Archive

I just re-upped my subscription to Archive and there was tab for rankings, so I clicked on it and voila there I was...

The Replacements

There's a lab at Mass General Hospital that tests and studies joint replacement parts. They get them sent in from all over the world. Made a visit there for an editorial client. Here's what worn out hip replacement joints look like.... Ouch and kinda yuck, but also pretty interesting.