IronMo Weekend

This past August 29th and 30th I went down to Louisville, Kentucky to support my good friend Mauricio as he participated in the Ironman. I took my Trusty F100, 5 rolls of Fuji Pro 800Z, 4 rolls of Fujicolor Superia 400 and 2 rolls of Ilford PanF Plus with me. These Photos are the result.

Totally had fun down there =D  Proud of you Mo!

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Exploring Chicago

I was in Chicago one day visiting my little sister at her new job, which was holding an open house.

After the open house was finished I decided to go around and explore with my Nikon D70 and 18-70mm 3.5-4.5 and 50mm 1.4D

Some of the images I turned up with that day….

I caught the luckiest picture in my lifetime while trying to recompose the very same image in a later frame:

I wish I could say I told the pigeon to come into the middle of the frame…but alas I’m not that good lol.

Along the way I decided to see what was going on at the Art Institute of Chicago, passing by different streets and capturing images along the way….

The lions at the Art Institute of Chicago look very different under 1.4….

And next to them was something that I found to be the most entertaining of all…a drumline

If I ever see them again, I’ll definitely try to take more.

A Nikon, A Canon, and A Dream.

My photography career really started with not one, but two cameras:

1. A Nikon N75 and a 28-75mm lens. The camera was 35mm film and I had no idea what I was doing.

2. A Canon SD300 Elph “point and hoot”. Yes I called it a point and hoot.

From the beginning I started shooting whatever I could find. I was going to college at the time at UIC, so the urban environment was perfect for me to photograph a vast variety of things. From plants to animals to buildings, nothing was safe. A perfect environment for a budding photographer to explore and learn.

Wildlife in Chicago…

Watchdog

I passed by this little guy every day for a semester when I was going to school at UIC. He was always at the same spot, lounging at the window, so it became pretty traditional that I would stop by and watch him for a minute or so.

One day I brought my N75 with me and saw him. Instead of lounging at the window, he stood up and stared at me. It looked like an interesting pose so I focused on him, looked for the correct exposure and clicked away.

One of my favorite pictures to this day, not many people know that it’s also one of my first images ever taken.

Stitch

My cat Stitch =)

I was still new to photography, so didn’t know exactly where to focus with my father’s 50mm 1.4 while Stitch was holding still.

So before you ask…no, his earhairs were not the subject of my focus….

Urbanology

Aside from portraits of the local fauna, my style of photography extended out to scenery and scenic pictures as well.

I happened to be walking back home to my apartment at UIC one day when I looked up and saw this photo:

UIC

I had my SD300 with me at the time and was starting to experiment with digital. While I thought a photo of this would look nice, when I took the picture, something wasn’t adding up. The image wasn’t looking right.

I changed the settings, fiddled with the controls, tried this and tried that. Nothing seemed help me convey what I was seeing in front of me.

Until I tried it in Black and White.

When you discover the purpose and forcefulness of Black and White as a medium to convey your vision to your audience, a whole new door opens to your mind and senses.

Being so used to color for photography, we are forced to renew our senses when looking at black and white imagery; we look at the tone and the bare essentials now and see the image for what it is rather than be distracted and be possibly misled by colors.

UIC At Night

Encouraged by this, I started experimenting with anything and everything that I saw. Which led to this image:

“Smokey Mountain”

Since I was so close to the Sears tower and had a good view of the building in a parking lot near me, I decided to have a go at night photography.

Set at f/11 or f/15, for an exposure of 11-15 seconds, this was my very first real cityscape photo that I ever took.

When I looked through my old photos for this entry I found myself reminiscing a lot and absolutely loving it. It has helped me keep up with this blog and this blog in turn has definitely helped with my writing-a skill that I haven’t really utilized in full force since my college days.

Altogether though, and with luck, this blog will be further encouragment to me to look for more images and tell the stories behind them.

Lazy Afternoon

Covert Operations: Street Photography In New York

It had been a dream of mine ever since I could remember…
I never really thought I would be ready for it, but at the time, either way…it was now or never.

Ever since I started photography, there was a level of standard to which I set myself against that all photographers worth their salt admire or strive to compare themselves with.

That standard was the level of photojournalism and street photography found in magazines such as National Geographic and in photographers such as Henry Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, etc.

A Central Park Afternoon

This past October 2007 I took time off from my normal job and sought to compare myself to that standard. I lived and breathed in New York, not as a tourist or a visitor, but as a professional photographer and photojournalist.

As a painter paints with brushes, a photographer paints with pictures. I wanted to show New York not through a simple point and shoot that captures bit and pieces of a puzzle, but New York through my lens as a complete work of art.

The Alley

I hoped to…no, I wanted to show a side of New York few had seen, even refresh the minds of New Yorkers who were so used to their fine, beautiful city.

The Jungle

The question was, would I be able to prove it to myself as well that I could survive in New York?

The 5 Points, Queens

Could I spend the entire day by myself, alone with my cameras…and would my photography goals be acheived?

Or would I quit after a few hours in the day and admit failure?

Street Dreams

That last question was the single biggest fear I ever had in my photographic career.

Marble Collegiate Church At 5th Avenue

New York, Halloween Night 2007

I ended up with over 2000+ images in one week while I stayed there in New York. I walked everywhere with a Nikon d200, Nikon fm and a leica m4 in hand. Photographing everything and anything whever I went.

It was the best experience of my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

One Morning In Brooklyn

When you start photography (digital, not necessarily film), you shoot for numbers. The statistics are in your favor. You shoot and experiment and see what turns out. If you like it, you keep it. If you don’t, delete.

They say however that when a photographer reaches a certain point, they become one with their camera; they know their camera so well that the image is already captured and finalized before the camera is ever touched. That one image is all that they will ever need.

It’s a moment of clarity and inspiration that is a huge step in the development of a photographer’s abilities and career.

This was that image for me.

The very first image where for that split second before the composition and the click, I knew in my mind what I wanted in the image, and how it would look.

It is now one of my favorite images of all time, one of my inspirations to keep my photography skills going.

And I couldn’t be any happier =)